Dr. Genevieve von Petzinger

So that gives us a clue that things were made in a layered way at different times.

But the oldest piece, the one where the little cauliflower is, is the 65,000-year-old, roughly, mas o menos, as they would say in Spain, so more or less the latter.

And so this is where it's important to note, though, how close it is to El Castillo.

Because it's right down the way, so it would not be surprising if you have mark-making people living there that they might have used other caves for similar things.

Yeah.

So this is what I'm saying is that you can see that, yeah, I mean, the art is...

It's just fascinating the way it's all done as well.

And the way that people keep kind of coming back and doing more over top of, you can see where it's incredibly complicated to peel the layers back, right?

And so this is where, again, modern technology, there's this thing called Raman spectrometry, which actually analyzes pigment at the chemical, at like the atomic level.

And so they can see the different ingredients in the different paints and the different layers, and then you can split them.

And so this is the kind of thing, the work that's being done now to understand, okay, what was made at the same time with the same paint recipe?

What might have been made differently?

So this is where my colleague, Amy Chase, she's working on her PhD right now.

So I can't tell you the results because she hasn't published it yet.

However, her PhD, which is just such a cool one, because this is the kind of work that needs to be done.

She has gone through and analyzed...

sort of at the atomic level, the mineral level, what the pigments were.

Because they found red pigments in the Neanderthal layers at El Casillo.

So we know they were using these red ochre pigments which are on the walls.

So her PhD is actually looking at how similar are the recipes that are on the walls to the ingredients that are in those layers.