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Bear-clawed cavern discovered in Spain ‘opens new door on prehistory’

Researchers exploring a cave system in south-east Spain have discovered a huge cavern, sealed off for millennia, hung with huge stalactites and gouged by the claws of long-extinct cave bears, which, they claim, “opens a new door on prehistory”.

The find was made at the Cueva del Arco, a collection of caves in the Almadenes gorge near the Murcian town of Cieza. Although the site had already yielded evidence of settlements stretching back 50,000 years – making it one of the few places in the eastern Iberian peninsula where the transition from Neanderthals to modern humans can be documented – experts digging there suspected it harboured further discoveries.

During a 2018 dig, a team led by Ignacio Martín Lerma, a prehistorian at the University of Murcia, and Didac Román, a prehistorian at the Jaume I University in Castelló, came across what they thought was the silted-up entrance to a large chamber. While their suspicions proved correct – and subsequent, careful excavation revealed an air vent – the dig was curtailed by the Covid pandemic.

When they finally secured the site and entered the chamber last year, however, they were not disappointed.

“We found ourselves before a world-class discovery,” the team said in a statement on Friday. “Its rooms were enormous, some of them 20 metres high, making them the tallest in the region. Its stalactites were equally unrivalled, some of them three metres long and one centimetre wide, meaning they had grown in conditions of almost unparalleled stability thanks to the cavern’s isolation over the course of many millennia.”

The marks on the walls suggest cave bears, which became extinct about 24,000 years ago, may have lived farther south in the peninsula than previously thought.

“The identification of cave bear claw marks on many areas of the walls makes the cave a major, and really unique, example of a place where these huge mammals lived in southern Europe,” the statement said.

Martín Lerma, the scientific director of the project, said the find had “exceeded all our expectations”, adding: “It opens a new door on prehistory.”

While the discovery of such a large, pristine cavern could bring researchers and tourists to the region, Martín Lerma urged people to give the experts time to finish their studies. “We’ve got to remember that what we hold in our hands is an intact natural treasure – and that’s how it needs to stay.”