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Describe a painting in the Altamira cave and what scholars learned

Sagot :

The paintings may have been used in religious rituals. In terms of a specific purpose, some experts believe that the paintings may have been used during a ritual where a shaman would enter the cave and go into a trance in order to make contact with spirits.
In many countries of the world there are caves with cave paintings, one of the most famous caves - Lascaux - located in the south of France and was discovered in 1940 by a group of young people. Since then several historians have visited it with the intention of studying and describing it. Currently the cave can not be visited by tourists to avoid possible damage to the paintings. Research suggests that these drawings date from approximately 17,000 years ago, although there are other, much older rock paintings such as those found in the El Castillo Cave in Spain dating back 40,000 years ago.
There are several enigmatic signs inscribed on the walls: dots, dotted lines, arrows, triangles and other geometric motifs. With so many animal representations and undeciphered signs is a single human figure, made with simple strokes, leaning against the wall of an eight-meter-deep pit. Lascaux reveals to visitors about 1,500 engravings and six hundred drawings painted in yellow, brown, red and black, representing bulls, bison, horses, aurochs (ancestors of our cows), deer, goats, mammoths, felines, a reindeer, a Bear and a rhino.
There are indications that animal images were associated with religious rituals and ceremonies. By capturing in the drawing the shape or movement of a reindeer, a horse, an auroch, our hunter-artists believed that they were also capturing the soul of these animals, which would facilitate their subsequent hunting. But this is just a hypothesis.