One of the Earliest Primitive Maps Found in Spain

"Imagine a group of hunter-gatherers, returning to an area they had not been to for a long time. How do you find a particular cave, especially if the vegetation has changed and its entrance may be masked?" asks independent archaeologist Paul Bahn.

The answer may be that hunter-gatherers had their own maps. A team of archaeologists have matched etchings made 14,000 years ago on a polished chunk of sandstone in northern Spain to the landscape in which it was found. They claim to have the earliest known map of a region in western Europe - a prehistoric hunting map.

The rock, roughly hand-sized and 14,000 years old, bears a mess of overlapping etchings. It was found in a cave in Navarre on the southern side of the Pyrenees and it took Pilar Utrilla of the University of Zaragoza, Spain, and colleagues the better part of 10 years to disentangle the lines and make sense of them (Journal of Human Evolution, DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2009.05.005).

Above recognisable depictions of reindeer, a stag and some ibex are what Utrilla's team believe is a representation of the landscape surrounding the cave. Several etched lines resemble the shapes of mountains that are visible from the cave.

Long, meandering etches match the course of a river that runs at the foot of one of the mountains and splits into two tributaries. A series of strokes that cut across the river near the mountain could represent places where it was easily crossed, or even bridges, the researchers say.

"This is a pretty spectacular find," says prehistoric archaeologist Lawrence Straus of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. "It may give us a glimpse into the ways in which people navigated and explained their territories."

He says the slab was etched during a period of enormous cultural activity in northern Spain. "The human range was expanding northward and population density was increasing after people nearly died off in the last glacial maximum about 20,000 to 17,000 years ago.

People were perhaps having to cooperate, carving up territories among different bands. They had to live by their wits and what the landscape provided." Strauss says engravings and paintings would have helped with territorial definition, hunting, human aggregation and mobility, and generally making sense of the world.