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Retrieved from https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/02/24/neanderthal-art/

Neanderthal artists believed

responsible for 65,000-year-old
paintings in Spain, which leads to new
thinking about Neanderthals’
sophistication
Feb 24, 2018 Bruce Fenton

Whether Neanderthals had the same cognitive abilities as fully modern

humans has long been a matter of debate, with many suggesting our
species displayed more mental prowess. One area where
Neanderthals were considered lacking was in the production of cave
art. But new findings from cave sites in Spain suggest that
Neanderthals had nothing to envy in respect to their close cousins, our
direct ancestors.

Archaeological research across Europe has convincingly established

that the ancestors of modern Europeans reached the continent around
45,000 years ago. This date not only matched found fossils and tools
but also coincided with the earliest examples of cave art. Despite
definitive evidence of a lengthy presence for Neanderthals across
Europe, cave art seemed to appear only after modern humans arrived.

In newly released studies, three cave sites, La Pasiega in northeastern

Spain, Maltravieso in western Spain, and Ardales in southern Spain,
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have produced new evidence that pushes back the date for complex
art to at least 65,000 years ago. These three sites offer a number of
paintings in red or black, incorporating animals, dots, and geometric
patterns alongside hand stencils, hand prints, and engraved
iconography.

“Our dating results show that [some of] the cave art at these three sites
in Spain is much older than previously thought,” said team member
Alistair Pike from the University of Southampton. “With an age in
excess of 64,000 years, it predates the earliest traces of modern
humans in Europe by more than 20,000 years.”

“Cave of La Pasiega Photo:AVANTI –

CC BY-SA 3.0
The logical conclusion is that Neanderthals are the most likely
candidates for having painted the images, and although it remains
possible that another sub-species was responsible for the work, such
as archaic Homo sapiens, there is no clear evidence for their presence
in Europe at the time.
Dirk Hoffmann, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology, was able to date the art only due to the fact
that the radioactive element uranium dissolves in water, but the
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element thorium doesn’t. When water soaks through soils into a cave,
uranium is carried with it and then gets trapped in mineral deposits; it
then radioactively decays at a predictable rate becoming thorium.
Measuring the relative amounts of uranium and thorium in minerals
can reveal their ages and provide a minimum date for any paintings
beneath these deposits.

A close up of the A closer view of the red ladder shape,.Photo by: C.D Standish, A.W.G. Pike
and D.L. Hoffmann

The three Spanish caves with paintings were found to have mineral
crusts overlying the images that were at least 64,800 years old,
although this is the minimum date for the art; we must consider that it
could be considerably older. This is without doubt the oldest directly
dated art in Europe and close in age to the oldest examples on the
planet.

Results of a second study were announced to the media at the same

time: Researchers had determined the age of an archaeological cache
at Cueva de los Aviones, a coastal cave in southeastern Spain. Among
the artifacts examined were perforated sea shells, red and yellow
compounds for painting, along with shell containers with mixed
pigments. The same Uranium-Thorium dating method was applied and
revealed an incredibly early date, 115,000 years before present day.
Consider that the very oldest signs of such artifacts in Africa are no
older than 92,000 years in age, perhaps considerably younger.

“One wrong move, and you might remove some pigments from the wall
that were there for thousands and thousands of years,” said Hoffmann,
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the lead author of both studies. “There’s this overwhelming feeling you
get when you first get in.”

A 1913 drawing of Panel 78 in La Pasiega. Photo:BREUIL ET AL

With the revelation that both Neanderthals and modern humans had an
equal ability to produce rock art, as well as other discoveries showing
near equality in tool use, ingenuity, ritual behavior, and genes
associated with speech, some researchers are calling into question
whether Neanderthals were truly a distinct species. There has long
been a divide over whether Neanderthals might not properly be
considered a sub-species of Homo sapiens and this new evidence
supports the argument that they were an isolated subgroup of our own
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species. We certainly seemed to have interbred successfully with

them, which traditionally confirms membership of a single species.
The new studies build on evidence for complex ritual artistic creations
among Neanderthals previously highlighted by the discovery of a
176,000-year-old circle created from broken stalagmites deep within
the Bruniquel Cave, located in France. Most scientists had already
accepted that the Bruniquel Cave stone circles had been composed by
local Neanderthal populations.

Related story from us: Brazilian rock shelter proves humans inhabited
Americas 23,000 years ago
“According to our new data, Neanderthals and modern humans shared
symbolic thinking and must have been cognitively indistinguishable,”
said Joao Zilhao of the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced
Studies in Barcelona, and who was involved in both studies. “On our
search for the origins of language and advanced human cognition, we
must, therefore, look much farther back in time, more than half a
million years ago, to the common ancestor of Neanderthals and
modern humans.”

Bruce R. Fenton is a researcher of human evolution and ancient

hominin migrations, with a special focus on the rise of the first Homo
sapiens. Fenton is the author of the pop-science book The Forgotten
Exodus: The Into Africa Theory of Human Evolution, as well as a
regular guest writer for several online magazines. His research
interests have taken him to all six inhabited continents and led to his
being featured in the UK Telegraph and acting as an expedition leader
for the Science Channel. He is a current member of both the
Palaeoanthropology Society and the Scientific and Medical Network.