Kapova Cave
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How it came to be
Shulgan-Tash, or Kapova Cave, is a limestone cave on the Belaya River in the southern Urals, in Russia's Republic of Bashkortostan. In January 1959 Alexander Ryumin, a researcher at the local nature reserve, went in looking for bats and found horses, rhinoceroses and mammoths painted on the walls.
Until then Palaeolithic cave paintings of extinct animals were known only from France and Spain. The cave holds more than 190 images: mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, bison and horses, as well as the only known prehistoric painting of a two-humped camel, human figures and geometric signs known as the Kapova trapezoids.
Uranium-thorium dating shows the paintings are more than 14,500 years old. Temperatures in the cave stayed below freezing, making it a far harder place to paint than other Palaeolithic caves. Some panels were defaced with graffiti during early exploration. The cave was inscribed in 2025.
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