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Museo de Altamira y D. Rodríguez · CC BY-SA 3.0
Landmark Europe archaeological

Cave of Altamira

38,000 years ago

Paleolithic cave in northern Spain with polychrome bison paintings, called the 'Sistine Chapel of Prehistory'

See the deep-time shelf

Wikipedia

The opening of the article, and a way into the rest of it without leaving the site.

Cave of Altamira on Wikipedia.

Read the article

38,000 years ago — older than the timeline's axis, which begins at 9000 BCE. Drawn to the same scale as the rest of the canvas, everything since would be a single pixel, so Cave of Altamira sits on the deep-time shelf instead.

Who held this ground

Borders from dated snapshots, up to a century apart; precision varies.

Reconstruction

  1. No border recorded here in this snapshot (3000 BCE)
  2. European tribal peoples (2000 BCE) Border precision: Approximate
  3. Celtiberians (1500 BCE–700 BCE) Border precision: Approximate
  4. No border recorded here in this snapshot (500 BCE)
  5. Celtic Hallstatt culture (400 BCE) Border precision: Approximate
  6. No border recorded here in this snapshot (323 BCE–300 BCE)
  7. Celts (200 BCE) Border precision: Approximate
  8. No border recorded here in this snapshot (100 BCE)
  9. Roman Empire (1 BCE–200 CE) Border precision: Approximate
  10. Rome (Maximian) (300 CE) Border precision: Approximate
  11. Western Roman Empire (400 CE) Border precision: Approximate
  12. Basques (500 CE) Border precision: Approximate
  13. Visigothic Kingdom (600 CE–700 CE) Border precision: Approximate
  14. Asturias (800 CE–900 CE) Border precision: Approximate
  15. Castile (1000 CE–1500 CE) Border precision: Approximate
  16. Spain (1530 CE–2026 CE) Border precision: Approximate
Border precision
  • Approximate
Image credits 1 picture from Wikimedia Commons