Carving discovered on last cave lion in Europe: it is 12,000 years old was found in Puglia, in the Romanelli Cave in the province of Lecce, a portrait of one of the largest felines that ever existed. The relicton had been found 80 years ago. The study, led by the French National Center for Scientific Research and published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, had an important Italian participation The image of a big cat has been identified by a team of international researchers on a stone found 80 years ago in Grotta Romanelli, in Castro, in the province of Lecce. A new study, the result of an interdisciplinary approach involving scholars from various institutions, including that of La Sapienza University of Rome, has in fact detected the figure of a large lion. The image can be dated to about 12,000 years ago. The find constitutes the last representation and evidence of the cave lion in Europe.

One of the largest lions ever
The research – in which CNRS, Université Jean-Jaurès, Ispc-Cnr, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, University of Milan, University of Turin, Igag-Cnr and University of Cagliari also collaborated – was published in the journal ‘Quaternary Science Reviews. The find, now housed at the Museum of Civilizations in Rome, was examined using advanced analytical techniques and revealed further details about the artistic tradition of Grotta Romanelli, demonstrating how much the environmental context influenced the development of a symbolic-figurative heritage and how much the cave lion-one of the largest felines that ever existed-was a prominent figure for prehistoric populations, as would justify its presence in European wall and furniture art. The figure of a European donkey also detected.
The depiction would have been made between 12,700 and 11,000 years ago, when by then few cave lion specimens were present in Europe, apparently just in southern Italy. And that represented in Grotta Romanelli offers the time limit, beyond which there are no more traces of this animal in our continent. The researchers also found a series of scrapings on the stone, due to surface preparation, and the presence of traces of red pigment revealing the use of ochre. Technical, stylistic, and thematic aspects place the art of Grotta Romanelli in the artistic tradition of the late European Upper Paleolithic. In addition to the lion, a European donkey (‘Equus hydruntinus’), a series of lines with no apparent order, and a fringed rectangle that was made before the lion were engraved on the block.

Grotta Romanelli studied since the 1970s
“The interdisciplinary nature of this work,” comments Raffaele Sardella of the Sapienza Department of Earth Sciences, “underscores the importance of this kind of approach in research, as well as the need to revive old collections that still have so much to unveil, and, in this specific case, it opens new research perspectives on the symbolic value of big cats for Paleolithic populations and on the extinction of the cave lion in Europe. Grotta Romanelli is a site of great importance for the study of prehistory in Italy since the first research in the early 20th century. The cave and the contents of the sediments deposited within it were the subject of studies until the early 1970s, before going into partial oblivion. In 2015, after more than 40 years of closure new field research was started, authorized by the Sabap of Brindisi and Lecce, and funded by the Grandi Scavi di Sapienza project, for which Raffaele Sardella is in charge, characterized by a strong interdisciplinary approach that includes different scholars from different institutions and scientific expertise.