The architects of the oldest rock painting in the world

The Neanderthals were artists

Thanks to the uranium-thorium dating technique, a new study published in Science was able to provide the first proof that the Neanderthals were the architects of the oldest rock painting in the world

The Neanderthal, our extinct cousins, were real artists. The researchers from the University of Southampton and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, who discovered the first important evidence that Neanderthal are the creators of the world's oldest rocky painting and probably had an artistic sense very similar to ours, told the story on Science's pages. Shortly after the discovery of the first of their fossils in the 19th century, the Neanderthal were described as brutal, uncultivated, incapable of artistic sense and some of these opinions still persist today,"explains the studio's co-author, Alistair Pike. The question of how Neanderthal's men behaved is a much debated topic and our discoveries will make a significant contribution to this debate.

Until now, rock art has been attributed exclusively to modern human beings. But now the researchers have been able to analyze with extreme precision the paintings, engravings and artifacts found in three caves in Spain: La Pasiega (North-Eastern Spain), Maltravieso (Western Spain) and Ardales (South West Spain).

Using an innovative dating technique (dating uranium-torium), they managed to set their age more than 64 thousand years ago, 20 thousand years before modern human beings (Homo sapiens) arrived in Europe. Unlike the radiocarbon dating, for example, which provides less accurate age estimates in the more remote past, the uranium-torium method used in this latest study, is a much more accurate technique for earlier findings that involves the dating of small carbonate deposits that have accumulated over rock paints.

These contain traces of the radioactive elements of uranium and thorium, which indicate precisely when deposits were formed, thus giving an estimate of the minimum age for anything below.

This is an incredibly exciting discovery that suggests that Neanderthal was much more artificial than we have believed so far,"explains author Chris Standish, archaeologist at the University of Southampton. Our findings show that paintings are by far the oldest rock art known in the world and were created at least 20,000 years before modern humans came from Africa to Europe and must therefore have been painted by the men of Neanderthal.

Moreover, according to the researchers' estimates, the various paintings were created over a period of 25 thousand years, suggesting that they were the result of a long tradition. "The emergence of material and symbolic culture represents a fundamental threshold in the evolution of humanity and is one of the main pillars of what makes us human", added the author. "Artifacts whose value lies not so much in their practice, but rather in their symbolic use, are fundamental aspects of human cognition as we know it".