Researchers exploring a cave system in southeast Spain have discovered a huge cavern, sealed off for millennia, hung with huge stalactites and gouged by the claws of long-extinct cave bears, which “opens a new door on prehistory,” they said.
The find was made at the Cueva del Arco, a collection of caves in the Almadenes Gorge near the Murcian town of Cieza. Although the site had already yielded evidence of settlements stretching back 50,000 years — making it one of the few places in the eastern Iberian Peninsula where the transition from Neanderthals to modern humans can be documented — experts digging there suspected it harbored further discoveries.
During a 2018 dig, a team led by Ignacio Martin Lerma, a prehistorian at the University of Murcia, and Didac Roman, a prehistorian at Jaume I University, came across what they thought was the silted-up entrance to a large chamber.
While their suspicions proved correct, the dig was curtailed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
When they finally secured the site and entered the chamber last year, they were not disappointed.
“We found ourselves before a world-class discovery,” the team said in a statement on Friday.
“Its rooms were enormous, some of them 20m high, making them the tallest in the region. Its stalactites were equally unrivaled, some of them 3m long and 1cm, meaning they had grown in conditions of almost unparalleled stability thanks to the cavern’s isolation over the course of many millennia,” the team said.
The marks on the walls suggest that cave bears, which became extinct about 24,000 years ago, might have lived farther south in the peninsula than previously thought.
“The identification of cave bear claw marks on many areas of the walls makes the cave a major, and really unique, example of a place where these huge mammals lived in southern Europe,” the statement said.
Martin Lerma, the scientific director of the project, said the find had “exceeded all our expectations,” adding that “it opens a new door on prehistory.”
While the discovery of such a large, pristine cavern could bring researchers and tourists to the region, Martin Lerma urged people to give the experts time to finish their studies.
“We’ve got to remember that what we hold in our hands is an intact natural treasure — and that’s how it needs to stay,” he said.
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