ART

Did Neanderthals Paint?

~64,800 years ago

Palaeolithic · Middle Stone Age · Last glacial

In three Spanish caves, a red ladder-like motif, a hand stencil and painted cave formations lie under thin crusts of calcite. In 2018, uranium-thorium dating of those crusts gave minimum ages beyond 64,800 years, at least twenty millennia before Homo sapiens is known in Europe. If the dates hold, the painters were Neanderthals, and cave art was never ours alone.

Why it matters

The question is not decoration but minds: paint on a wall implies an image carried in a head, and symbols shared with others. Granting that to Neanderthals dissolves the clearest behavioural line still drawn between them and us. That is why so much argument settles on the dating chemistry: the whole claim rests on whether the calcite crusts kept their uranium clock honest.

Dating & uncertaintyDisputed

The uranium-thorium dates are minimum ages, measured on carbonate crusts that grew over the paint, not on the paint itself. Critics argue that the method can misbehave: a 2018 comment reads the same data as supporting an age near 47,000 years, and a 2020 study at Nerja Cave found such crusts behaving as open systems, in which mobile uranium would be enough to make apparent ages too old. If the young reading wins, the painters could have been Homo sapiens after all.

Sources

1. Hoffmann et al. (2018), Science · U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave artdoi:10.1126/science.aap7778
2. Slimak et al. (2018), Science · Comment on 'U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art'doi:10.1126/science.aau1371
3. Pons-Branchu et al. (2020), Journal of Archaeological Science · U-series dating at Nerja cave reveal open system. Questioning the Neanderthal origin of Spanish rock artdoi:10.1016/j.jas.2020.105120

Our species’ history as one day

19:03:464 h 56 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day