Cops are investigating the defacement of a 6,000-year-old cave painting in southern Spain. According to authorities, the ancient evidence of the human drive to create was damaged when a local man poured water on it. Why? He was trying to gussy up the painting to take a photo for his Facebook page.
The paintings are located in the Sierra Sur de Jaén mountain in Spain’s Jaén Province. They’re some of the oldest in the world and the UN has recognized their location as a World Heritage Site alongside Stonehenge and the Great Wall of China.
According to a report in the Spanish newspaper El País, the police are investigating a 39-year-old man from the neighboring city of Los Villares in connection with the crime. They kicked off the hunt in May when pictures of the water-logged cave paintings surfaced online.
People love to take pictures of the paintings, which is a normal instinct. What’s not normal is pouring water over them to make sure they glisten and gleam when photographed. After taking the pictures, the man uploaded them to Facebook and tagged his location. It wasn’t hard for authorities to track him down.
Dumbasses trying to score points on social media are just the latest threat to the ancient cave paintings. In 2022, vandals spray-painted a large Spanish flag over another nearby cave painting. The flag was so large it could be spotted from a nearby road. Something similar happened in Australia (also in 2022) when vandals defaced 3,000-year-old rock art.
Vandals are bad, but the inevitable march of time and climate change are the two biggest threats to this invaluable art. As the planet heats up and the oceans rise, we’re losing access to some of these artistic wonders. It may soon be hard to look at them at all, let alone protect them from idiots who want to capture them forever on social media.
In southern France, there’s a cave filled with paintings of prehistoric marine life, penguins, seals, fish, carts, and bears. Reaching it requires diving into the Mediterranean and navigating an underwater cave. Sea levels have risen a lot in the past decade and navigating to the cave is becoming increasingly difficult. Worse, the changing tides are starting to wipe away some of the artwork.
Whether by clout-chasing social media addicts or man-made climate change, humans are the force by which all our artistic endeavors will be destroyed.