An international team of scientists from Germany, Italy and Spain found that Neanderthals were able to create images, indicating the emergence of the rudiments of culture. This was announced in a press release on EurekAlert !.
Experts have discovered in the limestone cave Cueva de los Avione, located in the southern part of Spain, ancient artifacts dating back to 115-120 thousand years. The finds include perforated sea shells, red and yellow dyes, and vessels made from shells containing remnants of complex pigment mixtures.
At the same time, the earliest traces of the presence of modern humans in this area date back only about 40 thousand years, when the first wave of Homo sapiens dispersal across Europe took place. In addition, the researchers carried out uranium-thorium dating of rock paintings in three caves of the Iberian Peninsula. It turned out that their age reaches 64.8 thousand years ago, which also proves their Neanderthal origin.
Scientists believe that the discovery of cultural objects that belonged to the Neanderthals indicates that the ability for symbolic visual art could have been in the common ancestor of Homo neanderthalensis and modern people who lived about half a million years ago.
Thus, researchers refute the well-established opinion that Homo neanderthalensis could not make art objects and did not even have a primitive form of language.
