Found: A pocket guide to prehistoric Spain

Very interesting find, 14000 years old too. Im guessing a lot of people here will have something to say on this. Could it be the oldest map in Western Europe?

The internet and centuries of map-making mean getting to, say, the prehistoric painted caves of France and Spain is child's play. "But imagine a group of hunter-gatherers, returning to an area they had not been to for a long time. How do you find a particular cave, especially if the vegetation has changed and its entrance may be masked?" asks independent archaeologist Paul Bahn.

The answer may be that hunter-gatherers had their own maps. A team of archaeologists have matched etchings made 14,000 years ago on a polished chunk of sandstone in northern Spain to the landscape in which it was found. They claim to have the earliest known map of a region in western Europe - a prehistoric hunting map.

The rock, roughly hand-sized and 14,000 years old, bears a mess of overlapping etchings. It was found in a cave in Navarre on the southern side of the Pyrenees and it took Pilar Utrilla of the University of Zaragoza, Spain, and colleagues the better part of 10 years to disentangle the lines and make sense of them (Journal of Human Evolution, DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2009.05.005).

Full Article

Check out "America B.C." by Barry Fell and the connection with
Spain.

The Ships of Tarshish went to Spain for the mined Gold and sailed
to Egypt for sale.

Bill Lyne taking this further has also researched Gold from America
since before Columbus.

reply to post by refuse_orders
What a bloody good find. S&F. Very interesting. I'll have to read more into it later. What strikes me is the archaeologist Jean Clottes says...

Clottes believes that instead of connecting the artist to the physical world, they may have acted as a bridge to another, spiritual world. "For these people, their landscape was likely sacred. A map might not have helped them go from one place to another, but instead could have marked the places of very significant sacred places."

Link

I prefer the idea of an actual map rather than some spiritual blather. If there's one thing we can know for sure about prehistoric people...they were very practical. A map seems entirely reasonable and has a practical purpose.

I'm not sure if this image will load...it's quite large I'm gonna go and read up on this and post back if I find anything interesting. Nice work.

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/7a82a02eb5c8.jpg[/atsimg]

reply to post by Kandinsky


I agree, this really does show the ingenuity of prehistoric people in a new light compared with the accepted "cave man" ideas usually used.

As for a map of the spiritual world im very doubtful, surely the point of recording places etc would be to record the ones you can actually see. Sure significant places would be included, but i think the mapping of places that had resources, shelter or good hunting grounds would be priority.

One of the things i was thinking about is would it have been a solo effort to etch or many generations work each adding more info as they explored further. Having no scale to compare it to makes guessing how far A to B is impossible, possibly covering large distances was the reason for its creation.

Yet another piece of evidence that ancient man was a lot more advanced than we are led to believe.

All these findings, all the ancient buildings, they all point to it. Were they actually more, or just as advanced as we are now, back then? What happened to them?