Most of the popular coverage of the recent announcements about the possible Neanderthal link to parietal art in Spanish caves has, as usual, been focussing on the old paradigm of their being much less “advanced” or “intelligent” than their H. Sapiens successors in Europe. This is a view that has taken something of a battering…
The Ario Dream, a new film reflecting on 57 years of cave exploration by Oxford University Caving Club and the Ario Caves Project, premiered at the Kendal Mountain Festival on Saturday night and won “The People’s Choice Award” at the close of the festival. The film, made by Paul Diffley of Hot Aches Productions, follows…
I’d been caving for perhaps nine hours. We’d been going slowly, carrying a lot of equipment and I was tired. Very tired. Now I was shivering in a storm shelter at the foot of a draughty waterfall with so much flow that you could barely see where the pitch rope was. In any other circumstance…
Spanish cave diver Xisco Gracia (54) survived 60 hours stranded in an air bell in the cave of Sa Piqueta in Cala Romantica, Mallorca after an equipment malfunction. His diving partner Guillem Mascaró was able to leave the cave to initiate the rescue whilst Gracia is reported to have been sheltering around 800m into the…
Phil Papard has recently published the Matienzo 2015 report on the Matienzo web site. With around fifty cavers involved at various times throughout the year 2015 has seen another 5.4km of cave found, pushed and surveyed as well as another 4.5km of resurveying work carried out and one hundred and twenty eight new caves and…
