Chauvet-Pont d’Arc holds some of the oldest known painted walls, and a rockfall sealed its entrance long ago. A single date on a single charcoal line says when that line was drawn, and nothing more. Putting the drawings, the fires and the bones on one timeline needs many dates at once.
Two, thousands of years apart. A model built on more than 250 gives an in . The dates come from the rock art, the human activities and the bone remains, and the model separates the human and cave bear occupations into distinct episodes rather than one long stay.
The decorated Upper Paleolithic cave of Chauvet-Pont d’Arc, in the Ardèche in France, carries rock art among the oldest known anywhere. A rockfall closed the entrance, which is why the walls and the floor deposits survived in the state they did.
The authors compiled a set of more than 250 radiocarbon dates related to the rock art, the human activities and the bone remains in the cave. That is a far larger body of dates than most decorated caves have produced.
From those dates they derive a modeled absolute chronology of the human and cave bear occupations of the site, presented in calendar years. Modeling is what turns overlapping individual measurements into phases that can be read as events.
The result is a framework rather than a single headline age. It provides an insightful frame for the successive events that occurred in the cave during the Paleolithic period, which is the thing a list of separate dates cannot give.
wat. More than 250 dates turned one cave into a sequence of visits.
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It changes what the cave is: not a single moment of decoration, but a place people and bears returned to across millennia.
How do we know?
Quiles and colleagues compiled the radiocarbon dates from the cave and combined them in a chronological model, which turns a scatter of individual measurements into dated phases.
What is still unknown
A model remains a model, and its phases are only as good as the dated material behind them.
Learn something?
Where to next
When did people start painting a story rather than a thing?cave art
What did a scan that never touches the wall find in cave paintings?cave art
How do you date a painting that contains no carbon?cave art