New studies say European art scene began with Neanderthals

Associated Press

NEW YORK — From the depths of Spanish caves comes a surprising find: Humans’ ancient cousins, the Neanderthals, created art.

That’s been proposed before, but experts say two new studies provide evidence that Neanderthals had the brainpower to make artistic works and use symbols.

The key finding: New age estimates show paintings on cave walls and decorated seashells in Spain were created long before our species entered Europe. So Homo sapiens couldn’t have made them or influenced Neanderthals to copy their artwork. Until now, most scientists thought all cave paintings were the work of our species.

But one of the new studies concludes that some previously known paintings — an array of lines, some disks and the outline of a hand — were rendered about 20,000 years before H. sapiens moved into Europe.

For most of the last century, researchers have argued that our Neanderthal cousins were intellectually inferior to their modern human contemporaries — incapable of symbolic thought and possibly devoid of language. But the more these elusive, vanished people have been studied, the more respectt hey’ve gained.

“This work confirms that Neanderthals were indeed using cave walls for depicting drawings that had meaning for them,” said Marie Soressi, an archaeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands who was not involved in the research. “It also means that our own group, the one we call anatomically modern humans, is maybe not so special.”

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 H. sapiens anywhere.

Neanderthals lived in Europe and Asia before disappearing about 40,000 years ago, around the time H. sapiens moved into Europe from Africa.

The journals Science and Science Advances released the research Thursday.