The Department of Culture, Education, and Historical Heritage reports the discovery of graphic designs on a stone block that could be more than 200,000 years old, as part of an archaeological excavation at the Coto Correa site in Las Chapas. This area, known in specialized studies for housing the oldest remains in the city, is protected archaeologically, as some stone tools were accidentally discovered in the 1950s, dating back to the early Paleolithic.
The work and its subsequent analysis have provided insight into the geological evolution of the site, as well as the archaeological discovery of a set of stone tools carved into one of its strata. Of this set, discovered in 2022, a block of gabbro stands out, marked with lines, giving it an exceptional character. The significance of this discovery is twofold: on the one hand, it confirms the presence of settlers in Marbella during the Early Middle Paleolithic, a period little known in Spain and unprecedented in the province of Malaga. Furthermore, it provides this unique stone, which contains a set of graphic representations of human origin that could be 100,000 years older than the oldest cave art depictions.