Were Neanderthals capable of making art?

The ability to create art has often been considered a characteristic of our species. More than a century ago, prehistorians even found it hard to believe that modern humans from the Upper Paleolithic (between 45,000 and 12,000 years ago) were capable of artistic talent.

The discovery of indisputably ancient works of art from the caves and rock shelters of Europe quickly dispelled their doubts. But what about Neanderthals? an ancient, big-brained sister group to our own species? We now know that they too were capable of making art.

However, at present, not all Neanderthal evidence is figurative: it does not contain any depictions of animals, including humans. The latter art form was perhaps exclusive to Homo sapiens. Instead, Neanderthal examples consist of handmade stencils made by blowing pigment onto the hand, finger fluting (where the fingers were pressed onto a soft surface), and geometric markings.

Neanderthals inhabited Western Eurasia from around 400,000 years ago until their extinction around 40,000 years ago and have often been caricatured as the archetypal “cavemen”.

Questions about their cognitive and behavioral sophistication have never really gone away, and the question of whether they produced art is at the forefront of this question.

Although we know that Neanderthals were capable of making jewelry and using colored pigments, there has been much objection to the idea that they explored deep caves and left artwork on the walls.

But recent work has confirmed beyond doubt that this is the case. In three Spanish caves: La Pasiega in Cantabria, Maltravieso in Extremadura and Ardales in Malaga, Neanderthals created linear signs, geometric shapes, stencils and handprints using pigments. At La Roche Cotard, a cave in the Loire Valley, France, Neanderthals left a variety of lines and shapes in the finger grooves (the lines that fingers leave on a soft surface).

And deep in Bruniquel Cave, in southwest France, they divided the stalactites into sections of similar length and built a large oval wall out of them, lighting a fire on them. It was not a shelter but something stranger, and if it had been built in a modern art gallery we would undoubtedly assume it was an art installation.

Now that we have well-established examples of Neanderthal art on cave walls in France and Spain, more discoveries are inevitable. However, the work is difficult due to the difficulties encountered in establishing the age of Paleolithic rock art. In fact, it is often the subject of intense debate among specialists.

Relative dating schemes based on the style and themes of rock art and comparisons of objects recovered from dated archaeological levels have proven useful, but they have their limitations.

To produce real ages, at least one of the following three conditions is required. The first is the presence of a charcoal pigment which can be dated by the radiocarbon method. This will establish exactly when the charcoal was created (when its wood died). However, black pigments often come from minerals (manganese) and therefore a large amount of black colored rock art is simply not dateable.

Another issue is that the production of the charcoal may or may not be the same age as the date it was used as a pigment. I could pick up 30,000-year-old charcoal from the floor of a cave and write “Paul Was There” on a cave wall. The radiocarbon date would not reflect the date my graffiti was actually done.

A second condition is the presence of calcite flows (stalactites and stalagmites) which formed over the course of the art. If they are shown to have grown up on top of a work of art, then they must be younger than it. A dating method based on the decay of uranium into an isotope – a particular form – of the element thorium can be used to establish exactly when the flowstones formed, thus producing a minimum age for the underlying art.

I was part of a team that used this method to date flowstones covering red pigment art in the three Spanish caves mentioned above, demonstrating that the stencils, dots, and color washes must have been created more than 64,000 years ago. This is a minimum age: the real age of the images could be much older.

But even at their youngest age, the images predate the arrival of modern humans (Homo sapiens) on the Iberian Peninsula by at least 22,000 years. As Middle Paleolithic archeology – the calling card of Neanderthals – is common in all three caves, the simplest interpretation that fits the dating is that the makers of the images were Neanderthals.

Objections to our results ignored the additional information we had published. Do dated samples really cover art? They did it. Can we trust technology? We’ve had it for half a century.

The third condition has just provided additional proof of Neanderthal artistic activity. The sinuous lines left by the tracing of fingers along the soft mud of the walls of the Roche Cotard cave reveal another form of interaction with this mysterious underground kingdom. These marks include wavy, parallel, and curved lines arranged in organized arrangements that show they were made deliberately.

Dating of the sediments that formed at its entrance shows that it was completely sealed no later than 54,000 years ago, probably earlier. As with our Spanish examples, this was well before the arrival of Homo sapiens in the region and the cave only contains tools made by Neanderthals. It adds another art form to the Neanderthal repertoire.

Even the most skeptical must recognize that these data unambiguously reveal artistic activities in deep caves that could only have been carried out by Neanderthals.

The art could depict Neanderthal individuals becoming more aware of their own action in the world. This may constitute the first evidence of engagement with an imaginary realm. The years to come will undoubtedly reveal even more topics for debate.

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