Neanderthal Paintings: 66,500 Years Old and Controversy Over Them | Early European History And Religion

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NEANDERTHALS – NOT MODERN HUMANS – WERE THE FIRST ARTISTS?

Images in La Pasiega Cave

Neanderthals made cave painting in Spain 65,000 years ago — thousands of years before modern humans were even in Europe — scientists say. The finding debunks the widely-held belief that modern humans are the only species capable of producing art. Ian Sample wrote in The Guardian: “In caves separated by hundreds of miles, Neanderthals daubed, drew and spat paint on walls producing artworks, the researchers say, tens of thousands of years before modern humans reached the sites. The finding, described as a “major breakthrough in the field of human evolution” by an expert who was not involved in the research, makes the case for a radical retelling of the human story, in which the behaviour of modern humans differs from the Neanderthals by the narrowest of margins. [Source: Ian Sample, The Guardian, February 22, 2018 |=| ]

“Until now, the evidence for Neanderthal art has been tenuous and hotly contested, often because the works were not old enough to rule out modern humans as the real artists. But the latest findings, based on new dates of symbols, hand stencils and geometric shapes found on cave walls across Spain, make the most convincing case yet. “I think we have the smoking gun,” said Alistair Pike, professor of archaeological sciences at the University of Southampton. “When we got the first date for the art, we were dumbfounded.” |=|

“In a study published in Science an international team led by researchers in the UK and Germany dated calcite crusts that had grown on top of ancient art works in three caves in Spain. Because the crusts formed after the paintings were made, the material gives a minimum age for the underlying art. Measurements from all three caves revealed that paintings on the walls predated the arrival of modern humans by at least 20,000 years.

“Historically, works of art and symbolic thinking have been held up as proof of the cognitive superiority of modern humans – examples of the exceptional skills that define our species. “To my mind this closes the debate on Neanderthals,” said João Zilhão, a researcher on the team at the University of Barcelona. “They are part of our family, they are ancestors, they were not cognitively distinct, or less endowed in terms of smarts. They are just a variant of humankind that as such exists no more.” |=|

65,000-Year-Old Neanderthal Art Works

Red ochre pigment discovered on stalagmites in the Caves of Ardales, near Malaga in southern Spain, were created by Neanderthals about 65,000 years ago, making them possibly the first art works on earth, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal. According to Reuters: Modern humans were not inhabiting Europe at the time the cave images were made. Pigments were made in the caves at different times up to 15,000 and 20,000 years apart, the study found, and dispel an earlier suggestion that they were the result of a natural oxide flow rather than being man-made. [Source: Jon Nazca and Mariano Valladolid, Reuters, August 8, 2021]

Illustrations of Images in La Pasiega Cave

“Joao Zilhao, one of the authors of the PNAS study, said dating techniques showed that ochre had been spat by Neanderthals onto the stalagmites, possibly as part of a ritual. "The importance is that it changes our attitude towards Neanderthals. They were closer to humans. Recent research has shown they liked objects, they mated with humans and now we can show that they painted caves like us," he said. Wall paintings made by prehistoric modern humans, such as those found in the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc cave of France, are more than 30,000 years old.

The four caves in Spain with Neanderthal art are: 1) La Pasiega: with a red ladder shape, at least 64,800 years old; 2) Ardales: with painted rock ‘curtains’, at least 65,500 years old; 3) Maltravieso: with hand stencils, at least 66,700 years old; 4) Aviones: with painted seashells dated to 115,000 years ago. [Source: Ian Sample, The Guardian, February 22, 2018 |=| ]

Ian Sample wrote in The Guardian: “At La Pasiega cave near Bilbao in the north, a striking ladder-like painting has been dated to more than 64,800 years old. Faint paintings of animals sit between the “rungs”, but these may have been added when Homo sapiens found the caves millennia later.

“In Maltravieso cave in western Spain, a hand shape – thought to have been created by spraying paint from the mouth over a hand pressed to the cave wall – was found to be at least 66,700 years old. At the Ardales cave near Malaga, stalagmites and stalactites that form curtain-like patterns on the walls appear to have been painted red, and have been dated to 65,500 years ago. What the creators sought to express with their efforts is anyone’s guess. “We have no idea what any of it means,” said Dirk Hoffmann at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. |=|

“It is not the only question left unanswered. “It’s fascinating to demonstrate that the Neanderthals were the world’s first artists, and not our own species,” said Paul Pettit, professor of palaeolithic archaeology at Durham University. “The most important question still remains, however. What were Neanderthals doing in the depths of dark and dangerous caves if it wasn’t ritual, and what does that imply?” |=|

“In a second paper, published in Science Advances, Hoffman and others show that dyed and decorated seashells found in the Aviones sea cave in southeast Spain were made by Neanderthals 115,000 years ago, pointing to a long artistic tradition. |=|

Reactions to the Neanderthal Art Claims

La Pasiega Cave

Jonathan Jones wrote in The Guardian: “It seems very possible that Neanderthals actually taught Homo sapiens to paint in caves. However, there’s no evidence – yet – that they painted realistically. Could it just be that our relativism about what art is blinds us to the really amazing thing – the skill and perception of the paintings made by Homo sapiens? ...But here’s the thing. That Neanderthal hand is the first evidence ever found of another species showing cultural self-consciousness. It’s not so very far from a hand print to a self-portrait to a diary to a novel. This discovery dethrones the modern human mind. [Source: Jonathan Jones, The Guardian February 23, 2018]

Ian Sample wrote in The Guardian: “But some scientists are cautious about the claims. “It is possible that Neanderthals made rock art of some kind, but I don’t believe that this has been adequately demonstrated here,” said Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Brisbane. He believes the scientists may have dated calcite crusts that were not overlying paint, meaning they provide dates only for the rock canvas, rather than the artwork itself. He also wonders if the curtain-like rock formations at Ardales cave might be naturally pigmented, rather than painted. [Source: Ian Sample, The Guardian, February 22, 2018 |=| ]

“Clive Finlayson, director of the Gibraltar Museum, has discovered a rock engraving that was made by Neanderthals, and found evidence they may have adorned themselves with the talons of golden eagles and other birds of prey. He welcomed the work, but said it was impossible to rule out other originators of the Spanish art, such as the mysterious Denisovans or some as yet unknown species. “We have to keep an open mind. Who else was around?” he said. |=|

“Others are less sceptical, though. Wil Roebroeks, professor of palaeolithic archaeology at Leiden University in the Netherlands said the work “constitutes a major breakthrough in the field of human evolution studies”.“The concept of Neanderthal cave art, at least 65,000 years ago, is certainly exciting and surprising, possibly even difficult to accept for some,” Roebroeks added. “I would love to listen in to the conversations this will create in some quarters where Neanderthals are still seen as behaviourally inferior to their modern human contemporaries. Neanderthals made ‘cave art’ – deal with it,” he said. |=|

“The team’s next job is to understand whether Neanderthal art was widespread, by dating and studying cave markings in France and other countries. “That might help us get a little closer to what it means,” Pike said. If Neanderthals were the world’s first artists, it raises the question of what they might have achieved had they had not died out. “If you’d given Neanderthals another 40,000 years,” Pike said, “they probably would have got to the moon.”

Neanderthals Using Ocher 200,000 Years Ago?

Maltravieso Cave

Zach Zorich wrote in Archaeology magazine: “In 1981, when Wil Roebroeks of Leiden University was beginning his archaeological career, he ran across some red stains in the grayish sediments on the floodplain of the Maas River where his team was excavating. The site, called Maastricht-Belvèdère, in The Netherlands, was occupied by Neanderthals at least 200,000 years ago. Roebroeks collected and stored samples of the red stains, and 30 years later he received funding to analyze them. It became apparent that he and his team had discovered the earliest evidence of hominins using the mineral iron oxide, also known as ocher. [Source: Zach Zorich, Archaeology, Volume 65 Number 3, May/June 2012 |==|]

“Until now, the use of ocher—as a red pigment in rock paintings, an ingredient in glue, and for tanning hides, among other things—was thought to be a hallmark of modern human behavior. While the manner in which the mineral was used at Maastricht-Belvèdère is something of a mystery, the find has had an impact on the question of whether ocher use represents modern behavior. "This whole debate is now to some degree a non-debate," Roebroeks says, "because Neanderthals were already doing this 200,000 years ago."” |==|

40,800-Year-Old Spanish Cave Art “Panel of Hands”

The 'Panel of Hands' in El Castillo Cave is a series of red disks and hand stencils made by blowing or spitting paint onto the wall. A date from a disk shows the painting to be older than 40,800 years making it among the oldest known cave art in Europe. Some bison overlay the hands and are therefore painted later. [Source: Seth Borenstein, Associated Press, June 14, 2012]

Seth Borenstein of Associated Press wrote: “Testing the coating of paintings in 11 Spanish caves, researchers found that one is at least 40,800 years old, which is at least 15,000 years older than previously thought. That makes them older than the more famous French cave paintings by thousands of years. Scientists dated the Spanish cave paintings by measuring the decay of uranium atoms, instead of traditional carbon-dating, according to a report released Thursday by the journal Science. The paintings were first discovered in the 1870s.

“The oldest of the paintings is a red sphere from a cave called El Castillo. About 25 outlined handprints in another cave are at least 37,300 years old. Slightly younger paintings include horses. Cave paintings are "one of the most exquisite examples of human symbolic behavior," said study co-author Joao Zilhao, an anthropologist at the University of Barcelona. "And that, that's what makes us human." There is older sculpture and other portable art. Before the latest test, the oldest known cave paintings were those France's Chauvet cave, considered between 32,000 and 37,000 years old.”

A novel dating technique was used to date the Spanish cave art. Jason Daley wrote in Discover: “Measuring the age of the cave paintings found across Europe is confounding because most images are made from inorganic pigments that leave few clues. Archaeologist Alistair Pike, now at the University of Southampton, described a clever way to get answers: Analyze the breakdown of radioactive uranium-234 embedded in the natural mineral crust that forms on top of the artworks. Pike and his team applied the technique to drawings from 11 caves in the Cantabria and Asturias regions of northern Spain. They pegged the age of one illustration—a red disk in El Castillo cave—at 40,800 years old, making it the oldest known piece of European art by more than 5,000 years. [Source: Jason Daley, Discover, January 2, 2013]

Nikhil Swaminathan wrote in Archaeology magazine: “Rather than directly examining the art, scientists instead analyzed calcium carbonate (calcite) crusts that covered the paintings. They used a technique called uranium-thorium dating. The calcite covering, which is formed by the same process as stalagmites and stalactites, contains trace amounts of uranium, which decays over time into thorium. Using mass spectrometry, scientists can measure thorium in a calcite sample as small as a grain of rice to arrive at an approximate date when the crust formed. That date is the minimum possible age of the art behind it.” [Source: Nikhil Swaminathan, Archaeology magazine, Volume 65 Number 5, September/October 2012]

hand prints from Maltravieso Cave

40,800-Year-Old Spanish Cave Art: Made by Neanderthals?

The painted works described above may predate the arrival of modern humans in the area the artworks were made, therefore it would not be presumptuous to presume they might have been made by Neanderthals. The earliest remains of modern humans in Europe is a 41,500-year-old mandible found in the Romanian cave Pestera cu Oase. The earliest fossils of Neanderthals in Europe are dated at 430,000 years ago. If modern humans made the art works, it would safe to assume they arrived with some already-developed artistic skills, although there evidence of cave art in Africa older than 40,000 years old.

Seth Borenstein of Associated Press wrote: “What makes the dating of the Spanish cave paintings important is that it's around the time when modern humans first came into Europe from Africa. Study authors say they could have been from modern humans decorating their new digs or they could have been the working of the long-time former tenant of Europe: the Neanderthal. Scientists said Neanderthals were in Europe from about 250,000 years ago until about 35,000 years ago. Modern humans arrived in Europe about 41,000 to 45,000 years ago — with some claims they moved in even earlier — and replaced Neanderthals. "There is a strong chance that these results imply Neanderthal authorship," Zilhao said. "But I will not say we have proven it because we haven't." [Source: Seth Borenstein, Associated Press, June 14, 2012]

Zilhao said Neanderthals recently have gotten "bad press" over their abilities. They decorated their tools and bodies. So, he said, they could have painted caves. But there's a debate in the scientific community about Neanderthals. Other anthropologists say Zilhao is in a minority of researchers who believe in more complex abilities of Neanderthals.

“Eric Delson, a paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and John Shea at Long Island's Stony Brook University said the dating work in the Science paper is compelling and important, but they didn't quite buy the theory that Neanderthals could have been the artists. "There is no clear evidence of paintings associated with Neanderthal tools or fossils, so any such evidence would be surprising," Delson said. He said around 41,000 years ago Neanderthals were already moving south in Europe, away from modern humans and these caves. Shea said it is more likely that modern humans were making such paintings in Africa even earlier, but the works didn't survive because of the different geology on the continent. "The people who came in to Europe were very much like us. They used art, they used symbols," Shea said. "”

In order to prove Neanderthals were cave artists, Delson believes archaeologists need to find bones or tools in a cave layer that corresponds directly to the art on a wall. Zilhão disagrees. "You don't have to have both the art and the occupation in the same site," he says, noting that there are no associated human remains at caves famous for their Paleolithic art, such as Chauvet. "These are just places where people went to make this stuff." [Source: Nikhil Swaminathan, Archaeology magazine, Volume 65 Number 5, September/October 2012]

La Pasiega art

Researching and Dating the Spanish Neanderthal Caves

Franz Lidz wrote in Smithsonian magazine:“In a corner of the cave, cloaked in shadow, my fellow spelunker, the Portuguese archaeologist João Zilhão, inspects a flowing curtain of stalactites with a laser pointer. As we huddle together, red points of light bounce around the surface, finally settling on a pair of blotches. The designs, hazy circles in red ocher, survive in tattered remnants. Cueva de Ardales is one of three sites in Spain examined by Zilhão and his colleagues. Separated by hundreds of miles, the caves house distinctively splotchy handiwork — vivid patterns (spheres, ladders or hand stencils) have been stippled, splattered or spat on the walls and ceilings. [Source: Franz Lidz, Smithsonian magazine, May 2019]

Wielding drills and surgical scalpels, Zilhão’s international team of researchers grind and scrape the milky crusts of minerals that dripping groundwater has left on top of the blotches. At each sampled spot, a few milligrams of veneer is removed without actually touching the final coat of calcite that overlays the ocher. “The idea is to avoid damaging the paintings,” says expert dater Alistair Pike. The flecks will be sent to a lab at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, where their minimum age will be evaluated using uranium-thorium dating, a technique relatively new to paleoanthropology that’s more accurate, less destructive and can reach back further in time than traditional methods.

“In 2018, the results of sampling at the three caves were published, and our understanding of prehistoric artistic creation was upended. Analysis showed that some of the markings had been composed no fewer than 64,800 years ago, a whopping 20 millennia before the arrival of our Homo sapiens ancestors, the presumed authors. The implication: The world’s first artists — the Really Old Masters — must have been Neanderthals, those stocky, stooped figures, preternaturally low-browed, who became extinct as sapiens inherited the earth. “More than a dozen of the paintings have turned out to be the oldest known art in Europe, and, with current knowledge, the oldest in the world,” says Zilhão, a professor at the University of Barcelona.

The dating was done at Alistair Pike’s lab at the University of Southampton in England using a accelerator mass spectrometer that analyzes the mineral crusts found on cave formations, which contained the traces of uranium and thorium that revealed when the deposits formed. Because the amount of uranium in calcite declines as it decays into thorium, the ratio of those radioactive isotopes is like a clock that starts ticking the moment the crusts form: the higher the ratio of thorium to uranium, the older the calcite. Radiocarbon dating, on the other hand, becomes increasingly unreliable beyond about 40,000 years. Restricted to organic materials like bone and charcoal, carbon dating is unsuitable for drawings made purely with mineral pigments. “There are new technologies that just come along that provide us new opportunities to interrogate the past,” says Pike. “It’s now kind of reaching archaeology.”

Could Altamira’s famous bulls been made by Neanderthals? The bulls could have been made 34,000 years ago when Neanderthals were still around; its probably a stretch to say this but it could be possible

Controversy and Skepticism Over Claims the Neanderthals Created Art and Symbols

Franz Lidz wrote in Smithsonian magazine:“The latest rumpus centers on whether the abstract patterns qualify as symbolic expression, the $64,000 question of 64,800 years ago. “The emergence of symbolic material culture represents a fundamental threshold in the evolution of humankind — it is one of the main pillars of what makes us human,” says geochemist Dirk Hoffmann, a lead author of the cave art study. “Zilhão says the debate over whether the cave art qualifies as symbolic expression “touches deeply on a concern that goes far beyond academic rivalries. It confronts the issue of how special we, as modern humans, actually are, how distinct we are — or are not — from humans who were not quite ‘us.’”[Source: Franz Lidz, Smithsonian magazine, May 2019]

Jean-Jacques Hublin, director of the Department of Human Evolution of the Max Planck Institute is perhaps the best-known skeptic of claims that Neanderthals made art. A longtime Replacement theorist, he doesn’t buy into the idea that Neanderthals had the capacity to think abstractly, a capacity that, as Zilhão asserts, was fundamentally similar to our own. Whereas Zilhão is interested in the similarities between sapiens and Neanderthals, Hublin is more interested in the contrasts. “I think somehow differences are more relevant for our understanding of the evolutionary processes. In the end, to prove everyone is like everyone else is maybe morally satisfying, but does not teach us anything about the past.”

“He’s especially hard on Zilhão, who he thinks is on a “mission from God” to prove that Neanderthals were the equals of modern humans in every respect. “In other words,” says Hublin, “that Neanderthals did not use iPhones, but only because they lived 60,000 years before Apple was created. If not, they would probably run the company today.” .

“Hublin is not satisfied that the Cueva de Ardales splotches are even art. “The most pro-Neanderthal people like to reason in terms of present actions or features, which means they would say, ‘We found a handprint, therefore Neanderthals had art.’ This implies that if they had art, they could paint the Mona Lisa. The reality is that using colors to make a mark with your hand or painting your body in red ocher is not like painting a Renaissance picture of the Quattrocento.” Hublin says he won’t be persuaded until he sees a realistic representation of something by a Neanderthal. “Maybe it will happen. I think it’s fine to speculate in your armchair about what could exist, but until it exists, as a scientist, I cannot consider that.”

Chauvet's Cave in France contains hundreds of paintings that were made as early as 37,000 years ago; no modern human bones have been found there

“But must all cave art necessarily be representational? Even 64,800-year-old cave art painted 45,000 years before the Paleolithic bison and aurochs of Lascaux? Jerry Saltz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic, doesn’t think so. “Neanderthals made art, they had a material culture where they traded stones,” he said in a recent City University of New York interview. “They made tools and made them symmetrical — they made them beautiful.” Though the early cave people didn’t sell their finger paintings at Christie’s, Saltz is willing to bet that they traded them for baskets or meat or better flint. “They put value in it. We are God when it comes to art. We place its life force in it.”

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Nature, Scientific American. Live Science, Discover magazine, Discovery News, Ancient Foods ancientfoods.wordpress.com ; Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, AP, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated April 2024