Primitive art: Neanderthals were Europe's
first painters
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[February 23, 2018]
By Ben Hirschler
LONDON (Reuters) - The world's oldest known
cave paintings were made by Neanderthals, not modern humans, suggesting
our extinct cousins were far from being uncultured brutes.
A high-tech analysis of cave art at three Spanish sites, published on
Thursday, dates the paintings to at least 64,800 years ago, or 20,000
years before modern humans arrived in Europe from Africa.
That makes the cave art much older than previously thought and provides
the strongest evidence yet that Neanderthals had the cognitive capacity
to understand symbolic representation, a central pillar of human
culture.
"What we've got here is a smoking gun that really overturns the notion
that Neanderthals were knuckle-dragging cavemen," said Alistair Pike,
professor of archaeological sciences at the University of Southampton,
who co-led the study.
"Painting is something that has always been seen as a very human
activity, so if Neanderthals are doing it they are being just like us,"
he told Reuters.

While some archaeologists already viewed Neanderthals as more
sophisticated than their commonplace caricature, the evidence until now
has been inconclusive. With the data from the three Spanish cave sites
described in the journal Science, Pike and colleagues believe they
finally have rock-solid proof.
The early cave art at La Pasiega, Maltravieso and Ardales includes
lines, dots, discs and hand stencils - and creating them would have
involved specific skills, such as mixing pigments and selecting
appropriate display locations.
The Neanderthals living in the same land that would one day give birth
to Diego Velazquez and Pablo Picasso also needed the intellectual
ability to think symbolically, like modern humans.
Scientists used a precise dating system based on the radioactive decay
of uranium isotopes into thorium to assess the age of the paintings.
This involved scraping a few milligrams of calcium carbonate deposit
from the paintings for analysis.
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A colour-enhanced hand stencil from the Maltravieso Cave, made by a
Neanderthal is seen in Pasiega, Spain in this photo obtained
February 21, 2018. Univeristy of Southampton/Handout via REUTERS

A second related study published in Science Advances found that dyed
and decorated marine shells from a different Spanish cave also dated
back to pre-human times.
Taken together, the researchers said their work suggested that
Neanderthals were "cognitively indistinguishable" from early modern
humans.
Joao Zilhao of the University of Barcelona said the new findings
meant the search for the origins of human cognition needed to go
back to the common ancestor of both Neanderthals and modern humans
more than 500,000 years ago.
Neanderthals died out about 40,000 years ago, soon after direct
ancestors arrived in Europe. It is unclear what killed them off,
although theories include an inability to adapt to climate change
and increased competition from modern humans.
If they were still alive today, Pike believes they could well have
gone on develop complex art and technology.
"If they had been given the time, the resources and the population,
then they might have ended up in some version of the world we live
in today."
(Reporting by Ben Hirschler; Editing by Alison Williams)
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