A painted panel discovered in 1912 on the walls of Bacon Hole cave in south Wales has been reclassified as Britain's oldest prehistoric rock art. Initial scholarly opinion dismissed the horizontal red bands as natural mineral formations, attributing the coloration to iron oxide seeping through the limestone rather than human artistic creation. By 1928, the scientific consensus had firmly rejected the original assessment.
Recent archaeometric analysis conducted by Dr George Nash's international team has definitively confirmed the artwork's true age at 17,100 years before present. Utilizing uranium-thorium dating methodologies, researchers identified calcite and clay residues within the pigment matrix, confirming a sophisticated prehistoric recipe. This discovery establishes the site as the earliest known rock art in Britain and north-western Europe.
Sources: theguardian.com
The words in bold are from the article.
| 1. reclassified | a. academic |
| 2. scholarly | b. approaches |
| 3. formations | c. advanced |
| 4. attributing | d. agreement |
| 5. consensus | e. conclusively |
| 6. archaeometric | f. structures |
| 7. definitively | g. assigning |
| 8. methodologies | h. reassessed |
| 9. matrix | i. composition |
| 10. sophisticated | j. scientific |
1.h 2.a 3.f 4.g 5.d 6.j 7.e 8.b 9.i 10.c