Cave Walls Have Been Keeping Human DNA
Ancient DNA has been read from bones, from sediments and from artefacts. Painted cave walls were considered out of reach, because pigment on rock has no direct link to an excavated floor.
A team led by Alba Bossoms Mesa and Matthias Meyer at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, working with Hipólito Collado Giraldo of the Extremadura government, tested pigment and wall samples from 24 rock art panels across 11 caves in Spain and Portugal. Human DNA had survived. At Covarón, in Spain, two wall samples were traced to western hunter-gatherers who lived between roughly 5,200 and 16,700 years ago, and the sequences most likely came from women. A sample from Escoural, in Portugal, pointed to a man.
The result is thinner than the headlines suggest, and the authors say so themselves. Usable ancient human DNA came from only one of the 24 painted panels. Most of the material could not be dated precisely. And the DNA does not identify who made the paintings — it may have been left by anyone who touched the wall, at any point.
What changes is the category. A cave wall is now a surface where human presence can be read directly.
