NEW YORK — From the murky depths of Spanish caves comes a surprising insight: Neanderthals created art.
That’s been proposed before, but experts say two new studies finally give convincing evidence that our evolutionary cousins had the brainpower to make artistic works and use symbols.
The key finding: New age estimates that show paintings on cave walls and decorated seashells in Spain were created long before our species entered Europe. So there’s no way Homo sapiens could have made them or influenced Neanderthals to merely copy their artwork.
Until now, most scientists thought all cave paintings were the work of our species. But the new work concludes that some previously known paintings were rendered about 20,000 years before H. sapiens moved into Europe.
That’s a surprise that “constitutes a major breakthrough in the field of human evolution studies,” said Wil Roebroeks of Leiden University in the Netherlands, an expert on Neanderthals who didn’t participate in the new work.
The second study provided evidence that Neanderthals used pigments and piercings to modify shells some 115,000 years ago, which is far earlier than similar artifacts are associated with H. sapiens anywhere. That shows Neanderthals “were quite capable of inventing the ornaments themselves,” said Paola Villa of the University of Colorado Museum in Boulder, who also didn’t participate in the new work.
Neanderthals lived in Europe and Asia before disappearing about 40,000 years ago, around the time H. sapiens moved into Europe from Africa.
The research, released Thursday by the journals Science and Science Advances, focused on determining the ages of previously known artifacts.
One team of European researchers concentrated on painted artwork in three caves in northern, southern and west-central Spain. Results indicated artwork from all three were around 65,000 years old, much older than the arrival of H. sapiens in Europe, which occurred some 45,000 to 40,000 years ago.
The other study sought to find the age of shells that had been colored and punctured in another cave, in southeast Spain. Previous studies had estimated an age of 45,000 to 50,000 years old, too young to rule out a link to H. sapiens.
Results indicated the shells were around 115,000 years old. That is some 20,000 to 40,000 years older than comparable artifacts in Africa or western Asia that are attributed to H. sapiens.
