For more than a century the Ice Age art of the Dordogne has been admired without anyone being able to say when it was made. The black figures were thought to be painted with iron and manganese oxides — mineral pigments that contain no carbon and therefore give radiocarbon dating nothing to work with. Style was the only clock available. A French research team has now shown that the assumption was never actually tested, and that it was wrong.
Working at Font-de-Gaume near Les Eyzies, a cave whose paintings a village schoolteacher came upon in 1901, scientists led by a CNRS researcher examined the chemistry of two black figures: a bison and an image usually described as a mask. Raman microspectrometry and hyperspectral imaging, neither of which damages the artwork, picked up traces of charcoal in the pigment. Crucially, the charcoal ran evenly through the black lines rather than sitting in patches, which ruled out later contamination by graffiti or by visitors to the cave.
That evidence justified an exceptional authorisation: four micro-samples, invisible to the naked eye, taken from the two figures for carbon-14 measurement. Working with so little material is demanding, but the results held. The bison was painted between 13,461 and 13,162 calBP — calibrated years before 1950, the conventional reference point. Parts of the mask date to between 15,981 and 15,121 and between 15,297 and 14,246 calBP. The findings appeared in the journal PNAS.
A figure that was worked on twice
One sample from the mask came out far younger, between 8,993 and 8,590 calBP. The researchers offer two readings: a later generation retouched the image, or younger carbon contaminated that spot. Either way, the sequence suggests that a decorated cave was not a single act but a place people returned to and altered — a history that stylistic dating alone cannot resolve.
The dates also shift the picture slightly. Font-de-Gaume's art had been placed at roughly 16,000 to 18,000 years old on stylistic grounds; the measured figures are somewhat more recent. Hundreds of images have been identified in the cave, about two-thirds of them animals, the rest humans, masks, geometric signs and handprints. It lies in the Vézère valley, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1979 with 147 prehistoric sites and 25 decorated caves.
Outside specialists urge patience. Any chance to obtain dates matters because it anchors the art in time, says the archaeologist Inés Domingo Sanz of the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies, who was not involved — but more data are needed before the results can be leaned on. The method's real promise lies elsewhere: if hidden charcoal turned up here, it may be waiting in other caves too.