When did humans start making art and were Neanderthals artists too?

Michael Marshall is the author.

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We think about the past when we think about art. It is said that the cave art in Lascaux is around 17,000 years old. A second French cave, Chauvet, has similar paintings that have been dated to 30,000 or so years ago, but that is controversial, with some archaeologists saying the paintings are just too good to be that old. Homo has been around for more than 2 million years, and our species is more than 300,000 years old. Humans started painting late in the day, and other hominins didn't do it as well.

It is1-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-6556 prejudice against the idea that other hominins could express themselves symbolically and issues with the physical evidence are obstacles to demonstrating this.

The caves of northern Spain were the focus of a New Scientist Discovery Tour in June. Altamira was the first place where prehistoric European cave art was found and it was the center of the tour.

How old is Europe’s cave art?

I wanted to find out as much as possible about the caves on the itinerary. I couldn't figure out how old the artwork was. The paintings in Altamira are as old as 36,000 years old, while the artifacts in the cave are less than 15,000 years old.

There were different dates for each artwork. The Hornos de la Pea cave is a good example. It has a lot of engravings of animals. They were created in two phases, one dating back at least 18,000 years and the other close to 15,000 years ago. The dates that have been obtained for the artworks ranged from around 10,000 years ago to more than 30,000 years ago. The cave was used as a shelter during the Spanish civil war, and has been altered to make it easier for people to visit.

There are pictures of animals in the El Pindal cave. There is no definite date again. El Pindal is one of several caves in the region where the dates of the art are problematic according to a book chapter.

I spoke to a professor at the University ofSouthampton who has studied the age of cave art to find out the exact date of the paintings. He said that only a small portion of cave art has been dated.

There are a number of reasons for this. Radiocarbon dating was the main method of determining the age of cave art. The custodians of the caves are slow to give permission due to the destructive nature of this activity. Carbon dating only works if there is organic material like charcoal in the art; for engravings, and anything painted with minerals, it is useless.

There is a bad reason not to carbon date. People thought they could tell the age of cave paintings by the style in which they were depicted. Since the first prehistoric art was found in the late 1800s, there has been a belief that art should evolve linearly, with the oldest pieces being very simple and abstract. The paintings of Chauvet have been carbon-dated.

The line of thinking was exposed in a study by April Nowell and Genevieve von Petzinger at the University of Victoria. Nowell and von Petzinger discovered an enormous loop of circular logic when they asked experts on each cave why they thought the artworks were old. Cave A's art was thought to be thousands of years old because it looked like cave B's art, but the experts on cave B believed it to be closer to the truth.

All went around in a circle. It's one of the best pieces of work I've ever seen.

Were Neanderthals artists too?

Our ideas about who made the art are spurious if a lot of the ages are spurious.

The region's cave art is thought to have been created by a succession of hominins. The modern humans settled in the region around 45,000 years ago after escaping from Africa. Neanderthals lived in Europe and western Asia for hundreds of thousands of years. Other hominins like Homo antecessor existed before that.

The cave art in western Europe could only have been created by our species. In some cases, that hasn't always been true, like in the case of researchers like Pike.

In 2012 a red dot on the wall of El Castillo cave was shown to be at least 40,000 years old. Neanderthals were still alive, so they could have made the dot.

This was done using dating techniques. This doesn't find the age of the art itself, but the age of a thin mineral covering it. Water trickles over the cave wall and deposits minerals that build up over time. A minimum age for the art is given by the dating technique.

Three more Spanish caves were dated in a follow-up to the first one. El Castillo is located in the same hill as La pasiega. At least 64,800 years ago, a symbol made of red lines was found. The oldest cave art in the world was found in western Spain, and it was a hand stencil. The red paint on stalagmites in Ardales cave is at least 65,500 years old.

There were gasps when I mentioned the dates to the tourists. The results hadn't sunk in yet, but they were knowledgeable and engaged. The most logical explanation is that Neanderthals made it.

Other sites with evidence of symbolic behavior by Neanderthals have been dismissed before. There is a stone circle made from broken stalagmites in Bruniquel cave. There are shells in the cave that have been there for over a hundred thousand years. At least 200,000 years ago, Neanderthals are thought to have collected and used a red color in their paintings.

Marshall’s First Law

Archaeologists who don't want Neanderthals to have painted have banned us from taking samples, which has made it difficult for the team to do additional dating. He hopes that other groups will have more luck and eventually build up a rigorous time line of cave art. He thinks art-making may be related to the ancestors we shared with Neanderthals.

Marshall's First Law: Never be surprised when something turns out to be older than you think is applicable to art. Artificial intelligence was used to find hidden evidence of controlled fires at a site in Israel from 1 million years ago. I think painting and symbolic expression will turn out to be a lot older once we start looking.

Art is fragile, that's the problem we face. If the entrance collapsed, people wouldn't be able to go to caves. In the Ca valley in Portugal, there are thousands of open-air engravings from 10,000 years ago. Most outdoor art has been gone for a while. There were a lot of symbols in the landscape, but very few of them survived.