One of the verbal insults you could deal to a man—more neutrally, a modern Homo sapiens sapiens—was to call him a “Neanderthal”. It would immediately be a comment on the subject’s intellect: a brute too simple-minded to even survive. Neanderthals, our fellow hominines, were long thought to have been the archetypal cavemen: brutish and intellectually un-evolved. A new study, published in Science, turns that assumption over its head. Our extinct relatives—earlier research shows that modern man and Neanderthals mated—may have had the “cognitive capacity to create art”. Earlier, research showed that they had been capable of using sophisticated technology (for prehistoric times) and showed social behaviour previously thought complicated for them to exhibit. Now, research shows they were much more intellectually capable—the first cave-paintings, it turns out, could have been made by them.
Dating experts and archaeologists now agree that the simple paintings from three caves in Spain—outline of a hand, an array of lines and a painted cave formation—are more than 64,800 years old. Thus, these pre-date the arrival of the H. sapiens sapiens in Europe by at least 20,000 years. Relics from a fourth cave, that are thought to be used as painted ornaments, are even older. The cave paintings and their possible link to Neanderthals means that the gap between human and Neanderthal intellectual faculties may not be as wide as believed. Scientists are divided on how narrow the gap was. While some believe humans and their extinct cousins were cognitive equivalents, others believe that the latter definitely had sophisticated intelligence but their “cultural achievements fell short of modern humans”. Cave art, with certain exceptions, was notoriously difficult to date until very recently and thus modern humans have been historically assumed to have created them. Neanderthal art may be comparable to the art and symbolism of modern man—across Africa, painted egg shells and minerals attributed to “our direct ancestors” have been found and these date back some 80,000 years.