Art linked to Neanderthals
Oldest-known examples created before modern humans on scene, researchers say
Ared hand stencil, a series of lines that look like a ladder, a collection of red dots. These images, painted in ocher on the walls of three separate caves in Spain, are the oldest-known examples of cave art. New research suggests that all three were created not by humans, but by our ancient cousins the Neanderthals.
In a paper published in Science, an international team of archeologists shows that each of the three paintings was executed at least 64,000 years ago — more than 20,000 years before the first modern humans arrived in Europe.
“This work confirms that Neanderthals were, indeed, using cave walls for depicting drawings that had meaning for them,” said Marie Soressi, an archeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who was not involved in the study. “It also means that our own group, the one we call anatomically modern humans, is maybe not so special.”
For most of the last century, researchers argued that our Neanderthal cousins were intellectually inferior to their modern human contemporaries — incapable of symbolic thought and possibly devoid of language. This, in turn, was used to explain why the Neanderthals disappeared from Eurasia about 40,000 years ago, not long after modern humans arrived there.
However, archeological evidence revealed over the past two decades tells a different story. We now know that Neanderthals were sophisticated hunters who knew how to control fire, and that they adorned themselves with jewelry and took care to bury their dead. In addition, genetic evidence suggests that modern humans and Neanderthals were similar enough that they frequently interbred. If you are of European or Asian descent, it is likely that about two per cent of your genome comes from Neanderthal ancestors.
Still, Soressi said, the discovery that at least three instances of known cave art were created by Neanderthals is significant.
“The one criteria left that would have distinguished Neanderthals and early modern humans was the interest and need to draw symbols deep in the underground,” she said.
Thanks to the new discovery, we now know that Neanderthals and modern humans had that in common as well, Soressi said.
For this work, archeologists travelled to cave sites across Spain, including La Pasiega in the northeast, which is home to the mysterious ladder-shaped painting; Maltravieso in the west, where the hand stencil was found; and Ardales in the south, where red dots were painted on curtain formations inside the cave.
Dirk Hoffman, the archeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who led the work, said the team targeted symbolic, nonfigurative art, which, they guessed, would be some of the earliest paintings in each of the caves.
Each of the works of art took some planning to execute — requiring a light source, the preparation of pigments, and a decision about where to place the painting. The hand stencil in particular is a relatively demanding piece to create, Hoffman said. The artist placed his or her hand on the wall, then painted over it. When the hand was removed, its “negative” was left, imprinted on the cave.
To determine the age of the paintings, the researchers used uranium-thorium dating, which measures the age of calcitic crusts that form on the walls of caves. By calculating the age of crusts that formed over the paintings, the authors discerned minimum ages for the artworks.
The uranium-thorium dating technique requires a very small sample of the carbonate crust — about 10 milligrams. The researchers carefully scraped the crust off the paintings without damaging the art, then sent the samples to two labs for analysis. The results indicated that the ladder shape was painted no later than 64,800 years ago, and the hand stencil goes back at least 66,700 years. The oldest of the red markings on the curtain formations dated back at least 65,500 years.
“Keep in mind, these are minimum ages,” Hoffman said. “We have no idea how much time elapsed at the three caves between the painting act and calcite precipitating on it.”
Even so, these findings show beyond a shadow of a doubt that the three paintings were created by Neanderthals, the researchers wrote, as there were no other hominids living on the Iberian Peninsula before about 40,000 years ago.