A peculiar "signature" of a Neanderthal craftsman on a stone tool found in Crimea indicated that Neanderthals had the ability to think abstractly, according to an article published in the PLoS One magazine.
“The 3D images of these scratches on the chopper surface indicate that they did not appear on it by accident, but were made by a skilled craftsman using two different tools. It was quite difficult to do this, given the small size of this item. This speaks in favor of the fact that this drawing was the identification mark of this master,”write Vadim Stepanchuk from the Institute of Archeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kiev (Ukraine) and his colleagues.
For quite a long time, anthropologists and paleontologists believed that the Neanderthals, the European "cousins" of our ancestors, were noticeably inferior to them in cultural development, lacking the gift of speech, culture, religion, and even the ability to kindle a fire. Over the past five years, all of these, as it turned out, myths have been successfully broken by new finds in Croatia, Israel and Spain.
For example, recently scientists have discovered necklaces made by Neanderthals, as well as various samples of Neanderthal rock paintings, and also found out that these ancient people collected stones, knew how to cook various decoctions to treat diseases and draw abstract tattoos, use "chemistry" to light fires and had rather complex funeral rites.
Over the past few decades, as Stepanchuk and his colleagues note, archaeologists from all over Europe have discovered dozens of tools made by Neanderthals, which were present with various scratches and structures similar to drawings. Anthropologists have been arguing for a long time whether these patterns arose by chance or whether they were deliberately left by the creators of these instruments.
The authors of the article found the answer to this question by studying Neanderthal artifacts found in the Kiik-Koba cave, one of the most famous sites of ancient people on the territory of Crimea. It was completely excavated back in Soviet times, and the chops, kernels and other tools found in it, as well as the remains of an adult Neanderthal man and a child, have been repeatedly studied and sorted by Russian and Ukrainian researchers.
On one of the tools found next to their remains, scientists noticed a set of parallel scratches that made Stepanchuk and his colleagues wonder how they could appear on the surface of the stone. To answer this question, anthropologists have created an accurate three-dimensional model of the chopper and have tried to understand how these lines originated.
Their calculations showed that these scratches could not have occurred on the surface of the stone by chance. They were too smooth and crisp to appear when using this chopper or making it.
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In addition, the scientists found that all the lines were drawn on the stone with two different points that moved along the surface of the chopper in the same direction and in the same manner. All this suggests that they were purposefully applied by the master and that he used such marks as a kind of “quality mark” or a sign of the chopper's belonging.
If this is true, then this drawing once again, as the authors of the article conclude, testifies that the Neanderthals were not deprived of abstract thinking and were not inferior in this respect to the ancestors of modern people.
