The first Neanderthal cave art

There has been some debate about the artistic ability of Neanderthals, and to date no art has been found, though their “spirituality” has been suggested from traces of ochre in burial sites. That suggests either that living bodies were decorated before burial or were adorned after death in some kind of ritual.  People seize on that, eager to detect signs of religiosity. (Ochre is a red “earth” pigment that contains ferric oxide.)

There are of course famous representational cave paintings, like the wonderful beasts of Lascaux, but these were made about 20,000 years ago. That was after Neandertals became extinct and when “modern” H. sapiens had already colonized Europe from Africa around 40,000 years ago. (Note: I’ve always considered Neanderthals a “subspecies” of H. sapiens, H. sapiens neanderthalensis, while “modern” humans are H. sapiens sapiens. Needless to say, some anthropologists disagree, though the interfertility of these forms, as evinced by Neanderthal genes in the modern human genome, makes me deem them members of the same biological species.)

Neanderthals are conventionally thought to have been in Europe from about 250,000 years ago to about 40,000 years ago. Thus the finding of 65,000 year old cave paintings in Spain, as documented in a new paper in Science by D. L. Hoffmann et al. (reference below; free access with Unpaywall, pdf here), not only bespeaks an artistic bent of Neandertals, but is the oldest cave paintings by a hominin. (The previous records are a hand stencil in Indonesia and a red disk  in a Spanish cave: both date to about 40,000 years ago and were therefore almost certainly done by H. sapiens sapiens.)

So what did Hoffmann et al. find? The three Spanish caves they investigated bear red hand stencils, abstract art consisting of geometric figures, as well as figures of animals like deer and birds. Since the caves appear to have been continuously occupied for at least 100,000 years, there’s no way of knowing, without dates, which subspecies produced which art.

The novel thing about this paper, though, is that the authors were able to actually date the art using uranium-thorium dating on the carbonate crusts that form on top of the paintings. These carbonates are what make stalactites and stalagmites, and form when the calcium compounds crystallize out of dripping water. A crust on top of a painting therefore had to form after the painting was created. I didn’t look up how they can date the formation of the crusts using uranium and thorium, but I’m sure a reader will tell us.

At any rate, here’s a geometric ochre panel, with crusts over it (see inset), that was dated at a minimum age of 64,800 years. It’s called a “red scalariform sign” (“resembling a ladder especially in having transverse bars or markings like the rungs of a ladder”), but I sort of see a humanlike figure to the right, though it’s probably my imagination. You can see the crust that was dated atop the red pigments. What a lucky find!

Fig. 1 Red scalariform sign, panel 78 in hall XI of La Pasiega gallery C. This panel features the La Trampa pictorial group (21). (Inset) Crust sampled and analyzed for a minimum age (64.8 ka), which constrains the age of the red line.

Here’s a hand stencil almost completely obscured by calcite, but made visible with software (right). This is between 45,300 and 48,700 years old, but other samples indicated a minimum age of 65,000 years.

Fig. 2. Hand stencil GS3b in Maltravieso cave (minimum age 66.7 ka). (Left) Original photo. The inset shows where the overlying carbonate was sampled for MAL 13. (Right) Same picture after application of the DStretch software (25) (correlation LRE 15%, auto contrast) to enhance color contrast. See (20) for details.

Finally, here are some “speleothem curtains” (calcite sheets) which have some red pigment (surely of human origin) covered with calcite; the ages here are 65,500 years.

Fig. 3 Speleothem curtain 8 in section II-A-3 in Ardales cave with red pigment, painted before at least 65.5 ka ago. (Left) Series of curtains with red paint on top, partially covered with later speleothem growth. The white rectangle outlines the area shown at right. (Right) Detail of curtain 8. The black square indicates where carbonate, overlying the red paint, was sampled for ARD 13. See (20) for details.

Paintings and ochre daubings from all three caves are, as the authors say, consistent, and, at 64.8 kyr (64,800 years), “substantially predate the arrival of modern humans in Europe, which has been variously estimated at between 45 ka and 40 ka ago.” Thus this art predates the arrival of “modern” humans by 20,000 years. (“Modern H. sapiens” remains simply aren’t found Spain at the time of these paintings). Since the only hominins in the area were Neanderthals, it’s presumed these paintings are by that subspecies—unless there’s some still-undiscovered hominin, which seems unlikely.

Neanderthals, then, had art—though it’s not representational—well before the famous cave paintings of France. This shows, as the authors say, that Neanderthals had a light source and premeditation, both of which are necessary to create hand stencils. They add, “it is difficult to see them [the art] as anything but meaningful symbols places in meaningful places.”  Well, we are meaning-seeking creatures, so I wouldn’t go that far. Perhaps they’re the Neanderthal equivalent of graffiti, not having much meaning at all. (“Hey, Zog, look: I made a print of my hand!”)

It’s unlikely that this kind of art was unique to these three caves, and so, as Hoffman et al. propose, it seems likely that eventually we’ll find Neanderthal art in other caves. And it will be interesting to see if that subspecies hit on representational art—showing animals or hominins—before H. sapiens sapiens came to Europe and Neanderthals died out.

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Hoffmann, D. L., C. D. Standish, M. García-Diez, P. B. Pettitt, J. A. Milton, J. Zilhão, J. J. Alcolea-González, P. Cantalejo-Duarte, H. Collado, R. de Balbín, M. Lorblanchet, J. Ramos-Muñoz, G.-C. Weniger, and A. W. G. Pike. 2018. U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art. Science 359:912-915.