The discovery of ancient human DNA on cave walls in Spain and Portugal has opened a new window into the past, allowing researchers to recover the identities of ancient artists from thousands of years ago. This groundbreaking study, published in the journal Nature Communications, examined ancient DNA preserved within pigment samples extracted from 24 rock art panels in 11 caves across Spain and Portugal. The team, led by Alba Bossoms Mesa from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, is part of a larger multinational project called First-Art, which includes archaeologists, geologists, scientists, and cultural heritage specialists from Spain, Portugal, Italy, China, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The discovery of DNA in these artworks has revolutionized the field of archaeogenetics, offering a new way to reconstruct Paleolithic communities beyond the reliance on human bones, sediment, teeth, and faunal remains. The study examined simple marks and hand stencils found in nine sites of the eleven total caves, as well as figurative paintings at the Cave of Altamira. While only a limited amount of these samples contained human DNA, the scientists note that the methods developed in Spain and Portugal may now give us more insight into the artists who painted the Cueva de las Manos in Argentina, which contains hundreds of handprints dating between 13,000 and 9,500 years ago. The symbiotic relationship between science and visual art is evident in the chemistry needed to create synthetic pigments like Egyptian Blue and the understanding of kiln thermodynamics necessary for ceramicists to fire their pottery. Monica Green, a specialist in the history of science and ancient DNA, noted the importance of this area of study in comments to Hyperallergic, stating that retrieving molecular evidence of the past has been revolutionizing our understanding of mass migrations and pandemics. Green and others have long contended that archaeogenetics offers more opportunity to recover the histories of people, pandemics, and migration. New analyses of everything from the linen strands of the Shroud of Turin to the artworks of Leonardo da Vinci also illustrate the latent potential of aDNA analysis for the field of art history. While there are definite limits to what archaeogenetic data can and cannot reveal, microscopic clues are telling us more than ever about prehistoric, ancient, and medieval artists, even the forgeries of yore. As we are only starting to understand, artworks carry much more than a visual message; they are biological archives that provide access to our past.
