Word: cave
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...previous discovery of ancient texts. TIME's April 15, 1957, cover story reported on what the delicate, 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls revealed about early Christianity: "Since a Bedouin shepherd boy named Muhammad adh-Dhib ('The Wolf') first stumbled on them just 10 years ago in a cave near Qumran (he had hoped to find buried treasure), the scrolls have stirred up perhaps the most vigorous debate in Christianity since Darwin ... The majority verdict: the scrolls do not shake the foundations of Christianity, but they greatly contribute to the understanding of those foundations ... The fragments ... make a strange...
...more than 17,000 years, the bestiary of the Lascaux cave in southwestern France has survived the ravages of human history. Anyone entering this time capsule is confronted by 4-m-long bulls that appear to float across the massive vaults like religious apparitions. An enigmatic spotted beast with a round snout and straight, forward-pointing horns, plump horses in brilliant yellow and deer with treelike antlers - all seem in equal part intimates of the present and missives from some distant world. Which they are. Though the draftsmanship is strikingly Modernist - on exiting the cave in 1940, Pablo Picasso said...
...couldn't take the risk of doing nothing. It seemed like the least bad solution." If so, it was pursued at arguably the worst time. While a roof over the entrance was removed for the installation of the new system in early 2001, drenching rains poured directly into the cave's entrance, bringing with them dirt and, some suspect, fusarium spores. The danger that spores or other biological agents might contaminate the cave had been foreseen. Jean-François Nicolas, director of contractor Forclim Sud-Ouest Alary Vimard, says his workers were under instructions to wash their feet, limit...
...There's been a tradition of intervention at Lascaux from the very beginning," says François Bourges, an independent hydrogeologist and expert on France's caves. South by 230 km, the Tuc D'Audoubert and Grotte des Trois Frères, caves of a similar vintage and impact as Lascaux, have never been open to the public. Count Robert Bégouën, whose father and uncles found the caves on the family's Pyrenean estate in the years just before World War I, continues a family tradition that decrees no one enters either cave without...
...remarkable degree, the cave paintings executed over 20 millenniums until about 11,000 years ago are concentrated in southern France and northeastern Spain. Some cultural impulse drove the early Homo sapiens of that region not only to venture deep into caves but also to paint and engrave them. Though some of the caves have been known for centuries, most were discovered - or rediscovered - in the 20th century. Lascaux is the most famous: its grandeur makes it exemplary. But so do its travails, as José A. Lasheras, the director of the museum and cave of Altamira in Spain, acknowledges. "Altamira...