PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC—According to a Radio Prague International report, engravings of the heads and necks of horses have been discovered on a piece of limestone in debris left over from the excavation of a cave in South Moravia in the 1950s. Petr Škrdla of the Czech Academy of Sciences said that the engravings, recovered from Švédův stůl Cave, belong to the Magdalenian art tradition known from cave paintings in Western Europe. They date to about 15,000 years ago. The artwork was likely created by a member of a small group of hunter-gatherers who lived in the area around the Moravian Karst caves at the end of the last Ice Age. It is the first time that this type of figurative cave art has been documented in the Czech Republic, he added. “The engraving is on a fragment of limestone that probably fell from the cave wall a very long time ago—the fracture surfaces are smooth and clearly weathered,” Škrdla explained. The images had been engraved on two adjacent surfaces of the block, and had been crossed with additional engraved lines, a practice that can be interpreted as symbolic or ritual behavior in Magdalenian art. To read about other equine cave art, go to "The Story of the Horse: Taming the Horse."
