How sapiens were Neanderthals?: new found cave art (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, February 23, 2018, 21:24 (2254 days ago) @ David Turell

Newfound cave art in Spain shows Neanderthals produced art over 64,000 years ago, before sapiens arrived:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-cave-paintings-clinch-case-for-neand...

"Once upon a time, in the dim recesses of a cave in what is now northern Spain, an artist carefully applied red paint to the cave wall to create a geometric design—a ladder-shaped symbol composed of vertical and horizontal lines. In another cave hundreds of kilometers to the southwest, another artist pressed a hand to the wall and blew red paint around the fingers to create a stenciled handprint, working by the flickering firelight of a torch or oil lamp in the otherwise pitch darkness. In a third cave, located in the far south, curtainlike calcite formations were decorated in shades of scarlet.

"Though nothing of the artists themselves remains to establish their identity, archaeologists have long assumed that cave painting was the sole purview of Homo sapiens. Another group of large-brained humans, the Neandertals, lived in the right time and place to be the creators of some of the cave art in Europe. But only H. sapiens had the cognitive sophistication needed to develop symbolic behavior, including art. Or so many experts thought.

"Now, dates obtained for the images in these three Spanish caves could put that enduring notion to rest. In a paper published this week in Science, researchers report that some of the images are far older than the earliest known fossils of H. sapiens in Europe, implying that they must have instead been created by Neandertals. The findings open a new window into the minds of these oft-maligned cousins of ours. They also raise key questions about the origin of symbolic thought, and what, exactly, distinguishes H. sapiens from other members of the human family.

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"For a long time arguably the most significant point of distinction between Neandertals and modern humans seemed to be that Neandertals did not make or use symbols. Whereas H. sapiens left behind jewelry, sculptures and cave paintings—all products of symbolic thought—no such items could be unequivocally attributed to Neandertals. In recent years, however, evidence for Neandertal symbolic behavior has been accumulating from sites throughout Europe. In Gibraltar a Neandertal engraved a hashtag symbol in the bedrock of a cave. In Croatia, Neandertals harvested eagle talons and made them into necklaces. At sites in Gibraltar and Italy Neandertals hunted birds for their feathers, perhaps to wear as ceremonial headdresses and capes. In Spain, Neandertals made shell jewelry and mixed sparkly paint that they may have used as a kind of cosmetic. In a cave in France, Neandertals erected semicircular walls of stalactites, possibly for some ritual purpose. The list goes on.

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"Their efforts were richly rewarded: the analyses show that all three caves contain paintings dating to at least 64,800 years ago. Neandertals across Spain were thus making rock art more than 20,000 years before modern humans set foot in Europe.

"Outside researchers praised the new study. “Wow!” says Genevieve von Petzinger, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Victoria whose research focuses on prehistoric symbols. She notes that when Pike and his collaborators raised the possibility of Neandertal artists in 2012, they got a lot of static from their peers who argued that there was no reason to credit Neandertals over modern humans for the El Castillo images. “This is the mic drop,” Petzinger says of the newly dated paintings. “At 65,000, there’s no way it’s modern humans.”

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"Could the ancient paintings instead signal that H. sapiens reached Europe earlier than the fossil record indicates? After all, recent discoveries elsewhere in the world have suggested that our species originated and began spreading out of Africa thousands of years earlier than previously thought. “It’s possible,” Higham allows, “but there is no evidence for it yet.”

"If Neandertals had cave painting traditions, then researchers will need to grapple with the question of whether their behavior actually differed from that of modern humans in any meaningful way. One school of thought holds that moderns were able to displace the Neandertals by virtue of superior intellect and symbolic capabilities, including language."

Comment: it certainly seems the Neanderthals wee more 'sapiens' than thought, but the point that humans might have arrived earlier needs to be settled. Findings in Israel point to an arrival there about 70,000 years ago.