In the late 1990s, archeologist Francois Rouzaud used carbon dating to estimate a chamber in the Bruniquel Cave in France to be around 47,000 years old. This was news because it meant that the cave sculpture was older than the oldest known cave art, and more importantly it meant that the chances it was created by Neanderthals as opposed to Homo sapiens was very high. This would be, arguably, the most powerful evidence at the time that Neanderthals were much more sophisticated than had been previously believed. Rouzaud did not get to further investigate the caves, dying suddenly of a heart attack in 1999. The caves went uninvestigated for years until recently, when spelunker Sophie Verhayden visited the caves during a vacation.
A life-long caver, Verheyden works at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, where she specializes in stalagmites. She treats them as time capsules, using the chemicals within them to reconstruct the climate of past millennia. So when she learned about Bruniquel Cave, while visiting the region on holiday and seeing a display at a nearby castle, she had only one thought: Why hadn’t anyone dated the broken stalagmites themselves?”
She knew that Rouzaud’s date of 47,600 years was impressive but suspect. Carbon-dating is only accurate for samples younger than 50,000 years, so the Bruniquel material was hitting the technique’s limits. They could well have been much older. To get a better estimate, Verheyden assembled a team including archaeologist Jacques Jaubert and fellow stalagmite expert Dominique Genty. In 2013, they got permission to study the site and crawled into it themselves. “I’m not very big, and I had to put one arm before me and one behind to get through,” says Verheyden. “It’s kind of magical, even without the structures.”
[Me saying, how much older, really?]
Using a different method, drilling in the stalagmites and dating them based on mineral accumulation on the sections where (and when) they were broken, her team came up with a startling date. It turns out it was much older. Much, much older.
Their date? 176,500 years ago, give or take a few millennia.
“When I announced the age to Jacques, he asked me to repeat it because it was so incredible,” says Verheyden. Outside Bruniquel Cave, the earliest, unambiguous human constructions are just 20,000 years old. Most of these are ruins—collapsed collections of mammoth bones and deer antlers. By comparison, the Bruniquel stalagmite rings are well-preserved and far more ancient.
Wow. How and why these Neanderthals made this is clearly unknown—but you can speculate in the comments!
You can watch a short film showing some of the cave and the work being done below.