Wisher made detailed 3D scans of the drawings, which helped her understand the uneven pressure applied to the charcoal and the direction the lines were drawn. The team then compared the panel’s composition with age-appropriate artistic efforts by modern children. Kids across cultures go through the same developmental stages, which influence their physical ability to draw, until about the age of 6, Amir notes.
The team compared the ancient art with the developmental stages exhibited by modern children: the furiously scribbled circles and push-pull lines typical of 3-year-olds just learning to control their bodies, for example, or the wobbly, right-angled figures of slightly older kids beginning to master fine motor skills.
Both are apparent in the cave, superimposed on each other as though two or more kids were drawing at once. That’s a clue the Las Monedas marks were likely made by “siblings or a mixed-age play group within the sphere of safety around adults, but also within their own space,” says co-author Felix Riede, an Aarhus archaeologist.
Adults at Las Monedas would have been aware of what the kids were doing and presumably had lit fires or torches; without ample firelight the cave is pitch black.
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