Word: caving
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...soon, the walls would cave...
Idid not see a single soldier in Chechnya with a sleeping bag, gloves or other proper kit. In fact, you would have thought the Russian army had just crawled out of a cave, where they still cook over a fire and sleep on the ground instead of in tents. The soldiers had no change of underwear and had not been able to wash for weeks. It seemed, in fact, as if this war was being waged 200 or 300 years ago. The only difference was that what our soldiers were carrying in their dirty hands were not old-fashioned muskets...
...ARTISTIC RECORD is much sparser. Scientists have unearthed a pendant made from a seashell that may be more than 40,000 years old, carved bones and beads made from ostrich eggshells that probably date from around 27,000 B.P., and paintings on slabs of rock in a Namibian cave that may be nearly as old. But like Australia's Aborigines, southern Africa's indigenous people carried on their rock-art tradition into modern times, confusing anthropologists' tasks considerably...
...discoveries like the one at the Chauvet cave, and more intensive study of existing sites, are constantly giving archaeologists more information to work with. Also, dating techniques are becoming more refined. It used to be that scientists needed to test a large sample of paint to pinpoint its age. And, says anthropologist Margaret Conkey, "no one was willing to scrape a bison's rump off the wall." Now it takes only a tiny sample. French prehistory expert Arlette Leroi-Gourhan estimates dates by using pollen particles preserved on cave floors...
...results of all these studies, while always enlightening, don't necessarily simplify things for scientists. A new analysis of the Cosquer cave on the French Riviera, for example, has shown that painted handprints on the walls date to 27,000 B.P., while images of horses and other animals came some 9,000 years later. Rather than being decorated in a single, prolonged burst of creativity, the cavern was painted over scores of centuries, quite possibly by artists who had no connection of any kind with one another, unlike Aborigines, whose culture has direct links to the distant past...