An Ancient Cave

This was once a great cave guha pronounced gufa for meditation but I am told that because people went in and did not want to come out, the government cut off the deeper rooms to provide for more superficial meditations and more returning tourists. Also a magnificent spot on the River Ganga. When we were there there was a yagya in progress. Our trip to this cave was unfortunately rushed, though well worth the trip and plan to return mid week next trip and stay at the accompanying ashram for a small and reasonable fee Inside the cave was pitch black and could only he viewed with the help of torch or candle light There is good great info on the web about the Gufa so I would not repeat this info here Very well known in certain circles To anyone reading this.

Please visit the vashishth gufa and meditate inside the cave for just 30 minutes. The positive vibes will last with you for another few days. It is difficult to describe it. It needs to be experienced on its own. Also one can contribute in the kitchen by doing some sewa and making food for the visitors. A much talked about place that really disappointed us. The caves have been taken over by the followers who have converted the space into a shrine and gather a few times a year to celebrate at various occasions. You can spend more than 3 hours only if you walk down till the river and a little upstream.

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We were expecting some raw caves free from human intervention but were disappointed to see that it was more of a religious place. There are gates, worship and staying areas and at the time we visited there were people gathering from different parts to celebrate some religious or spiritual event. A few decades ago the place might have been very raw but now there is a lot of plastic waste thanks to the people who supposedly come together in remembrance but they do not have the dedication to be able to leave the city waste back in the city.

So you will see plastic bottles, maggi packets, all kinds of chips packets, even alcohol, biscuit packets and a lot of other items. The ashram area is kept clean. Families were slowly trickling in and as the crowd increased the noise was increasing as well. It is difficult to get people to understand that the sanctity of the place is lost with unnecessary shouting. Perhaps the time when there is no or less crowd it is a place where one can relax and be at peace in the quiet, green environs.

The only good part came once we left the ashram area and walked to the river and about half a kilometre upstream. Yet the lack of older paintings may not reflect the true history of rock art so much as the fact that they can be very difficult to date. Radiocarbon dating, the kind used to determine the age of the charcoal paintings at Chauvet, is based on the decay of the radioactive isotope carbon and works only on organic remains. This is where Aubert comes in. Instead of analyzing pigment from the paintings directly, he wanted to date the rock they sat on, by measuring radioactive uranium, which is present in many rocks in trace amounts.

Uranium decays into thorium at a known rate, so comparing the ratio of these two elements in a sample reveals its age; the greater the proportion of thorium, the older the sample. But it can also date newer limestone formations, including stalactites and stalagmites, known collectively as speleothems, which form in caves as water seeps or flows through soluble bedrock. To do this would require analyzing almost impossibly thin layers cut from a cave wall—less than a millimeter thick.

Then a PhD student at the Australian National University in Canberra, Aubert had access to a state-of-the-art spectrometer, and he started to experiment with the machine, to see if he could accurately date such tiny samples. Within a few years, Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at the University of Wollongong, where Aubert had received a postdoctoral fellowship—today they are both based at Griffith University—started digging in caves in Sulawesi. Brumm hoped to find them. As they worked, Brumm and his Indonesian colleagues were struck by the hand stencils and animal images that surrounded them.

But the archaeological evidence showed that modern humans had arrived on Sulawesi at least 35, years ago. Could some of the paintings be older? And it dawned on him: After that, Brumm looked for paintings partly obscured by speleothems every chance he got. As soon as he got home, he told Aubert to come to Sulawesi.

Aubert spent a week the next summer touring the region by motorbike. He took samples from five paintings partly covered by popcorn, each time using a diamond-tipped drill to cut a small square out of the rock, about 1. Back in Australia, he spent weeks painstakingly grinding the rock samples into thin layers before separating out the uranium and thorium in each one.

Unable to get funding for the project, he had to pay for his flight to Sulawesi—and for the analysis—himself. The very first age Aubert calculated was for a hand stencil from the Cave of Fingers. I said, are you sure? I had the feeling immediately that this was going to be big.

The caves we visit in Sulawesi are astonishing in their variety. They range from small rock shelters to huge caverns inhabited by venomous spiders and large bats. Everywhere there is evidence of how water has formed and changed these spaces. The rock is bubbling and dynamic, often glistening wet. It erupts into shapes resembling skulls, jellyfish, waterfalls and chandeliers.

As well as familiar stalactites and stalagmites, there are columns, curtains, steps and terraces—and popcorn everywhere. It grows like barnacles on the ceilings and walls. This story is a selection from the January-February issue of Smithsonian magazine.

Ramli knows the art in these caves intimately. The first one he visited, as a student in , was a small site called Leang Kassi. He remembers it well, he says, not least because while staying overnight in the cave he was captured by local villagers who thought he was a headhunter. Almost all of the markings he shows me, in ocher and charcoal, appear in relatively exposed areas, lit by the sun. And they were apparently made by all members of the community.

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At one site, I climb a fig tree into a small, high chamber and am rewarded by the outline of a hand so small it could belong to my 2-year-old son. At another, hands are lined up in two horizontal tracks, all with fingers pointing to the left. Elsewhere there are hands with slender, pointed digits possibly created by overlapping one stencil with another; with painted palm lines; and with fingers that are bent or missing.

Perhaps, he suggests, the stencils with missing fingers indicate that this practice too has ancient origins. Aboriginal Australian elders he has interviewed explain that their stencils are intended to express connection to a particular place, to say: This is my home. There are two main phases of artwork in these caves.

Alongside these are red and occasionally purplish-black paintings that look very different: The youngest stencil was dated to no more than 27, years ago, showing that this artistic tradition lasted largely unchanged on Sulawesi for at least 13 millennia. The findings obliterated what we thought we knew about the birth of human creativity. At a minimum, they proved once and for all that art did not arise in Europe.

By the time the shapes of hands and horses began to adorn the caves of France and Spain, people here were already decorating their own walls. On that, experts are divided. He points out that although hand stencils are common in Europe, Asia and Australia, they are rarely seen in Africa at any time.

You have to find your way around, and deal with strange plants, predators and prey. Perhaps people in Africa were already decorating their bodies, or making quick drawings in the ground. But with rock markings, the migrants could signpost unfamiliar landscapes and stamp their identity onto new territories.

Although individual figures are less naturalistic, they are grouped in coherent grouped compositions to a much greater degree. The most common subjects in cave paintings are large wild animals, such as bison , horses , aurochs , and deer , and tracings of human hands as well as abstract patterns, called finger flutings. The species found most often were suitable for hunting by humans, but were not necessarily the actual typical prey found in associated deposits of bones; for example, the painters of Lascaux have mainly left reindeer bones, but this species does not appear at all in the cave paintings, where equine species are the most common.

Drawings of humans were rare and are usually schematic as opposed to the more detailed and naturalistic images of animal subjects. One explanation for this may be that realistically painting the human form was "forbidden by a powerful religious taboo. O'Hara, geologist, suggests in his book Cave Art and Climate Change that climate controlled the themes depicted.

Sometimes the silhouette of the animal was incised in the rock first, and in some caves all or many of the images are only engraved in this fashion, taking them somewhat out of a strict definition of "cave painting". Similarly, large animals are also the most common subjects in the many small carved and engraved bone or ivory less often stone pieces dating from the same periods.

But these include the group of Venus figurines , which have no real equivalent in cave paintings. Hand stencils, made by placing a hand on the wall and blowing pigment at it probably through a pipe of some kind , form a characteristic image of a roughly round area of solid pigment with the uncoloured shape of the hand in the centre, which may then be decorated with lines or dashes.

These are often found in the same caves as other paintings, or may be the only form of painting in a location. Some walls contain many hand stencils. Similar hands are also painted in the usual fashion. A number of hands show a finger wholly or partly missing, for which a number of explanations have been given. Henri Breuil interpreted the paintings as hunting magic to increase the abundance of prey. Another theory, developed by David Lewis-Williams and broadly based on ethnographic studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, is that the paintings were made by paleolithic shamans.

Dale Guthrie, who has studied both highly artistic and lower quality art and figurines, identifies a wide range of skill and age among the artists. He hypothesizes that the main themes in the paintings and other artifacts powerful beasts, risky hunting scenes and the representation of women in the Venus figurines are the work of adolescent males, who constituted a large part of the human population at the time. Rock painting was also performed on cliff faces; but fewer of those have survived because of erosion. When Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola first encountered the Magdalenian paintings of the Altamira cave , Cantabria , Spain in , the academics of the time considered them hoaxes.

Recent reappraisals and numerous additional discoveries have since demonstrated their authenticity, while at the same time stimulating interest in the artistry of Upper Palaeolithic peoples. Originating in the Paleolithic period, the rock art found in Khoit Tsenkher Cave , Mongolia, includes symbols and animal forms painted from the walls up to the ceiling. The paintings appear brown or red in color, and are stylistically similar to other Paleolithic rock art from around the world but are unlike any other examples in Mongolia.

In Indonesia the caves in the district of Maros in Sulawesi are famous for their hand prints. About 1, negative handprints have also been found in 30 painted caves in the Sangkulirang area of Kalimantan; preliminary dating analysis as of put their age in the range of 10, years old. A painting of a babirusa was dated to at least The Padah-Lin Caves of Burma contain 11,year-old paintings and many rock tools.

The Bhimbetka rock shelters exhibit the earliest traces of human life in India. The earliest paintings on the cave walls are believed to date to about 30, years ago. Similar paintings are found in other parts of India as well. In Odisha they are found in Yogimatha and Gudahandi. In Karnataka, these paintings are found in Hiregudda near Badami.

The most recent painting, consisting of geometric figures, date to the medieval period. Executed mainly in red and white with the occasional use of green and yellow, the paintings depict the lives and times of the people who lived in the caves, including scenes of childbirth, communal dancing and drinking, religious rites and burials, as well as indigenous animals.

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Cave paintings found at the Apollo 11 Cave in Namibia are estimated to date from approximately 25,—27, years ago. After extensive testing for seven years, it was revealed that the lines drawn on the rock were handmade and from an ochre crayon dating back 73, years. This makes it the oldest known rock drawing. Significant early cave paintings, executed in ochre , have been found in Kakadu , Australia.

Ochre is not an organic material , so carbon dating of these pictures is often impossible. Sometimes the approximate date, or at least, an epoch , can be surmised from the painting content, contextual artifacts, or organic material intentionally or inadvertently mixed with the inorganic ochre paint, including torch soot.

A red ochre painting, discovered at the centre of the Arnhem Land Plateau , depicts two emu -like birds with their necks outstretched. They have been identified by a palaeontologist as depicting the megafauna species Genyornis , giant birds thought to have become extinct more than 40, years ago; however, this evidence is inconclusive for dating. It may merely suggest that Genyornis became extinct at a later date than previously determined.

Hook Island in the Whitsunday Islands is also home to a number of cave paintings created by the seafaring Ngaro people. The following sections present notable examples of prehistorc cave art dated to after the end of the Upper Paleolithic to the Holocene , after c. In the Philippines at Tabon Caves the oldest artwork may be a relief of a shark above the cave entrance. It was partially disfigured by a later jar burial scene.

In , a French archaeological team discovered the Laas Geel cave paintings on the outskirts of Hargeisa in the northwestern region of Somaliland. Dating back around 5, years, the paintings depict both wild animals and decorated cows. They also feature herders, who are believed to be the creators of the rock art. Additionally, between the towns of Las Khorey and El Ayo in Karinhegane is a site of numerous cave paintings of real and mythical animals. Each painting has an inscription below it, which collectively have been estimated to be around 2, years old. In Djibouti , rock art of what appear to be antelopes and a giraffe are also found at Dorra and Balho.