According to a Monday study, Neanderthals were once thought to be brutish and unintelligent.Since the 2018 publication of a paper claiming that red ocher pigment on Cueva de Ardales' stalagmitic dome was a sign of extinct cousin species, the issue has been a major topic in paleoarchaeology.According to the dating, the art was at most 64,800 years of age, and was made in a time before modern humans inhabited the continent.Francesco dErrico (co-author of a paper in PNAS) said that the discovery was controversial.Pigment on a coloured stalagmite, in the Spanish cave at Ardales, south Spain. Photograph: Joao Zilhao/ICREA/AFP/Getty ImagesNew analysis showed that the composition and location of the pigments was not consistent with natural processes. Instead, they were applied by splattering or blowing.Their texture was also not the same as natural samples from caves, indicating that the pigments were from an external source.Further analysis revealed that pigments were used at different times in history, separated by more 10,000 years.According to dErrico of the University of Bordeaux, this supports the idea that the Neanderthals visited the cave on multiple occasions over several thousand years.It is hard to compare the Neanderthal art and wall paintings created by prehistoric modern people, such as the ones found in the Chauvet Pont d'Arc cave in France, which are more than 30,000 years old.The new evidence shows that Neanderthals were not the boorish cousins of Homo sapiens as long believed to be.The team stated that pigments were not art in the strictest sense of the term, but the result of graphic behaviors with the intent of perpetuating the symbolic meaning of a space.Cave formations played an important role in some Neanderthal communities' symbolic systems, but it is still unclear what these symbols mean.
