Cave Paintings Made By Neanderthals
New datings of cave paintings in Spain have turned an old discussion about the Neanderthals upside down. The major question was whether some of the cave paintings that exist throughout Europe could have been made by the extinct human variant. A team of archaeologists have dated cave paintings found in three different caves in Spain to be at least 64,800 years old. That's 20,000 years before modern humans left Africa.
Cave paintings are difficult to date using the carbon 14 method, as they rarely contain any organic material. So, the scientists studied the tiny deposits of calcite, which trickling water has left as a thin film across the paintings over the years. Calcite contains tiny quantities of uranium, which slowly decay into thorium. By measuring the thorium content in the calcite, the scientists dated the paintings. Although the Spanish cave paintings are not as detailed as more recent paintings, they demonstrate that the Neanderthals were able to express themselves via art and capable of symbolic thinking. So far, most scientists have believed that those qualities were unique characteristics of modern humans. This used to be why we thought Neanderthals succumbed in the competition with our ancestors, but the new datings show that it is probably not that simple.
The Neanderthals were early humans, who lived in Europe and spread to Asia. They became extinct some 40,000 years ago.