The Roche-Cotard cave, near Langeais (Indre-et-Loire), is known for its prehistoric parietal engravings. Made with the fingers in a crumbly rock – the walls of the cliff are in tufa –, they represent simple motifs. These non-figurative “drawings” consist of lines and dots but also scratches covering an area of ??more than twelve meters long of this chalk cliff typical of the banks of the Loire.
Discovered in 1912, these testimonies left by our distant ancestors have just been dated. An article in the journal Plos One on June 21 claims, in fact, that they are the work of Neanderthal men and women.
The interdisciplinary team that signs this publication, and of which Guillaume Guérin, a CNRS researcher at the Geosciences laboratory (which also depends on the University of Rennes), is a member, has proceeded methodically. Using photogrammetry, she first wanted to confirm the human origin of these alterations. “Assumptions of functional, natural, animal, geological or accidental production concerning them have been eliminated,” it reads.
Scientists do not exclude that some of these engravings are even older, because geological analyzes suggest that silt covering them would have been carried by the Loire at a more distant period. The first drawings could date back more than seventy millennia before our era.
