A red dot on a cave wall in Portugal does not look like much. It’s a small mark, crusted over by minerals, easy to miss beside the much more interesting animal figures and hand stencils made by Stone ...

DNA preservation on cave walls is highly variable, but scientists say their work is an important step on the path toward gaining a deeper understanding of our creative ancestors ...

Pigment sampling at a claviform rock art figure in Tebellín, Spain. (Alberto Martínez Villa/Bossoms Mesa et al., Nat. Commun.

Researchers have, for the first time, recovered ancient human DNA directly from cave walls, with one key sample coming from a small red painted mark in Portugal. The finding sugge ...

For the first time, scientists have shown that ancient human DNA can survive for thousands of years on cave walls, opening new ways to study prehistoric human activity. This interdisciplinary study ...

Markings on a cave wall in France are the oldest known engravings made by Neanderthals, according to a study published June 21, 2023, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Jean-Claude Marquet of the ...

A skull that was found embedded in a cave wall in Greece more than 60 years ago may finally have an identification. A new dating of the minerals that surrounded and grew over the mysterious Petralona ...

The world is full of amazing places. Though most people travel to see such sites above the earth’s surface, many are actually beneath it. Caves contain their own ecosystems that would not be ...

Archaeologists have concluded that a series of engravings discovered on a cave wall in France were made by Neanderthals using their fingers, some 57,000 years ago. They could be the oldest such marks ...

An international team of cave explorers has shown that cave walls and the prehistoric rock art that adorns them can preserve human DNA for thousands of years.

The stripes, spots, and parallel lines etched into the walls of a cave in Central France more than 57,000 years ago have been identified by researchers as the earliest record of Neanderthal art. Their ...