Study shows Neanderthals made cave wall art

Works in Spain predate modern humans’ arrival

A red 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 caves in Spain, are the oldest-known examples of cave art. And new research suggests all three were created by our ancient cousins the Neanderthals.

In a paper published Thursday in Science, a team of archaeologists shows that each painting 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 archaeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands who was not involved in the study.

For most of the last century, researchers have argued Neanderthal s were intellectually inferior to modern human s — incapable of symbolic thought and possibly devoid of language. This was used to explain why the Neanderthals disappeared from Eurasia about 40,000 years ago.

However, archaeological evidence revealed over the last two decades tells a different story. We now know Neanderthals were sophisticated hunters who knew how to control fire and took care to bury their dead.

Still, Soressi said the discovery of cave art created by Neanderthals is significant.

“The one criterion left that would have distinguished Neanderthals and early modern humans was the interest and need to draw symbols deep in the underground,” she said.

Dirk Hoffman, the archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology 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 these works took some planning — requiring a light source, the preparation of pigments and a decision about where to place the painting.

To determine the age of the paintings, the researchers used a technique known as uranium-thorium dating that measures the age of calcitic crusts that form on the walls of caves.

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.

Matthew Pope, an archaeologist at the University College of London who was not involved in the work, said the new study won’t necessarily change how he and his colleagues think about Neanderthals. At this point, many of them have already concluded that our ancient relatives had gotten woefully short shrift in the past, he said.

But he added that the work “may remove one of the last elements that separate the behavior of Neanderthal populations from modern humans in the archaeological record.”

Soressi said these recent revelations make the demise of the Neanderthals harder to explain.

“All of what we know today tells us that it is not because Neanderthals were dummies,” she said.

The Associated Press file Neanderthal artifacts include these perforated shells found near Cartagena, Spain.