A collection of very old art (Santander and Puente Viesgo, Spain)

A one-paragraph update, because I am getting behind in my blog duties (but am also increasingly computer-averse)! Yesterday I went to a town called Puente Viesgo, where I saw, for the first time in my life, prehistoric cave paintings. The experience ranks high in my List of Mind-Boggling Historical Experiences. Over the past many millions of years, dozens of caves have been carved by water into the rock of Monte Castillo, the big hill by the town, and in the past century, people have found cave paintings in five of them. Two of these -- la Cueva de las Monedas and la Cueva del Castillo -- are open to the public. La Cueva del Castillo is the main attraction for paintings. Excavations in the opening of the cave have revealed twenty-six layers of human-produced materials, ranging in age from 150,000 years to about five centuries. This cave has been a home for a long time! The paintings themselves, deeper inside the cave, date from about 12,000ish years ago, and are of bison, deer, horses, hands, and symbols that haven't yet been deciphered. What I found most fascinating was that the painters used the contours of the rocks as part of their art. They didn't say, "Oh look, a flat wall -- I will draw a horse there!" They said (something like), "Hmm . . . those cracks look like a horse's hind legs . . . and look how the rock protrudes here, that could be the horse's head . . . I will draw the horse's torso and front legs." They saw the pictures before they drew them! My favorite one of all involved shadows. The guide pointed out a painting that looked pretty odd to us -- a large pair of legs with no body attached. She asked us, "Why would they do that?" We failed the pop quiz -- nobody knew. Then she put the lamp in a certain position behind a rock formation -- and suddenly there was an upright bison body to go with the legs! The people had seen the shape of the bison in the shadow and added legs to turn it into a shaman. That's the theory, at least. WOWEE!!! I almost bounced up and down (might have actually). I think it's so exciting that we can see the same thing in a shadow that people saw ten thousand years ago. The other cave was more geologically impressive -- stalactites and stalagmites and curtains and organs and falls and other beautiful formations galore. Our planet is so great!

That's it for this update because it is breakfast time. In nine days I will be in Mexico -- holy shamoley.