The cave of Cussac reveals the complex funerary rituals of the prehistoric culture gravettian industries

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The great discovery arqueológido was produced in 2001. The cave of Cussac , very close to the famous Lascaux cave in southwestern France, discovered cave paintings of the upper paleolithic, with an antiquity of between 22,000 and 28,000 years ago .

The grotto was exceptional for two reasons. The first, the size of the paintings , with panels of fifteen meters by six, which represent the motifs typical of prehistoric art, animals, and triangles pubic. The other was the presence of human remains .

This matching of paint and bone remains was to unpublished , had not been found so far in western Europe a cave decorated that has served as the burial place of prehistoric men. Now, a study led by Jacques Jaubert, University of Bordeaux and Eline Schotsmans of the University of Wollongong and the University of Bordeaux, has examined and has determined that they were buried with elaborate funeral rituals .

The remains belong to members of the culture gravettian industries in the Upper Palaeolithic European, which appeared about 33,000 years leaving evidence of their existence across the continent. Have been analyzed through the use of photographs and 3D renderings and have been qualified as “unique” .

The findings, published in the journal “Proceedings of the Academy of Science, suggest that the cave contains two areas remains human s. The first includes the skeleton of a young adult in a shallow depression was formerly a nest of a bear, and fragments of at least two other individuals scattered in other two nests of bears earlier.

The second, more profound, contains the remains of at least two adults and a teenager, and in gaps along a wall. Some of the bones and sediments underlying present a red pigment, which researchers have been related to the remains. The depth in which are found all and the fact that they are surrounded by rock art make them unique in their class.

“in Addition, the majority of them are broken bones or parts of the body due to human manipulations after or during the decomposition. Although the manipulations of post-mortem human remains have been documented previously for other sites gravetianos, some of the ones here were unknown in other places, such as the removal of skull and mix deliberate the remains of several persons , ” he said to Newsweek Sacha Kacki, the French National Center for Scientific Research

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