© J. Zihao
120,000 year-old painted and pierced shells, fashioned by Neanderthals – proof, say researchers, that our distant cousins developed symbolic thought well before modern humans arrived in Europe.
Paintings found in Spanish caves have been found to be at least 68,000 years old, meaning they were made 20,000 years before the entry of modern humans into Europe.
The artists, therefore, say a team led by Dirk Hoffmann from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, were Neanderthals. The paintings - located in caves called La Pasiega, Maltravieso, and Ardales - are the subject of
a paper published in the journal Science.
Hoffman is also lead author of a second study,
published in the journal Science Advances, analysing a collection of 120,000-year-old painted and perforated seashells found in another Spanish location, called Cueva de los Aviones.
Dating evidence reveals that the artefacts, like the paintings, were fashioned many millennia before the arrival of Homo sapiens, meaning that they, too, were the work of Neanderthals.
Hoffman and colleagues note that similar finds in Africa, attributed to modern humans, have been uncontroversially accepted as proxies for symbolic behaviour.
With only a few contested exceptions, symbols - artefacts and paintings, for instance - have not previously been discovered in Europe dating to any earlier than about 45,000 years ago. Thus, it has been assumed that symbolic thought and language were the exclusive province of humanity.
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