Hand stencils in Maltravieso Cave in SpainH. COLLADOThe oldest known cave paintings were created more than 64,000 years ago, and were not made by modern humans, according to a study published last week (February 23) in Science. Instead, the report concludes, the artists were probably Neanderthals. The findings add to mounting evidence that our ancient hominin cousins were capable of greater cultural and creative complexity than generally assumed.
“Neanderthals appear to have had a cultural competence that was shared by modern humans,” John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who wasn’t involved with the study, tells National Geographic. “They were not dumb brutes, they were recognizably human.”
The paintings, distributed across three caves in Spain, consist of black and red images of animals, as well as dots, hand stencils, and handprints. Using uranium-thorium dating, the University of Southampton’s Alistair Pike and colleagues found that the paintings were at least 64,000 years old—predating the estimated arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe by around 20,000 years, but millennia after Neanderthals had settled on the continent. “Our dating results show that the cave art at these three sites in Spain is much older than ...
