Bats roosting in caves produce ample guano, which may explain why prehistoric marks left by humans cannot be found in some places where they are expec

Why Did the Cave Art Vanish? It Was Erased by This Furry Creature and Its Feces.

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2021-06-19 01:00:04

Bats roosting in caves produce ample guano, which may explain why prehistoric marks left by humans cannot be found in some places where they are expected.

Hunting scenes, geometric patterns, hand stencils and other works of prehistoric art can endure for tens of thousands of years on the walls of well-protected caves — but only if bats don’t hang out in the galleries.

These flying mammals are simply looking for a safe place to roost, but they also become furry philistines that erase ancient paintings and other cave wall markings within a few decades because of the corrosive property of their feces, or guano, according to research by a team of geologists and archaeologists published in May in the journal Geomorphology.

In Jamaica’s Green Grotto caves in the early 2000s, two scientists, Joyce Lundberg and Don McFarlane, showed that roosting colonies of bats create their own microclimates that can gradually erode a tropical cave’s limestone. Over the following decades, more research pinned down the destructive details. Studies have shown how large masses of bats generate heat and humidity within a cave’s closed confines, slicking the walls with an acidic, carbon dioxide-rich film. In addition, large quantities of bat guano and urine can ferment and saturate the air with aerosolized particles of phosphoric acid. This potent combination eats away at the limestone walls and ceiling, a process called biocorrosion.

A group of geomorphologists in France wanted to know whether the same process plays out in bat-filled caves across Europe, where prized cave paintings like those in France’s Chauvet and Lascaux caves offer ornate windows into our past.

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