Today, our GPS with their cartography are accessible everywhere from any smartphone. They serve us every day to move, assess our travel times, choose our means of transport or discover places anywhere on earth, and even beyond. But far from being a recent invention, this representation of the space in 3D would in fact date several thousand years, as revealed by a recent study1.
The shelter of Segognole 3 is nestled in Noisy-sur-École in the sandstone formations of the famous Fontainebleau forest. The latter is known to house more than 10,000 natural cavities, of which approximately 2,000 are adorned with engravings. Among them, some have figurative patterns dating from the Upper Paleolithic (Between 45,000 and 12,000 years before our era), making the site of Noisy-sur-École a rare place in Northern Europe. As for the rocky shelter of Segognole 3, it contains complex engravings which could well represent one of the oldest known relief cards.
