Neanderthals created the world’s oldest art
BRITAIN/SPAIN: Deep in the winding entrails of three Spanish caves, the walls are alive with birds, deer, horses and figures that could almost be human.
Several painters have pressed their hands against the naked rock and stencilled their outlines with red and yellow pigment. There are dots, triangles, a ladder and what looks to modern eyes like an ant wearing a jetpack.
These paintings were not made by people. Precise dating of their chemistry shows that some were executed at least 65,000 years ago, more than 20,000 years before Homo sapiens turned up in Europe.
It is now beyond any reasonable doubt that the rock artists were Neanderthals. The discovery challenges not only the idea that our intelligence is somehow historically unique, but our understanding of what it means to be human.
The researchers are now beginning to piece together a radical new theory of how the impulse to make art came into existence.
Chris Standish, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton, said his team believed that the biological capacity for painting may first have evolved in the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, who lived at least 500,000 years ago.
As the two species spread across the globe over the next few hundred thousand years, they began to daub astonishingly similar motifs on the walls of caves.
In Sulawesi, an Indonesian island on the other side of the world from the Neanderthal paintings in Spain, the same reddish hand prints were made by the ancestors of modern humans some 40,000 years ago.
‘‘You can’t see a difference,’’ Dirk Hoffmann, an evolutionary anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, said. ‘‘It’s amazing.’’
It is increasingly apparent the Neanderthals not only developed a suite of technologies and mental abilities that could easily match those of our own forebears but some of those skills were shared.
For Standish and some of his colleagues, this suggests the two may not really have been separate species at all. ‘‘Perhaps these species are cognitively the same, but perhaps they just looked different,’’ he said.
Recent genetic studies show that early modern humans and Neanderthals interbred to such an extent that about 3 per cent of the DNA of today’s Europeans is Neanderthal in origin. Combined with the revelation that both kinds of prehistoric human developed similar weapons and artistic styles, it adds up to the impression that Homo sapiens happened to be the branch of the family that came out on top.
The latest piece of the puzzle comes from analysis of the isotopes of uranium and thorium in the sediment deposited around paintings in the caves at La Pasiega in Cantabria, Spain, Maltravieso in Extremadura and Ardales in Andalucia.
Some paleoanthropologists have long suspected the rock art belongs to a period before modern humans arrived in Europe 42,000 years ago, but proof has been elusive. Yet the fresh dating shows some parts of the images were made at least 70,000 years ago.
Standish said it was impossible to say whether their purpose was religious or not. One certainty, however, is that somebody made a deliberate effort to create the art. Another is that it was often located in inaccessible parts of the cave systems, where only those who knew where to look would find it.
‘‘It’s easy for us to get there with battery-powered lights, but they would have had a very narrow field of view. They would need to take a source of light.
‘‘Then they would have had to have prepared their pigment, they would have had to hold their hands up against the wall, and they would somehow have fired the pigment over their hand – presumably out of their mouth. It shows a lot of thought and planning.’’