Mammuthus primigenius in the cave and portable art: An overview with a short account on the elephant fossil record in Southern Europe during the last glacial

Abstract

A rich Upper Paleolithic iconography testifies to a long coexistence of humans and Mammuthus primigenius during the last glacial in most of Europe, including northern Spain, and supplies additional information for a better understanding of the dispersion and last occurrence of woolly mammoths in southernmost Europe (i.e. in the Iberian and Italian peninsulas) during this time. In Italy, where the scanty M. primigenius findings are likely not younger than 38 ka (except for the Gravettian remains from the Arene Candide cave, eastern Liguria), no representations of woolly mammoths have been reported to date. An exception is the carved mammoth objects (a few Gravettian ornaments and female figurines), recorded in Ligurian sites, but the hypothesis that they could have been imported from some distant area cannot be ruled out. Conversely, in Spain along the northern Atlantic coast, M. primigenius remains have been found in some sites yielding mammoth representations. In southern Spain, where M. primigenius was present in the Padul basin (Granada) during most of MIS 3 (between 40.4 and 30.6 cal ka BP), artistic representations of woolly mammoths are unknown. As regard to Palaeoloxodon, some populations were present during the late MIS 3 in the Iberian Peninsula as in Western Europe, whereas no sound data support the persistence of straight-tusked elephants on mainland during MIS 2. Therefore, whether the intriguing elephant painting of the Spanish El Castillo cave could represent a straight-tusked elephant – suggesting a survival of the species in Northern Spain during the Last Glacial Maximum – or an unusual representation of a woolly mammoth, still remains an unanswered question.