Panther Cave in Seminole Canyon, Texas, has some of the country’s best-preserved prehistoric cave paintings. A colorful frieze of leaping panthers, feathered shamans and strange abstract shapes have puzzled researchers for decades. It appears to be telling a story of some sort, but what does that story say?
Now this new 3D video allows you to study it for yourself. Color enhancement brings out details hard to see with the naked eye. It also brings the cave (really a rock shelter) to the general public. Panther Cave is only visible from the opposite bank of the river or by a specially scheduled boat trip with a park ranger.
The paintings date to the Archaic period, a vague label stretching from 7,000 B.C. to 600 A.D. Judging from the condition of the paintings and the relatively shallow depth of the rock shelter, this former archaeologist thinks they must date to the last few centuries of that period. Take that with a grain of salt; my specialty was the Anglo-Saxon migration period.
For adventure-travel enthusiasts, visiting caves is a great way to satiate one’s appetite for exploring the lesser-traversed world out of the sun’s light. Immersed in bizarre natural formations, you’ll see rainbow colored rock compositions, jagged stalagmites, rugged stalactite, azure waters and scenery that will make you feel like you’re on another planet. Everything goes silent as the air gets cooler, and the only sound you hear is the trickle of water dripping from the uneven cavern roof. These places are sometimes peaceful, other times eerie, but almost always alluring.
Whether you want to get out and explore a cave for yourself or feel better curbing your curiosity from your computer chair, you can get a visual idea of some of the world’s most beautiful caves by checking out the gallery below.
If you want to beat the heat this summer, there’s no better way to do that than to explore a cool and beautiful cave.
Missouri is one of the best states to see them. A combination of lots of limestone and plenty of water has honeycombed the state with some 6,000 caves, from tiny little crawl spaces to grand and glorious show caves. One of the most popular is Meramec Caverns in Stanton, Missouri, on Route 66.
Like many caves, it was first used by Native Americans. In the 18th century, French explorers mined the cave for saltpeter, an ingredient used in making gunpowder. Saltpeter Cave, as it was then known, became tactically important in the Civil War. Union troops were stationed there mining the saltpeter until 1864, when Confederate guerrillas attacked them, drove them off, and destroyed the works.
The cave didn’t become a public attraction until the 1890s, when dances were held in the main gallery, appropriately called “The Ballroom.” Showman Lester Dill bought it in 1933, renamed it Meramec Caverns after the nearby river, and opened it to the public. He systematically explored the cave and discovered several impressive chambers. Soon people were flocking to see the stalactites and stalagmites, and beautiful stone drapery that looks like giant curtains. The action of the water depositing minerals on the walls had created amazing shapes and contours on every spot.
%Gallery-158676%Dill decided to create some clever advertising by linking the cave to Jesse James. He claimed it was one of his gang’s hideouts, although James scholars dispute this. The Jesse James/Meramec Caverns legend got a shot in the arm when the public became aware of a man claiming to be the real Jesse James, still alive and spinning a tale about how he faked his own death. Actually this old coot was named J. Frank Dalton and had one time passed himself off as Billy the Kid.
Local booster Rudy Turilli brought “Jesse” to Meramec Caverns to celebrate his 103rd birthday on September 5, 1950. This brought in a huge amount of publicity and Turilli offered $10,000 to anyone who could prove he didn’t have the real Jesse James. The James family took him to court and won. Turilli never paid the $10,000.
The tour and the nearby Jesse James Wax Museum explain this conspiracy theory in detail. The whole experience is fun and a bit cheesy, having the roadside appeal of The Thing? and South of the Border. There’s no denying the natural beauty of the cave itself, and beyond the showbusiness aspect of the place that’s its real appeal.
El Castillo Cave in Cantabria on Spain’s northern coast was one of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites investigated for the study. The earliest dates were a minimum of 40,800 years ago for a red disk, 37,300 years for a hand stencil, and 35,600 years for a club-shaped symbol. The red disk is at least 4,000 years older than anything previously found in Europe and arguably the oldest cave art anywhere.
These early dates have sparked an interesting debate. The paintings are from the transition period between Neanderthals and the arrival of modern humans. No cave art has been firmly attributed to the Neanderthals and scholars have long debated the level of their intelligence.
Researchers used uranium-series disequilibrium dates of calcite deposits overlying art in eleven caves to determine the dates. Like radiocarbon dating, this technique measures the change in radioactive isotopes. Unlike the more common radiocarbon dating technique, however, which studies the half-life of carbon 14, this technique studies the rate of decay of uranium 234 into thorium 230, a process that happens at a precise rate. It can date calcite up to 300,000 years old.
Very thin films of calcite were sampled from just above the paintings. Being on top of the paintings, they are younger than the art, thus the paintings could be centuries older than the minimum dates given.
The results have been published in the journal Science. Meanwhile, the team is sampling more cave art in the hope of finding even earlier dates.
Most travelers are compelled to leave home by curiosity – the desire to know what life is like in different parts of the globe. Many of us, myself included, are especially interested in visiting places where people live a simpler life, without all of the modern technology that most of us in the United States take for granted.
But the more you travel, the easier it is to become jaded. In Italy, there are scores of beautiful small towns, each with their own piazzas, churches and corsos, where townsfolk take their evening passegiata, or stroll. Sometimes, it can become difficult to distinguish one place from the next. But there are several towns in Italy where some residents still live in primitive, cave-like dwellings that are quite out of the ordinary and well worth a visit.
%Gallery-155510%
Five years ago, I visited Sperlinga, a town in the interior of Sicily that is famous for its cave dwellings, and this week I had an opportunity to visit Matera, a fascinating small city in Basilicata that is famous for its sassi cave dwellings, and Alberobello, a unique town in Puglia with some 1,500 trulli, small, primitive homes with distinctive conical tiled roofs. Both places are UNESCO World Heritage sites and major tourist destinations but are nonetheless well worth a visit.
%Gallery-155508%Matera’s sassi are considered one of the oldest inhabited human settlements in the world. The town’s earthy stone buildings give it a biblical feel that inspired Mel Gibson to film part of “The Passion of the Christ” in Matera. (Most of it was filmed in an abandoned town nearby called Cracovecchia.) Only about 3,000 of the city’s 60,000 residents still live in sassi, but as recently as the 1950s more than half the town’s population was living in them, many in desperate poverty.
These days the sassi are big business, and if you have the cash, you can stay in a very nice one, complete with Wi-Fi, luxury bathrooms and memory foam beds – a far cry from the wretched living conditions chronicled by the writer Carlo Levi, whose writing galvanized the Italian government to forcibly relocate some 15,000 of the sassi dwellers into modern apartment buildings in the late 1950s.
Alberobello is a smaller town, filled with souvenir shops, and the distinctive trulli homes, which have eight different rooftop symbols. Many of the trulli have symbols painted on them, some with Christian symbols, some are primitive and others pertain to magic and the occult. While Matera has several ancient cave churches with stunning frescoes, the only real site in Alberobello is the town itself, which is well worth a visit, as is the surrounding countryside, which is also filled with trulli.
If you go: Matera can be reached by the regional FSE line from Lecce or the FAL train line in about 90 minutes from Bari, a Ryan Air and German Wings hub. I stayed at the Residence San Giorgio and highly recommend it. The nearby town of Altamura is famous for its focaccia bread, but the bakers in Matera have copied their recipes and you can sample some of the best tomato focaccia bread you’ll ever have at Panificio Paoluccio, located just off the main square in the new town at 22 Via Del Corso.
We visited Alberobello on a day trip from the seaside town of Polignano A Mare. You can rent a trulli if you want to sleep in the town, but most visitors don’t stay in Alberobello for more than a night, as it’s mostly geared towards day-trippers from Bari and other nearby towns. If you don’t have a car, you can arrive via regional train from Bari or Lecce. The nearby town of Locorotondo is also well worth a visit.