Neanderthal 'Art' Found In Cave Sheds Surprising New Light....

Over the years here there have been quite a few debates on whether the Neanderthal were intelligent enough to create 'Art' this new article sheds some light on that debate. It doesn't surprise me that they were. The evidence indicate that they were pretty smart and not the Apish brutes they were often portrayed as being over the past century. It wasn't until fairly recently the past 20 or 30 years or so that a new understanding of just how advanced our genetic cousins were..

Enjoy


Neanderthal 'Art' Found In Cave Sheds Surprising New Light On Ancient Intelligence

It looks like a game of tic tac toe, but engravings found deep inside a cave in Gibraltar might be a Neanderthal masterpiece. At more than 39,000 years old, the etchings rival in age the oldest cave art in Europe — and they are the first to be unquestionably done by a Neanderthal, claim the researchers who discovered them. Other scientists, however, say that the artwork's attribution is not an open-and-shut case.

Archaeologists uncovered the engravings in Gorham’s Cave, a site overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. A team led by zoologist Clive Finlayson, the director of the Gibraltar Museum, has been excavating the cave since the late 1980s. The researchers found that the Neanderthals who called the cave home ate fish, shellfish and birds, and perhaps survived later than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe.

But in July 2012, Finlayson's colleague Francisco Pacheco crawled on the cave floor through a narrow passage to reach the very rear of the chamber, and happened on the etchings, carved on a horizontal platform that is elevated 40 centimeters from the bedrock, like a natural coffee table. “We started to shine the torch in different directions and we started to see the relief of this thing. It’s not immediately obvious,” says Finlayson. The drawings cover an area of about 20 by 20 centimeters, roughly the size of a Frisbee, and are up to a few millimeters deep.

Its curious that Neanderthal don't really evolve over the course of 3 Million years. They use the same one tool that entire time. Then in the last 50-75k they start burying their dead for the first time, wearing ornaments, and in this case possibly creating art.


Cro Magnon on the other hand - what a beauty.

The three Neanderthal constructs at the bottom of the page shows me there wasn't a lot of difference,
at least when hairless.
I admit I know little on the subject but I do find it all fascinating.

It looks to me like a phallic symbol horizontally with intersecting lines running vertically. Nice.

There is probably a Bobbit joke here somewhere, but that would be immature.

For comparison (no pun intended),

Neanderthals were intelligent. Where do you think humans learned their stuff from. Problem is humans used what they learned to put the Neanderthals into extinction. They probably stole what the Neanderthals taught them and claimed it as their own. The creation of the first patent.

Seems like that is a typical human trait. I question if the other hominids had that trait.

You do not survive for as long as neanderthal had by being stupid.

At what was probably the harshest time of existence everything you did would have had an overarching safety factor built in.

As there were surely predators everywhere you turned then your cave was your fortress and protection from whatever was outside of it and you would have done everything possible to make sure you did not draw the attention of them.

I believe the neanderthal would have done any carving of food as far from the entrance as possible and this looks like a likely place. As I look at this I see the same marks on my own cutting board and I propose that is all we are looking at.

Or perhaps this was the first baby's bedroom or even a timeout room they had for their unruly kids when dangerous predators were about? Maybe a child was just acting out by carving the rock, or maybe practicing his skills. If people had to crawl on their bellies to get in there, it was not practical for them.

For more on gorhams cave and the blog by Finlayson of the dig.
www.abovetopsecret.com...

a reply to: rickymouse

Nitpick here, but Neanderthal man was a human. Much like how a great dane and a basset hound are both dogs, Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis are both humans. As for other humans having the same propensity for self-interest and xenophobic hostility... I'd actually venture to say they probably did. That isn't unique to humans. Fact is, humans are the most peaceful, calm tempered, and least killy ape there is (Gorillas are close, but they still can go King Kong pretty easily), so there's no reason to think that our ancestors and genetic cousins wouldn't have had the same basic behaviors we do. Frankly, they might have been more hostile and aggressive to survive their hostile, harsh world. Not to mention Neanderthal man would have been in constant competition with his own kin for food, females, and shelter.

originally posted by: 131415

Its curious that Neanderthal don't really evolve over the course of 3 Million years.

I can completely understand why that would be a mind boggler for you, especially since 3 million years ago the closest relatives to humans were still Australopithecines. The Genus Homo didn't come into play until around 2 MYA with H. Erectus. Neanderthal as a distinct species, only came into play about 250,000 years ago. There were however distinct transitions going back approx 600,000 YA with the starting point being H. Heidelbergensis leading up to what became very distinctly Neanderthal. But 3 Million years... Not quite.

They use the same one tool that entire time.

Exactly what one tool would that be? Neanderthal had a rather extensive and intricate tool kit contrary to what most people seem to think of them. They utilized a very distinctive flint knapping technique called Lavellois during what is referred to as the Mousterian

Karen Ruebens, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton, analyzed more than 1,300 stone tools from European Neanderthal sites dated to between 115,000 and 35,000 years ago. She found that they belong to at least two distinct tool-making traditions. West of the Rhine River, Neanderthal hand axes are oval or roughly triangular, while to the east, they are rounded on one edge and flat on the other. Near the Rhine, the traditions seem to overlap, as if two cultures were sharing their techniques. A separate study, led by Marie Soressi at Leiden University, shows that Neanderthals also may have taught our Homo sapiens ancestors a thing or two. Soressi’s analysis shows that Neanderthals were using bone tools called lissoirs to process animal hides several thousand years before the first modern humans arrived in Europe and started making the same type of tool. While it has long been thought that H. sapiens were the progenitors of the practice, Neanderthals may actually have been more creative in their tool-making than was previously thought.

Additionally, Tools crafted during the Mousterian period of tool making included small hand axes made from disk-shaped cores; flake tools, such as well-made sidescrapers and triangular points, probably used as knives; denticulate (toothed) instruments produced by making notches in a flake, perhaps used as saws or shaft straighteners; and round limestone balls, believed to have served as bolas (weapons of a type used today in South America, consisting of three balls on the end of a thong, which is hurled at an animal, wraps itself around its legs, and trips it). Wooden spears were used to hunt large game such as mammoth and wooly rhinoceros. Mousterian “tool kits” often have quite different contents from site to site. Some paleo anthropologists explain this by suggesting that different groups of Neanderthal men had varying toolmaking traditions; other workers believe the tool kits were used by the same peoples to perform different functions (e.g., hunting, butchering, food preparation). Mousterian implements disappeared abruptly from Europe with the passing of Neanderthal as they were absorbed into what was to become Homo Sapiens Sapiens( present day us).

Then in the last 50-75k they start burying their dead for the first time, wearing ornaments, and in this case possibly creating art.

Just because there haven't been any definitively confirmed burial sites containing Neanderthal remains of verifiable older dates doesn't mean that they didn't do it earlier. The fossil record is pretty scant when it comes to our closest and most recent relative of our genus. There is a 65,000 year old burial site of Neanderthal in norther Iraq/Kurdistan that contains grave goods including pollen indicating flowers were placed in the grave. There are multiple sites where Neanderthal graves show bodies with debilitating injuries that had healed, in some cases were talking about broken legs or arms that while not set due to lack of medical knowledge, healed but left the individual incapable of surviving on their own. this shows that these people were taken care of by their community both in life and death. The intelligence, the compassion, the use of jewelry and makeup...these are all the hallmarks of what we would in the present refer to as what differentiates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. HNS were every bit as human as we are and their integration into our archaic societies and gene pool may in fact be what allowed us to become a dominant force on this planet.

Cro Magnon on the other hand - what a beauty.

Oh, indeed they were beauties. Thankfully for EEMH when they first left Africa and were making their way into Europe through the Levant, they encountered, lived and worked with the Neanderthals already living there who were kind enough to share their superior tool making skills with the new world travelers who contrary to most people's impressions, not in possession of superior tools.

a reply to: peter vlar
Another thing that impresses me with the Neanderthal is the use of red ochre during burial. Red ochre ended up being used all over the world by modern humans. It seams to be a funerary rite that lasted 100,000's of years even shared among different species.

originally posted by: peter vlar

originally posted by: 131415

Its curious that Neanderthal don't really evolve over the course of 3 Million years.

I can completely understand why that would be a mind boggler for you, especially since 3 million years ago the closest relatives to humans were still Australopithecines. The Genus Homo didn't come into play until around 2 MYA with H. Erectus. Neanderthal as a distinct species, only came into play about 250,000 years ago. There were however distinct transitions going back approx 600,000 YA with the starting point being H. Heidelbergensis leading up to what became very distinctly Neanderthal. But 3 Million years... Not quite.

They use the same one tool that entire time.

Exactly what one tool would that be? Neanderthal had a rather extensive and intricate tool kit contrary to what most people seem to think of them. They utilized a very distinctive flint knapping technique called Lavellois during what is referred to as the Mousterian

Karen Ruebens, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton, analyzed more than 1,300 stone tools from European Neanderthal sites dated to between 115,000 and 35,000 years ago. She found that they belong to at least two distinct tool-making traditions. West of the Rhine River, Neanderthal hand axes are oval or roughly triangular, while to the east, they are rounded on one edge and flat on the other. Near the Rhine, the traditions seem to overlap, as if two cultures were sharing their techniques. A separate study, led by Marie Soressi at Leiden University, shows that Neanderthals also may have taught our Homo sapiens ancestors a thing or two. Soressi’s analysis shows that Neanderthals were using bone tools called lissoirs to process animal hides several thousand years before the first modern humans arrived in Europe and started making the same type of tool. While it has long been thought that H. sapiens were the progenitors of the practice, Neanderthals may actually have been more creative in their tool-making than was previously thought.

Additionally, Tools crafted during the Mousterian period of tool making included small hand axes made from disk-shaped cores; flake tools, such as well-made sidescrapers and triangular points, probably used as knives; denticulate (toothed) instruments produced by making notches in a flake, perhaps used as saws or shaft straighteners; and round limestone balls, believed to have served as bolas (weapons of a type used today in South America, consisting of three balls on the end of a thong, which is hurled at an animal, wraps itself around its legs, and trips it). Wooden spears were used to hunt large game such as mammoth and wooly rhinoceros. Mousterian “tool kits” often have quite different contents from site to site. Some paleo anthropologists explain this by suggesting that different groups of Neanderthal men had varying toolmaking traditions; other workers believe the tool kits were used by the same peoples to perform different functions (e.g., hunting, butchering, food preparation). Mousterian implements disappeared abruptly from Europe with the passing of Neanderthal as they were absorbed into what was to become Homo Sapiens Sapiens( present day us).

Then in the last 50-75k they start burying their dead for the first time, wearing ornaments, and in this case possibly creating art.

Just because there haven't been any definitively confirmed burial sites containing Neanderthal remains of verifiable older dates doesn't mean that they didn't do it earlier. The fossil record is pretty scant when it comes to our closest and most recent relative of our genus. There is a 65,000 year old burial site of Neanderthal in norther Iraq/Kurdistan that contains grave goods including pollen indicating flowers were placed in the grave. There are multiple sites where Neanderthal graves show bodies with debilitating injuries that had healed, in some cases were talking about broken legs or arms that while not set due to lack of medical knowledge, healed but left the individual incapable of surviving on their own. this shows that these people were taken care of by their community both in life and death. The intelligence, the compassion, the use of jewelry and makeup...these are all the hallmarks of what we would in the present refer to as what differentiates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. HNS were every bit as human as we are and their integration into our archaic societies and gene pool may in fact be what allowed us to become a dominant force on this planet.

Cro Magnon on the other hand - what a beauty.

Oh, indeed they were beauties. Thankfully for EEMH when they first left Africa and were making their way into Europe through the Levant, they encountered, lived and worked with the Neanderthals already living there who were kind enough to share their superior tool making skills with the new world travelers who contrary to most people's impressions, not in possession of superior tools.

Hey I appreciate the reply I confused Erectus and the Acheulean hand axe with the Neanderthal Mousterian blades.

"The available archaeological data on Homo erectus reveals that one type of tool was used for about a million years --one type of stone tool, for a million years, all over Africa wherever Homo erectus is found after 1.4 mya."

What I find curious about the whole thing is that its an absolutely beautiful weapon. Its perfect in its design and it doesn't change. There is an axe wielding factory that Erectus had in Africa where they find ten's of thousands of these guys at the shoreline of a river bed. They would sneak up on a watering hole - and lob the axe into the air to graze the side of an antelope. Its natural reaction is to flail its legs out when scared - thus falling to ground and would have been trampled by rest of antelope in the pack. After the dust settled Erectus would move in and finish the kill. The Antelope never the wiser - returning to same watering hole without fear of predators.


Back to Neanderthal: Did they teach anyone anything?

Neanderthals developed the method of making cutting blades by knapping pre-shaped flint nodules. This was a development which may have derived from the Acheulean hand axe.
For 300,000 years these cutting blades (generally known as the Mousterian) are also consistently the same shape. It was the process of knapping which was culturally carried forward. The Neanderthal mind was on the technique, not on the end product. Only this explains how the blades remain the same for such an unimaginably long time, and how no variations were ever developed. Yet the Neanderthals were apparently effective predators and scavengers.
But for over 100,000 years (and perhaps 300,000 years) the Neanderthals never once dug a trench to sleep in, set up tent poles, placed rocks in a circle for a fire, pierced shells or pretty stones, carved a representative image, or buried their dead. We, H.sapiens, did. And we made art as well.
Only during the last 20,000 years, when contact is made with the Cro-Magnon H.sapiens, who had invaded Europe from the east, does the repertoire of the Neanderthals start to include other cutting tools, as well as ornaments, and the first burials.

originally posted by: 131415
Hey I appreciate the reply I confused Erectus and the Acheulean hand axe with the Neanderthal Mousterian blades.

"The available archaeological data on Homo erectus reveals that one type of tool was used for about a million years --one type of stone tool, for a million years, all over Africa wherever Homo erectus is found after 1.4 mya."

I'm not sure where your quote is from but a little under 2 MYA in China, H. Erectus had much more than a simple but elegant hand axe, they had a complete set of butchering tools. It's also important to note that you can have Erectus finds of the same age from different parts of the globe with widely varying degrees of intricacy in their tool making abilities. As I mentioned above, in China Erectus had a full kit of butchering tools while Finds of roughly the same age in Dmansi Georgia(1.8 MYA) were still using more primitive tools similar to H. Habilis

What I find curious about the whole thing is that its an absolutely beautiful weapon. Its perfect in its design and it doesn't change. There is an axe wielding factory that Erectus had in Africa where they find ten's of thousands of these guys at the shoreline of a river bed. They would sneak up on a watering hole - and lob the axe into the air to graze the side of an antelope. Its natural reaction is to flail its legs out when scared - thus falling to ground and would have been trampled by rest of antelope in the pack. After the dust settled Erectus would move in and finish the kill. The Antelope never the wiser - returning to same watering hole without fear of predators.

Back to Neanderthal: Did they teach anyone anything?

Absolutely, yes.

Neanderthals developed the method of making cutting blades by knapping pre-shaped flint nodules. This was a development which may have derived from the Acheulean hand axe.

For 300,000 years these cutting blades (generally known as the Mousterian) are also consistently the same shape. It was the process of knapping which was culturally carried forward. The Neanderthal mind was on the technique, not on the end product. Only this explains how the blades remain the same for such an unimaginably long time, and how no variations were ever developed. Yet the Neanderthals were apparently effective predators and scavengers.

A drastic over generalization. The types and intricacy of Neanderthal tools varied depending on the geographical region in question. In Europe there were differences between tools made east of the Rhine vs West of the Rhine.

But for over 100,000 years (and perhaps 300,000 years) the Neanderthals never once dug a trench to sleep in, set up tent poles, placed rocks in a circle for a fire, pierced shells or pretty stones, carved a representative image, or buried their dead. We, H.sapiens, did. And we made art as well.

Not at all correct.

December 16, 2013 Neanderthals, forerunners to modern humans, buried their dead, an international team of archaeologists has concluded after a 13-year study of remains discovered in southwestern France.

Their findings, which appear in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, confirm that burials took place in western Europe prior to the arrival of modern humans.

“This discovery not only confirms the existence of Neanderthal burials in Western Europe, but also reveals a relatively sophisticated cognitive capacity to produce them,” explains William Rendu, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the Center for International Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences (CIRHUS) in New York City.

New research suggests that Neanderthals kept a tidy home. During excavations at a cave in Italy where a group of our closest known extinct relatives once lived, scientists say they found a strategically placed hearth and separate spaces for butchering and tool-making.In recent years, researchers have discovered that Neanderthals made tools, buried their dead, used fire and maybe even adorned themselves with feathers, bucking our ancient cousins' reputation as stocky brutes. The new findings add to that growing list of intelligent behaviors similar to those of humans.

"There has been this idea that Neanderthals did not have an organized use of space, something that has always been attributed to humans," study researcher Julien Riel-Salvatore, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado Denver, said in a statement. "But we found that Neanderthals did not just throw their stuff everywhere, but in fact were organized and purposeful when it came to domestic space."

www.livescience.com...

Here is an article detailing a home built from Mammoth bones by Neanderthal- www.livescience.com...

Only during the last 20,000 years, when contact is made with the Cro-Magnon H.sapiens, who had invaded Europe from the east, does the repertoire of the Neanderthals start to include other cutting tools, as well as ornaments, and the first burials.

this is absolutely false. when anatomically modern humans left Africa there was an area in the Levant where they first encountered Neanderthal. Some of these AMH stayed there and cohabitated with HNS for roughly 50,000 years while others moved north and eventually into Europe. The older layers which were exclusively Neanderthal, contained the higher quality toolkits. They taught this technology to the AMH who were leaving Africa. One of the oldest Neanderthal burials is in Europe and approximately 50,000 years old and predates contact with AMH/EEMH They buried their dead and often covered the bodies in red ochre, they had art, they cared for their ill and had compassion. But I went over most of this in my first reply. If you weren't going to read it before I'm not going to waste anyone's times by regurgitating the same data again and again when its already there.

Regarding co-habitation Via Wikipedia:

The Cro-Magnons shared the European landscape with Neanderthals for some 10,000 years or more, before the latter disappeared from the fossil record. The nature of their co-existence and the extinction of Neanderthals has been debated. Suggestions include peaceful co-existence, competition, interbreeding, assimilation, and genocide.

Earlier studies argue for more than 15,000 years of Neanderthal and modern human co-existence in France. A simulation based on a slight difference in carrying capacity in the two groups indicates that the two groups would only be found together in a narrow zone, at the front of the Cro-Magnon immigration wave.

The Neanderthal Châtelperronian culture appears to have been influenced by the Cro-Magnons, indicating some sort of cultural exchange between the two groups. At the original Châtelperronian site layers of Châtelperronian artifacts alternate with Aurignacian, though this may be a result of interstratified ("chronologically mixed") layers, or disturbances from earlier excavations. The "Lapedo child" found at Abrigo do Lagar Velho in Portugal has been quoted as being a possible Neanderthal/Cro-Magnon hybrid, though this interpretation is disputed. Recent genetic studies of a wide selection of modern humans do however indicate some form of hybridization with archaic humans took place after modern humans emerged from Africa. About 1 to 4 percent of the DNA in Europeans and Asians appears to be derived from Neanderthals, though none of it can conclusively be tied to a European event.


I know some have gone as far as to suggest that all of the Cave paintings were Neanderthal in origin. That they had a fully functioning language and decimal system.

I'm still in the Cro-Magnon camp - but certainly open to new revelations.

Neanderthals had bigger brains

I wonder how much of the interpretation of Neanderthal evidence is due to their individualism.

The strength of Sapiens was greater cooperation among tribe members. Art has communication as part of its goal.

There was a study in which knowledge or problem solving test scores from a group of people taking a test as one agency were compared to the test scores of individuals taking the same test. Any member of the group could answer for the whole group, that is, the whole group answered each question as if it were a single testee. The group always scored much higher than any individual taking the same test.

A lot of conspiracy theories involving complex conspiracies could be made plausible by the instigators using the group method.

Like sapiens may have done to the Neanderthals.

Or maybe sapiens simply out bred the Neanderthals, like the way the birth rate is down among Europeans today.

Peter V,

You have brought up many good points. I'd like to add that a recent survey of neanderthal tools, shows that there were two distinct Neanderthal cultures in Eurasia. One centered in western Europe, Iberia, France and Germany, the other centered around the caucuses. These patterns roughly follow with what genetics has told us about hsn distribution.
That being said, a couple weeks ago I did some reading on north African hsn, and was surprised to find out that Hss and hsn co occupied several sites, for several thousand years.
Early modern humans in north africa can trace thier tool culture directly to hsn.
I would suspectct that the Asian and African hsn populations also had distinctive cultures.

a reply to: SLAYER69

The re-evaluation of Neanderthals is one of the coolest developments in Archaeology and Prehistory atm for me, i recently read how they may have boiled their food, and they also made birch bark tar which requires an oxygen-less environment and if i remember my terms correctly is done via sublimation.

Re the Birch tar, the above article suggests that they used rolled up cigars of Birch Bark... me and an old woodland colleague often theorised how they really did it and never really bought the "cigar" idea for various technical reasons, putting it down to clever use of clay and earth instead... low quality BBT can be made in hot water though , maybe a by product of their use of the bark in cooking?

I'll stop before i ramble, this was a minor obsession a few years ago, it ties in with the discovery of making pottery, cooking rocks and various other things and has zero evidence besides scruffy dudes speculating over campfires

Nice find




ETA: i posted this elsewhere a week or so back, but for those who haven't seen it, i hope that it will be of interest:

Neanderthal 'face' found in Loire

"It should finally nail the lie that Neanderthals had no art," Paul Bahn, the British rock art expert, told BBC News Online. "It is an enormously important object."

The mask was found during an excavation of old river sediments in front of a Palaeolithic cave encampment at La Roche-Cotard.

Tool and bone discoveries suggest Neanderthals used the location to light a fire and prepare food.

Triangular in shape, the object shows clear evidence, the researchers say, of having been worked - flakes have been chipped off the block to make it more face-like.


The 7.5-cm-long bone has also been wedged in position purposely by flint fragments.

I just want to thank everyone who has posted in this thread.
I love learning and I have learnt more from you lot than at school.
Fascinating stuff op.

a reply to: rickymouse do u have proof that humans did that or is it just based on that us humans copy and than collect the rewards of other peoples finds, is history repeating it self or is it just become that delusional that we believe what we think were there are no facts to support what you say , yes we know a lot of modern day uses and techniques come from ancient times of the arabs yes westerners learnt than excelled or stole and excelled. our counting system from 1 to 11 comes from the arabs and is used world wide . as it is easily recognize , but to say we put them into extinction ( neanderthals ) that is a different opinion all together . it is known that we take praise when praise shouldn't be ones but generally that praise one gets is allways from one idea weaver from them selfs or from another.