As artists, Neanderthals no Neanderthals
NEW YORK — From the murky depths of Spanish caves comes a surprising insight: Neanderthals created art.
That’s been proposed before, but experts say two new studies give convincing evidence that our evolutionary cousins had the brainpower to make artistic works and use symbols.
The key finding: New age estimates that show paintings on cave walls and decorated seashells in Spain were created long before our species entered Europe. So there’s no way Homo
sapiens could have made them or influenced Neanderthals to merely copy their artwork.
Until now, most scientists thought all cave paintings were the work of our species. But the new work concludes that some previously known paintings were rendered about 20,000 years before H. sapiens moved into Europe.
That’s a surprise that “constitutes a major breakthrough in the field of human evolution studies,” said Wil Roebroeks of Leiden University in the Netherlands, an expert on Neanderthals who didn’t participate in the new work. Now, he said in an email, Neanderthal “ownership of some cave art is a fact.”
The second study provided evidence that Neanderthals used pigments and piercings to modify shells some 115,000 years ago, which is far earlier than similar artifacts are associated with Homo sapiens anywhere. That shows Neanderthals “were quite capable of inventing the ornaments themselves,” said Paola Villa of the University of Colorado Museum in Boulder, who also didn’t participate in the new work.
Neanderthals lived in Europe and Asia before disappearing about 40,000 years ago, around the time Homo
sapiens moved into Europe. The research, released Thursday by the journals Science and Science Advances, focused on determining the ages of previously known artifacts.
One team of European researchers concentrated on painted artwork in three caves in northern, southern and west-central Spain.
The other study sought to find the age of shells that had been colored and punctured in another cave, in southeast Spain.