First Cave Paintings Discovered In Britain

Archaeology Saturday, June 14, 2003. Post by Ricky James

As the team reveal in the journal Antiquity, they targeted Creswell Crags because its caves are known to have been occupied in palaeolithic times. In the nineteenth century, archaeologists discovered a 12,000-year-old bone needle in a cave called Church Hole. And it is in this cave that Bahn and Pettitt discovered the two engravings, both of a style similar to the cave art of France and Spain. As for the two birds carved on the wall of Church Hole, one appears to be a crane or swan, the other a bird of prey. The other engraving is probably of an ibex, an animal not thought to have existed in Britain. The engraving may represent a rare sighting of an ibex that had strayed from southwest Europe.

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