We now know for sure that our extinct Neanderthal cousins were artists who regularly drew on cave walls. The finding implies the capacity to make art may have been inherited from the common ancestor we share with Neanderthals, which lived 500,000 years ago.
Many European caves contain prehistoric art, all of which has been attributed to modern humans, though there have been past claims of Neanderthal paintings with weak evidence.
of the University of Southampton, UK and his colleagues have been studying prehistoric art in the Monte Castillo caves in northern Spain for a decade.
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In 2012, they reported that a red dot on the wall of El Castillo cave was at least 40,800 years old. That was just when Neanderthals were disappearing from Europe and modern humans arrived. “We couldn’t work out whether it was modern humans or Neanderthals that did that painting,” says Pike.
Ancient artworks
Now his team has studied art in three more caves, and found older paintings that must have been made by Neanderthals, since modern humans weren’t around.
The first, La Pasiega, is also part of Monte Castillo. It is a long tube, sculpted by water, with arches that have been painted. One painting is a symbol made up of red lines. It is covered with a mineral called calcite, formed when water flowed over the painting and left behind dissolved chemicals.
The calcite contains radioactive uranium, which decays into thorium at a known rate. By comparing the amount of uranium and thorium, the researchers determined the calcite was 64,800 years old, so the painting must be at least that old.
A second cave, Maltravieso in western Spain, is home to a hand stencil that is almost obscured by mineral layer. Pike’s team dated it as 66,700 years old, making the stencil the oldest cave art known in the world.
The third cave, Ardales, is on Spain’s southern coast. There are stalagmites, some of which have been painted.
The team dated red paint on the stalagmites and found one was between 48,700 and 45,300 years old, while others were at least 65,500 years old. “There’s at least two separate instances of painting by Neanderthals,” says Pike.
Jewellers
A study led by of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany – part of Pike’s team – bolsters the case for Neanderthal art. He studied Aviones cave on Spain’s south-east coast.
Much of the cave has been eroded away, but the sediments on the floor have hardened into rock, preserving them. In 2010, of the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in Barcelona, Spain found the sediments contained prehistoric jewellery: seashells that had been perforated and painted.
ZilhĂŁo estimated , but this was not reliable, so Hoffmann investigated and found a mineral called flowstone, which he could date, atop the sediment.
“The layer closest to the sediments gave 115,000 years,” says Hoffmann. “That means the sediments are older than that, including the shells.”
No more doubt
Anthropologists have long debated Neanderthals’ intelligence, but that is set to change. “The discovery of Neanderthal painting is kind of a smoking gun,” says Pike. “It’s going to be difficult for anyone to deny that Neanderthals were behaving like modern humans.”
What’s more, it was not a one-off. The caves are hundreds of kilometres apart, and the artworks were made over tens of thousands of years. “It’s very much embedded in their thinking and culture,” says Pike.
“There can be no longer any doubt that Neanderthals were, at least cognitively, people like us,” says Zilhão.
Neanderthals and humans descend from a common ancestor . If both could make art, this ability “must pre-exist in the common ancestor,” says Zilhão. Hoffmann agrees that is “the simplest possible explanation.”
We diverged since then, of course – the Neanderthal artworks don’t compare to the drawings of animals in caves like Lascaux and Chauvet. However, Pike says it matches what our species was doing at the time. “Modern humans at this time were scratching little bits of red ochre, scratching ostrich eggshells in Africa,” he says. “There’s no difference.”
