It's one of the first instances of drones being used to find cave paintings.Aerial view of the mountains of Penaguila where the archeologists at University of Alicante used drones to look for rock art. Image: courtesy University of Alicante.
“There are many inaccessible areas of the Alicante mountains. Using a drone to photograph walls is a quick method and this recent find means there are many prehistoric cave paintings to be found,” Molina told Artnet News, noting that our distant ancestors likely created scaffolding structures to reach some of the caves.
The raw photos of the caves were analyzed and enlarged in Photoshop, revealing precisely what the team had hoped for. In the first cave, located in a Castellet-Barranc del Salt ravine, there was a scene of figures, roughly four inches in size, including archers, deer, and goats, some blighted by an arrow. In the second, there were similar paintings, albeit in poorer condition.