The Cueva de la Araña honey gatherer

What is on the wall

In a rock shelter near Bicorp in Valencia, eastern Spain, a small human figure is painted climbing a set of lines towards a cavity, reaching into it with one hand while holding a container in the other. Bees are painted flying around the figure. A second figure climbs below. It is a honey harvest, and nobody seriously disputes that reading.

The painting belongs to the Levantine rock art tradition of eastern Iberia, a body of narrative hunting and gathering scenes distinct from the animal-dominated cave art further north and west. Scenes of activity with human figures in them are the tradition's defining feature, which is why a honey harvest appears here and not at Lascaux.

The date, and why it is a bracket

The figure of around 8,000 years old is quoted almost everywhere. It is one point inside a range that specialists have placed several millennia apart, and the range exists because Levantine rock art is unusually difficult to date. The pigment is mineral, so radiocarbon dating of the paint itself is generally not possible; dates come from stylistic sequence, from association with dated deposits at the shelters, and from arguments about which subsistence economy the scenes depict.

What the figure is standing on

• A rope or fibre ladder, which is the commonest reading and matches ladders used in living cliff-harvesting traditions in the Himalaya and elsewhere.
• A set of ropes hung from above rather than a ladder as such.
• Flexible plant stems or lianas climbed directly, which some analyses of the brushwork have preferred.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. A manufactured ladder implies a technology, a plan and probably a group; a climbed liana implies none of those. The painting is thin evidence for either, and captions that describe it confidently as a rope ladder are choosing the more interesting reading.

What it is regularly mislabelled as

Why it matters anyway

Strip away the overclaiming and what is left is still remarkable. Somebody thought a honey harvest was worth painting on a rock wall, in a tradition that painted very few things. The scene records the hazard, the height, the container and the bees, which means it records that all four mattered to whoever made it. As a document of what honey was worth to people without agriculture, it has no equal.