A team of scientists discovered ancient cave illustrations that may be the earliest depictions of a hunter-gatherer camp on record.
Head over to Discovery News to see a series of images showing the stone slab with the drawings (from which the cropped image above was taken), as well as a reproduction and a digital rendering of what the actual camps may have looked like.
The researchers that detailed the cave drawing published a study on their findings in the journal PLOS One.
"It was very dirty and partially covered by a crust," the researchers wrote in a joint email to The Los Angeles Times. "Only some days later, when the cleaning of the slab was finished, were we aware of the importance of the piece.
"We are afraid the only way to be 100 percent sure would be to have the artist in front of us and ask him or her about his or her intentions," they wrote. "However, we can think of no better explanation."
The cave etching was discovered in a cave in northeastern Spain known as Molí del Salt and is approximately 13,800 years old.
"We think that the Molí del Salt engraving supports the hypothesis that there was a secular art in the Paleolithic, devoid of spiritual or religious meaning," study co-author Marcos García Diez, an archaeologist at the University of the Basque Country in Vitoria, Spain, told Live Science. "Due to its singularity, we think that it was the expression of the individual feeling of someone who departed from the conventions that ruled Paleolithic art."
