Dr. Genevieve von Petzinger

And again, by the way, you can actually book a tour to go to Ardalis.

It's controlled, but you can actually go to part of it.

It is one of the most sparkly caves I have ever seen.

It is all quartz calcite in there.

Like it is like you're walking into winter wonderland.

Like it's sparkling.

It's just extraordinary.

So from an, you know, again, an aesthetic point of view, if you were going to have a cave that was maybe your special ritual cave, it is a pretty darn cool cave.

And it has huge stalactites that look like massive chandeliers coming down from the ceiling.

It is a really neat cave.

So you can see where it would have been a bit of an experience just to walk through there, I would imagine.

But my colleague Barbara, she studied, I guess, down in one of the really deep sections.

It's quite dangerous to get to.

There's handprints there where actually they touched the wall and then just slid their hands down the wall.

So, again, they're interacting with the wall in these really interesting ways.

Now, modern humans also appear to have gone in there and done things too, but there's a very definite, heavy presence of Neanderthal tools, sites...

what we think is art.

And the reason why we're bringing up our dollars is because some of the other really old dates, again, using calcite and uranium series come from some spit painted dots.

So smaller ones that are on some of the, it's just a beautiful curtain of calcite there.

And so there's these little sprayed dots and those were also dated to around 65,000.