Researchers Identify Grooves and Indents in Cave Floor as World’s Oldest 3D Map

January 22, 2025 journo

The Segnole 3 Rock Shelter floor map – Credit: Dr Médard Thiry

In a proud moment for our heritage, researchers have found evidence that Stone Age humans carved a map of their territory into the floor of a cave in modern France.

Chipping away to create indentations for basins, these pioneering cartographers then cut grooves into the cave floor to represent rivers and gullies, all of which accurately a low-lying river system in the Esssone Department of the Iles-de-France Region.

Before this discovery, the oldest known three-dimensional map was understood to be a large portable rock slab engraved by people of the Bronze Age around 3,000 years ago.

Identified in the Segnole 3 rock shelter originally found in the 1980s, this 3D map would be 13,000 years old if it corresponds to other activity in the cave.

“This completely new discovery offers a better understanding and insight into the capacity of these early humans,” Dr. Médard Thiry from the Mines Paris—PSL Centre of Geosciences, told the University of Adelaide press, whose researchers contributed to the discovery.

Segnole 3 is well known for containing the artistic engraving of two female horses on either side of another depiction of an equine sexual organ. Rainwater infiltration into the cave caused it to spill out onto the cave floor through what is perceived as the vulva.

However, once the water reaches the floor, after a few meters it begins to run through a series of sharp grooves and around little humps protruding up from the floor. The research team from PSL and Adelaide, revisiting the cave after initial research in 2017, believe concretely that the grooves and humps are a model of the surrounding ecosystem, and that their connection with the horse carving represents “a profound meaning of conception of life and nature, which will never be accessible to us.”

The Segnole 3 Rock Shelter floor map and topographical map of the area – Credit: Dr Médard Thiry

“What we’ve described is not a map as we understand it today—with distances, directions, and travel times—but rather a three-dimensional miniature depicting the functioning of a landscape, with runoff from highlands into streams and rivers, the convergence of valleys, and the downstream formation of lakes and swamps,” Adelaide’s Dr. Anthony Milnes explains.

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“For Palaeolithic peoples, the direction of water flows and the recognition of landscape features were likely more important than modern concepts like distance and time.”

In the depiction, a shadowed depression represents a large flat basin caused by the bend of in the River École. The sharp well-defined line on the right represents the point where the valley slope begins, and the fainter lines in the center of the image represent the course of the École, and where its overflow channels are.

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“Our study demonstrates that human modifications to the hydraulic behavior in and around the shelter extended to modeling natural water flows in the landscape in the region around the rock shelter,” Milnes continues. “These are exceptional findings and clearly show the mental capacity, imagination, and engineering capability of our distant ancestors.”

“The fittings probably have a much deeper, mythical meaning, related to water. The two hydraulic installations—that of the sexual figuration and that of the miniature landscape—are two to three meters from each other and are sure to relay a profound meaning of conception of life and nature, which will never be accessible to us,” concludes Dr. Thiry.

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