Experts Find The Prehistoric Age, Before School

Archaeological research indicates that 13,000 years of hunter-gatherer children as young as three have been creating art in deep, dark caves, with their parents.

A conference on the archeology of childhood takes place this weekend at the University of Cambridge will reveal the latest research in art made by young children in one of the most famous prehistoric caves decorated in France - the Rouffignac cave complex in the cave also known as the Hundred mammoths.

Cambridge archaeologist Jess Cooney says, no matter how careful the research, using a method tailored to the task, it was possible to identify both the age and sex of the children who made a simple art form known as the finger grooves about 13,000 years ago, during the time of the hunter gatherer.

His work reveals that some of the pipes studied were made by a child of three years with the artist's most prolific young to be a girl of five years, a university statement said.

Archaeologists first realized that the children had produced some of the finger grooves in 2006.

The field work earlier this year by Cooney, a Gates Scholarship to Cambridge, and Dr. Leslie Van Gelder Walden University, USA, shows how they were young.

Each year thousands of people visit the caves in the Dordogne Rouffignac of France to see the extraordinary rock art: vivid images of animals drawn on the surface of the deep caves in the hill.

However, the excellent drawings of mammoths, rhinoceroses and horses, represent only a small proportion of the technique in the system of 8 km of the cave.

Also clear that there are thousands of lines - a simple form of art or decoration known as the finger grooves - the people who run your hand on a soft surface of the walls and roofs of many of the galleries and passages that make up the complex.

Although impossible to date precisely, the images can be found in deep caves Rouffignac - a network created by the water - probably at least 13,000 years.

These caves have been known since the 16th century, written in 1575 François de Belleforest in painting in his book Universal cosmography.

For centuries, visitors to the caves added their own graffiti to create a frustrating puzzle archaeologists.

It was not until 1956 that scientists realized that some of the most striking art - including images of animals - were prehistoric. The drawings were the subject of intensive study ever since. Only recently, archaeologists have turned their attention to the grooves fingers less dramatic, as almost all are manufactured without the use of pigments.

Traces indicate that they come from the same period as the painted and engraved animals - an era of hunter-gatherer culture, known as the Magdalenian period also responsible for the cave art of Lascaux.



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