Once upon a time, in the dim recesses of a cave in what is now northern Spain, an artist carefully applied red paint to the cave wall to create a geometric design—a ladder-shaped symbol composed of vertical and horizontal lines.
Hundreds of kilometers to the southwest, working by the flickering firelight of a torch or oil lamp in the otherwise pitch darkness, another artist pressed a palm to a cave wall and blew red paint around the fingers to create a stenciled handprint.
In a third cave, located in the far south, curtainlike calcite formations were decorated in shades of scarlet.
On supporting science journalism
If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
Nothing of the artists themselves remains to establish their identity, but archaeologists have long assumed cave painting to be the sole purview of Homo sapiens. Although another group of large-brained humans, the Neandertals, lived at the right time and in the right place to be the creators of some European cave art, only Homo sapiens had the cognitive sophistication needed to develop symbolic behavior, including art.
Or so many experts thought.
But new dating of the images in these three Spanish caves could put that enduring notion to rest. In a paper published in Science magazine in 2018, researchers reported that some of these images are far older than the earliest known fossils of Homo sapiens in western Europe, which suggests that they were instead created by Neandertals.
The findings open a new window into the minds of our oft-maligned cousins. They also raise key questions about the origin of symbolic thought and what exactly distinguishes Homo sapiens from other members of the human family.
The dating results come as a vindication long in the making for Neandertals, who’ve had an image problem since the early 20th century. Back in 1911, French paleontologist Marcellin Boule reconstructed a Neandertal skeleton from the site of La Chapelle-aux-Saints in France, portraying it as an apelike brute.
In the decades that followed, scientists discovered that Neandertals were actually much more like us physically than Boule thought. They also discovered that Neandertals and Homo sapiens made the same kinds of stone tools for millennia. Unfortunately, though, the bad rap stuck.
For a long time, the most significant distinction between Neandertals and modern humans seemed to be that Neandertals didn’t make or use symbols. While Homo sapiens left behind jewelry, sculptures and cave paintings—all products of symbolic thought—no such items could be unequivocally attributed to Neandertals.
But in recent years, evidence for Neandertal symbolic behavior has been accumulating from sites across Europe.
In Gibraltar, a Neandertal engraved a hashtag-like symbol in the bedrock of a cave.
In Croatia, Neandertals harvested eagle talons and appear to have fashioned them into necklaces.
At sites in Gibraltar and Italy, they hunted birds for their feathers, perhaps to wear as ceremonial headdresses and capes.
In Spain, they made shell jewelry and mixed sparkly paint, which they may have used as a kind of cosmetic.
And in a cave in France, Neandertals erected semicircular walls of stalagmites, possibly for some ritual purpose … The list goes on.
Still, a key form of symbolic expression appeared to be missing from the Neandertal repertoire: rock art.
The spectacular cave paintings of woolly rhinos, mammoths and other ice age animals at famous sites such as Chauvet and Lascaux in France, among other sites, were all linked to early modern humans. In the absence of any unambiguous evidence to the contrary, scientists assumed all cave paintings everywhere were likewise the handiwork of Homo sapiens.
But in 2012 researchers led by archaeologist Alistair Pike, now at the University of Southampton in England, made a discovery that challenged this assumption. The team dated dozens of paintings from caves in Spain and found several that were older than previously thought.
One image, a red disk in El Castillo cave, was found to have a minimum age of 40,800 years—old enough to be the work of a Neandertal and almost too old to be a modern human creation. (Homo sapiens is thought to have reached western Europe no sooner than about 42,000 years ago.)
At a press conference announcing the 2012 findings, the study’s co-author, João Zilhão of the University of Barcelona, declared that any art from Europe found to be more than 42,000 years old must be attributed to Neandertals. Six years later, such art was found.
In their 2018 study, Pike, Zilhão and their colleagues dated paintings in three caves located in different regions of Spain: La Pasiega in Cantabria, Maltravieso in Extremadura, and Ardales in Andalucía. Although the caves contain a mix of figurative and nonfigurative images, the researchers focused their efforts on the nonfigurative variety.
As Pike explains: “We found in our 2012 study that the earliest dates we were getting were on red nonfigurative art—lines, dots, symbols and hand-stencils—so for [this] project we focused on paintings similar to these.”
As in the 2012 study, the team determined the age of the paintings using a radiometric technique called uranium-thorium dating, which is based on the radioactive decay of uranium into thorium over time. Specifically, they used samples of the thin crusts of carbonate that have formed on top of the paintings and analyzed their thorium content to gauge the age of the crust, which provides a minimum age for the underlying painting.
Their efforts were richly rewarded: The analyses show all three caves contain paintings dating to at least 64,800 years ago. Which means Neandertals across Spain were making rock art more than 20,000 years before modern humans set foot in western Europe.
Genevieve von Petzinger, then still a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Victoria in British Columbia focusing on prehistoric symbols, noted that when Pike and his collaborators raised the possibility of Neandertal artists in 2012, they got a lot of static from their peers who argued there was no reason to credit Neandertals over modern humans for the El Castillo images. “This is the mic drop,” Petzinger said of the newly dated paintings. “At 65,000, there’s no way it’s modern humans.”
Not only do the dates point to Neandertals making the art, they also indicate that Neandertals came up with these artistic ideas on their own.
When archaeologists first began uncovering signs of Neandertal symbolism, all the evidence came from the tail end of the Neandertals’ lifespan as a species, by which point modern humans had established themselves in Europe. Some researchers posited that Neandertals were simply copying their modern human neighbors, perhaps without really understanding what they were doing.
But the new dates have convinced even the proponents of this idea, such as Thomas Higham of the University of Oxford, who’s been dating sites across Europe to develop a chronology of the displacement of Neandertals by modern humans and who wasn’t involved in the new study.
“I think the most parsimonious explanation on current evidence is that it is Neandertals that must be making these representations,” said Higham. “I say that as someone who has long held the view that incoming modern humans, overlapping with Neandertals upon arrival [around] 45,000 to 40,000 years ago, were responsible for the late development of Neandertal symbolic behavior—perhaps a kind of ‘imitation without understanding’—just before their disappearance.”
But could the ancient paintings instead signal that Homo sapiens reached this part of Europe earlier than the fossil record indicates? After all, recent discoveries elsewhere in the world suggest our species originated and began spreading out of Africa thousands of years earlier than previously thought.
“It’s possible,” Higham admits, “but there is no evidence for it yet.”
Some experts have dismissed previous examples of Neandertal art, like the Gibraltar hashtag engraving, as predictably unimpressive compared to the figurative art modern humans made.
Von Petzinger disagrees. “When researchers joke about the sophistication of Neandertal art, I think they’re missing the point,” she said. “The big cognitive leap is making the graphic mark; it’s the ability to store information outside the body.” In a general sense, she observed, the creation of abstract signs “marks the first step toward written language.”
Higham insists that “What is now needed is a wide-ranging analysis of other cave art using the same techniques to explore other potential cases.” Pike and his team have continued to do exactly that.
“Hand stencils of dots and disks are found in caves all over Europe,” Pike has noted. “We would like to start dating art outside Spain to see if Neandertal painting was as widely distributed as Neandertals were.”
One school of thought holds that Homo sapiens were able to displace Neandertals by virtue of superior intellect and symbolic capabilities, including language. But if Neandertals had cave painting traditions, then researchers will need to grapple with the question of whether their behavior actually differed from that of modern humans in any meaningful way.
Reference: Artists in the Family. Kate Wong in Scientific American Special Editions Vol. 28, No. 4s, 88-91; Fall 2019.