2026-06-29
32 分钟This is The Guardian.
Former politics reporter Jane Coaston is now hosting Crooked Media's daily news podcast, What A Day, five days a week.
With stories constantly flooding your for you page, it's hard to separate what matters from all the noise.
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This article contains some swearing.
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They take you out of life, out of time.
A journey into Spain's astonishing cave paintings.
Written and read by Stephen Phelan.
The aurochs, the mammoth and the steppe bison are long extinct,
but their painted likenesses still look relatively fresh across the walls and roofs of Altamira.
Or so said Diego Garate Maidagan,
who is one of the very few humans allowed to enter that exalted cave in northern Spain.
I met Garate last summer in a small Basque village called Gautegues Arteaga,
a professor of prehistory and paleolithic art at the University of Cantabria.
He told me he'd been inside Altamira as recently as the week before.
Furthering his lifelong investigations of the prep work,