Interesting Facts about Grotte Chauvet Cave, UNESCO World Heritage Site

Search engine giant Google celebrates the 26th Anniversary of the Grotte Chauvet Discovery with animated Doodle on December 18, 2020. Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave or Grotte Chauvet-Pont d’Arc is a cave that contains probably the best-saved non-literal cave paintings in the world, as well as other proof of Upper Paleolithic life. It is one of the UNESCO World Heritage Site.

30 Interesting Facts about Grotte Chauvet Cave

1. The Chauvet Cave (a.k.a Caverne du Pont d’Arc) is one of the most celebrated ancient rock art sites in the world. With one special case, the entirety of the cave art paintings has been dated somewhere in the range of 30,000 and 33,000 years prior.

2. The cave is arranged over the past course of the Ardèche River before the Pont d’Arc opened up. The gorges of the Ardèche region are the site of various caves, a significant number of them having some geographical or archeological significance.

3. The decorated cave of Pont d’Arc is known as Grotte Chauvet-Pont d’Arc, Ardèche.

4. The cave was named after Jean-Marie Chauvet, who found it on 18 December 1994, along with Christian Hillaire and Eliette Brunel-Deschamps. The scientists found that the cave had been untouched for 20,000-30,000 years.

5. Chauvet contains an aggregate of more than 300 paintings and engravings. These were gathered specifically. In the most available part of the cave, most pictures are red, with a few black or engraved ones.

Read More: Grotte Chauvet Discovery: Google Doodle Celebrates the 26th Anniversary of the Discovery of UNESCO World Heritage Site Chauvet Cave

6. The cave contains the oldest known cave paintings, because of radiocarbon dating of “black from drawings, from torch marks and the floors.”

7. Clottes reasons that the “dates fall into two groups, one around 27,000-26,000 BP and the other around 32,000-30,000 BP.”

8. Starting at 1999, the dates of 31 samples from the cave had been accounted for, with the soonest being 32,900±490 BP.

9. In the deeper part, the animals are generally black, with far fewer rock engravings and red figures.

10. There are groupings of explicit creatures: for example, the Horse Panel and the Panel of Lions and Rhinoceroses. What makes Chauvet quite a significant illustration of Franco-Cantabrian cave art, is the refinement of its paintings.

11. The most perceptible creatures in the cave (representing for some 60% of every single such picture) are lions, mammoths, and rhinoceroses, every one of whom was rarely hunted, in this manner dissimilar to most different caves, Chauvet is certainly not a pictorial showcase of daily Stone Age life.

12. Other uncommon creatures incorporate a panther, a spotted leopard, and an owl. What’s more, the cave includes the standard horses, bison, aurochs, ibex, reindeer, red deer, and musk-oxen.

13. As well as figurative pictures, Chauvet contains an abundance of abstract art as geometric symbols, various indecipherable marks, as well as an amount of red-ochre prehistoric hand stencils and handprints.

14. The last and deepest of the Chauvet Cave chambers, the Salle du Fond, is home to the paleolithic cave painting of The Venus and The Sorcerer, attracted black charcoal.

15. The cave was additionally strewn with cave bear skulls, one of which was discovered put cautiously upon a high slab as though on a modify.

16. This grand discovery was made on 18 December 1994 and stays one of the most important prehistoric sites to date.

17. It was found coincidentally by three local cavers – Christian Hillaire, Eliette Brunel-Deschamps, and Jean-Marie Chauvet after whom the cave was named.

18. In 2000 the excavator and master of cave paintings Dominique Baffier was selected to oversee conservation and management of the cave. She was continued in 2014 by Marie Bardisa.

19. The ancient Chauvet cave has been allowed prestigious World Heritage Site List status by UNESCO committee representatives gathering in Doha in 2014.

20. In 1999 John Robinson was welcomed into the Chauvet Cave by Dr. Jean Clottes to notice the Paleolithic cave paintings dated somewhere in the range of 30,000 and 33,000 years back.

21. The dates have involved question yet a study published in 2012 supports placing the art in the Aurignacian era, about 32,000–30,000 years prior.

22. Caverne du Pont-d’Arc, a copy of Chauvet Cave on the model of the supposed “Faux Lascaux”, was opened to the general public on 25 April 2015.

23. Between Vallon-Pont-d’Arc and St.Remeze, they have made an immense, full-size recreation of the cave to grandstand this stunning discovery. This 55 million euro project is available to people in general from 25 April 2015.

24. A study published in 2016 utilizing extra 88 radiocarbon dates indicated two periods of habitation, one 37,000 to 33,500 years prior and the second from 31,000 to 28,000 years back, with most of the black drawings dating to the previous period.

25. For his most recent documentary film ‘The Cave of Forgotten Dreams’ Werner Herzog takes us on a staggering 3-D journey into the Chauvet caves in Southern France.

26. Chauvet Cave is viewed as more amazing and excellent than Lascaux cave by individuals who have seen both. Chauvet contains stone engravings and paintings with 420 animal figures.

27. In 2020, scientists utilized the new IntCal20 radiocarbon calibration curve to assess that the oldest painting in the cave was made 36,500 years back.

28. It is the biggest cave replica ever constructed around the world, ten times greater than the Lascaux facsimile. The art is replicated full-size in a dense copy of the underground environment, in a circular building above ground, a few kilometers from the real cave.

29. Guests’ senses are invigorated by similar sensations of silence, darkness, temperature, humidity, and acoustics cautiously reproduced. A virtual visit to the cave, produced using 3D imagery, is likewise accessible to the public.

30. On December 18, 2020, Google praised the 26th Anniversary of the Grotte Chauvet Discovery with an animated Doodle.