For 94 years, archaeologists had an explanation for the painted lines on the wall of Bacon Hole cave on the Welsh coast. They weren’t painted at all, the thinking went, but a geological accident that happened to mimic something human.
The calcite crust made the mistake understandable, but new analysis confirms the markings were human-made.
A new study published in Quaternary has overturned that interpretation, confirming that the painted panel inside Bacon Hole cave on the Gower Peninsula in Wales is human-made. The finding revives the possibility that it may be Britain’s oldest known cave art. Dating evidence indicates the markings are around 17,100 years old. If confirmed, that would place them ahead of every other known prehistoric rock art site in northwestern Europe.
“This discovery rewrites what we knew about the social and ritual lives of our early Welsh ancestors in the early prehistory of the British Isles. Predating all previously identified rock art sites in north-western Europe by at least 1,500 years, the intriguing artwork is a find of international significance,” lead author George Nash said in a press release.
Why Britain’s Oldest Cave Art Was Dismissed as Natural Staining
The story begins in 1912, when researchers William Sollas and Henri Breuil identified a series of horizontal painted lines on the wall of the cave’s eastern-side chamber. The pigment was red, applied in strokes, and the two men announced it as the first Paleolithic cave art ever found in Britain.
Much of the panel was obscured by flowstone, a crust of calcite that had grown over the surface across thousands of years. To skeptical eyes, the painted lines looked indistinguishable from natural mineral deposits. By 1928, the consensus had shifted. The markings were dismissed as natural staining rather than prehistoric art.
It was rediscovered in 2022 by Barbara Oosterwijk of the University of Exeter during an initial survey. What she and the research team found supported what Sollas and Breuil had seen a century earlier. Beyond the original horizontal lines, the team found finger dots, geometric marks, and pigment patterns that suggest paint was projected onto the wall by blowing or spitting, a technique seen in Paleolithic cave art across Europe.
Read More: Why Did Our Paleolithic Ancestors Paint Cave Art?
How the Cave Paintings Were Dated
The team used high-resolution digital photography, pigment analysis, and uranium-thorium dating to examine the panel across two field campaigns in 2023 and 2024.
The pigment analysis identified the painted lines as haematite, an iron-rich mineral applied deliberately to the rock surface. Natural deposits of the same mineral do occur in the cave, but the painted lines are confined precisely to the artwork and arranged in parallel horizontal bands at equal intervals (a pattern that has no natural equivalent).
The dating programme analysed the calcite flowstone. One sample yielded a minimum age of about 15,700 years, while another suggested a possible age of around 17,100 years. The team treats the older figure as preliminary, but if the date holds, it would place the art within the Late Upper Paleolithic, when the landscape around Bacon Hole looked very different.
Seventeen thousand years ago, the stretch of water now called the Bristol Channel was dry, open land. The cave sat above a coastal plain that would have drawn herds of animals. The people who followed them would have found shelter in the limestone cliffs above.
Bacon Hole Cave Is Now Protected
The cave is not open to the public because of its precarious position on the coastal cliffs. A steel grille now protects the paintings, along with the bats that roost there in winter. For those who care for the site, the rediscovery makes an already significant cave feel even more extraordinary.
“To imagine people standing in this cave over 17,000 years ago, making their marks on the rock and transforming the places they lived through art, is profoundly moving,” said archaeologist David Thomas.
Read More: 5 of the World’s Most Fascinating Cave Paintings
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
- This article references information from a study published in Quaternary: Rediscovered Late Upper Palaeolithic Painted Imagery at Bacon Hole, Gower Peninsula, South Wales
