First carbon-based cave drawings found in France | Hacker News Reader

First carbon-based cave drawings found in France

news.artnet.com

21 pointsisaacfrond7 comments

Just in case anyone else was confused by the lead image of the Lascaux cave replica. This is about a cave near Lascaux, not Lascaux.

> The Bison Cave is named after the Paleolithic drawings of animals on its main gallery walls. It is considered one of the best examples of ancient wall painting along with the nearby Lascaux cave.

And not to diminish this but just for context the Chauvet cave paintings (also in France) have been estimated to be 37,000 years old, also using radio carbon dating.

> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauvet_Cave

Super interesting that most if the paintings in the Dordogne region used oxide pigments (if that's what the article is saying), didn't know that.

So it’s been discovered in 2020, and there’s no carbon 14 datation yet ? Why ?

Radiocarbon dating isn’t as simple as most people think because the ratios of the various carbon isotopes varies significantly by region and time period. A volcanic eruption somewhere else on the continent, for example, can dump ancient C14-poor carbon from underground which changes the ratio of C-14 to other isotopes, making samples appear much older than they really are.

They need to come up with a calibration standard for the locality by measuring a bunch of other samples that have been dated by other means to establish a control. Then they will be able to actually date the cave painting. Calibration standards are hard work and it might take a while.

> by researchers at the Center de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France

French regularly confuse "er" for "re" when they write english, but so do the english speaking word (center is writter centre and pronounced centre).

When French write American English and when Americans write about French institutions, rather. Generally it's "centre" in British and Canadian English.

Sincere question from an American: can you explain why er and re make different sounds at the end of a word than everywhere else? like "read" or "redo" or "terror".

It is common in languages that phonemes (groups of letters making a single sound) are pronounced differently depending in where in a word they occur. At the start of a word, they may get more emphasis and that can chance the pronunciation. At the end of the word, there is a tendency to drop emphasis as you prepare to speak the next word. That causes a phoneme like “er” to sound like “ur” at the ends of words.

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