How Cavemen Picked Caves...

[saltpeter]

Discovery News:
Cavemen Chose Caves on Five Criteria

House buyers today usually peruse properties with a checklist of desired features in mind. This aspect of human behavior has apparently not changed much over the millennia, according to a new study that found prehistoric cave dwellers in Britain did exactly the same thing when choosing their homes.

The recently released three-year-long survey of approximately 230 caves in the Yorkshire Dales and 190 caves in the northern England Peak District determined that people there from 4,000 to 2,000 B.C. selected caves based on at least five criteria.

"There was a higher frequency of prehistoric usage of those caves with larger entrances and deeper passages, also of caves that were higher in altitude and caves with entrances that faced towards the east or to the west," co-author Andrew Chamberlain of the University of Sheffield’s Department of Archaeology told Discovery News.

Full Article

[Brian Roebuck]

Picking out the best underground habitat - so easy even a caveman......

Interesting article SP.

Lynn and I have also learned that humans seem to use the same locations in caves for certain things throughout time such as for cave art etc. For example we have seen the pre-historic etchings of long extinct animals in caves such as Rouffignac Cave in France ( vm.kemsu.ru/en/palaeolith/ruffignac.html www.grottederouffignac.fr/visiter_an.asp ) surrounded by more modern Christian Crusades era inscriptions etc deep inside this tunnel like cave. In the US this use of similar areas for certain activities is also true for modern spray painters, civil war signature makers, and even native american artists as they made their markings on cave surfaces often overlapping the older with the newer. In all cases this activity spans thousands of years of cave use by humans. Obviously we humans recognise a good spot for certain activities when we see it. Apparently in the case of spray paint it's so easy even a cave-vandal can do it.