Neanderthals Made Cave Paintings Before Modern Humans Even Reached Europe

[Judi Lynn]

According to new research, the oldest paintings known to man appear to be the work of Neanderthals.

Lydia Pyne 10 hours ago



Panel 78 in La Pasiega cave, which includes red horizontal and vertical lines that date to more than 64,000 years ago,
long before Homo sapiens arrived in the area (photo by C.D Standish, A.W.G. Pike and D.L. Hoffmann used with
permission)


Neanderthals have done it again. They’ve reminded us Homo sapiens that we’re not as creative, original, or special as we’ve thought for the past 150 years. Last week, archaeologists published two astonishing reports that provide the most compelling evidence to date that our evolutionary cousins not only had the cognitive wherewithal to create art — specifically cave paintings — but they also did so well before modern humans entered the European Pleistocene.

In the journal Science, an international team of archaeologists reported that three caves in southeastern Spain — La Pasiega, Maltravieso, and Ardales — contain cave art that’s at least 64,800 years old. These sites are not new or unknown to archaeologists. But pinning down exactly when the cave art was painted has been a problem for decades. (The La Pasiega panel was originally sketched by researchers in 1913.) Dating experts, working in conjunction with archaeologists, developed a new set of techniques, carefully sampling geological material near the art in order to pin down the most likely time of painting.

The results have rocked the archaeological world, because the paintings appear to predate the arrival of modern humans in Europe by 20,000 years. In other words, the art comes from a time when the area was only occupied by Neanderthals. “It’s exciting to see dates that potentially reflect a long-term tradition or stable ‘artistic’ behavior amongst Neanderthals,” Felix Riede, an evolutionary archaeologist unaffiliated with the studies, told Hyperallergic in an email.

The cave paintings show simple but elegant motifs: a red linear pattern in La Pasiega, red-painted stalagmites and stalagtites in Andales, and, perhaps most impressively, a hand stencil in Maltravieso. These cave paintings suggest that Neanderthals had the ability to think symbolically and abstractly. Their apparent cognitive sophistication has also led researchers to speculate about Neanderthal language, and other behaviors that aren’t preserved in the fossil record. (Prior to this cave painting, the only other example of Neanderthal cave art was a significantly younger etching from Gibraltar, dated to roughly 40,000 year ago.) The Spanish cave art may be the oldest paintings in the world.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-03-echoes-thought-sites-prehistoric-art.html#jCp