Qualla: Cova de les Dones https://qualla.com/cova-de-les-dones en-us © 2026 Bendyline Thu, 20 Aug 2026 16:38:46 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/e/y/z/q/cova-de-les-dones-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Cova de les Dones https://qualla.com/cova-de-les-dones Cova de les Dones: Introduction https://qualla.com/cova-de-les-dones/ Photo credit Aitor Ruiz-Redondo, Virginia Barciela and Ximo Martorell Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 September 2023, CC BY 4.0. Five hundred meters inside a cave near the Valencian town of Millares, on a wall far beyond the reach of daylight, someone once dragged their fingers through soft red clay. The grooves are still there. So is something pressed over them — the claw mark of a cave bear. Because that animal's kind vanished from Europe some 24,000 years ago, in the depths of the last Ice Age, the human fingermarks beneath must be older still. Cova de les Dones, the "Women's Cave," had guarded that secret in absolute blackness for hundreds of centuries, and almost no one knew it was there.

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Image: Aitor Ruiz-Redondo, Virginia Barciela and Ximo Martorell Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 September 2023 | CC BY 4.0

]]> Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/e/y/z/q/cova-de-les-dones-wp/eyzq-cova-de-les-dones-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Cova de les Dones: Older Than the Bears https://qualla.com/cova-de-les-dones/ Photo credit Aitor Ruiz-Redondo, Virginia Barciela and Ximo Martorell Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 September 2023, CC BY 4.0. Most of the art here is abstract — rectangles, lines, and the sinuous tracks called finger fluting, made by drawing fingertips down a soft surface. Such tracings are notoriously hard to date, but these are old enough to have grown a patina, and in one striking case old enough for...

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Image: Aitor Ruiz-Redondo, Virginia Barciela and Ximo Martorell Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 September 2023 | CC BY 4.0

]]> Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/e/y/z/q/cova-de-les-dones-wp/eyzq-cova-de-les-dones-older-than-the-bears.mp3 0:06 2 full Cova de les Dones: Painted With Bare Hands https://qualla.com/cova-de-les-dones/ Photo credit Aitor Ruiz-Redondo, Virginia Barciela and Ximo Martorell Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 September 2023, CC BY 4.0. Almost everything here was made with the body itself. Fingers and palms were pressed and trailed across the stone, with only the faintest evidence of sharpened tools. The favorite medium was red clay, present in more than eighty of the surviving works and scooped from at least tw...

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Image: Aitor Ruiz-Redondo, Virginia Barciela and Ximo Martorell Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 September 2023 | CC BY 4.0

]]> Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/e/y/z/q/cova-de-les-dones-wp/eyzq-cova-de-les-dones-painted-with-bare-hands.mp3 0:06 3 full Cova de les Dones: A Map Redrawn https://qualla.com/cova-de-les-dones/ Photo credit Aitor Ruiz-Redondo, Virginia Barciela and Ximo Martorell Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 September 2023, CC BY 4.0. For a long time, the story of Ice Age art in Spain belonged to the north — the famous Franco-Cantabrian caves near the Atlantic coast. Cova Dones has redrawn that map. A cave on the Mediterranean side of Iberia turns out to hold one of the richest bodies of Paleolithic art in the...

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Image: Aitor Ruiz-Redondo, Virginia Barciela and Ximo Martorell Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 September 2023 | CC BY 4.0

]]> Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/e/y/z/q/cova-de-les-dones-wp/eyzq-cova-de-les-dones-a-map-redrawn.mp3 0:06 4 full Cova de les Dones: Broken Stalagmites and a Roman Coin https://qualla.com/cova-de-les-dones/ Photo credit Aitor Ruiz-Redondo, Virginia Barciela and Ximo Martorell Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 September 2023, CC BY 4.0. The deeper the team pushed, the stranger the cave grew. In 2024 they identified speleofacts — stalagmites deliberately snapped and rearranged by human hands. More than a hundred have now been catalogued, their broken ends resealed by slow calcite growth that vouches for their gre...

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Image: Aitor Ruiz-Redondo, Virginia Barciela and Ximo Martorell Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 September 2023 | CC BY 4.0

]]> Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/e/y/z/q/cova-de-les-dones-wp/eyzq-cova-de-les-dones-broken-stalagmites-and-a-roman-coin.mp3 0:06 5 full