Study claims cave art made by Neanderthals

[Buster's Uncle]

Study claims cave art made by Neanderthals
Associated Press
By FRANK JORDANS  19 minutes ago



This undated image provided by Journal shows a Neanderthal rock engraving at Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar. The series of lines scratched into the rock could be proof that Neanderthals were more intelligent and creative than previously thought. (AP Photo/Courtesy of Stuart Finlayson via Journal)



BERLIN (AP) — A series of lines scratched into rock in a cave near the southwestern tip of Europe could be proof that Neanderthals were more intelligent and creative than previously thought.

The cross-hatched engravings inside Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar are the first known examples of Neanderthal rock art, according to a team of scientists who studied the site. The find is significant because it indicates that modern humans and their extinct cousins shared the capacity for abstract expression.

The study, released Monday by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined grooves in a rock that had been covered with sediment. Archaeologists had previously found artifacts associated with Neanderthal culture in the overlying layer, suggesting that the engravings must be older, said Clive Finlayson, one of the study's authors.

"It is the last nail in the coffin for the hypothesis that Neanderthals were cognitively inferior to modern humans," said Paul Tacon, an expert in rock art at Australia's Griffith University. Tacon, who was not involved in the study, said the research showed that the engravings were made with great effort for ritual purposes, to communicate with others, or both.

"We will never know the meaning the design held for the maker or the Neanderthals who inhabited the cave but the fact that they were marking their territory in this way before modern humans arrived in the region has huge implications for debates about what it is to be human and the origin of art," said Tacon.

Not everyone is convinced: Another recently published study examining the dating of various archaeological sites across Europe raises the possibility that the artifacts may not have been made by Neanderthals but by modern humans. Neanderthals disappeared between 41,030 and 39,260 years ago, while modern humans arrived in Europe about 45,000-43,000 years ago, according to that study, leaving several thousand years of overlap.

"Any discovery that helps improve the public image of Neanderthals is welcome," said Clive Gamble, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton, England. "We know they spoke, lived in large social groups, looked after the sick, buried their dead and were highly successful in the ice age environments of northern latitudes. As a result rock engraving should be entirely within their grasp."

"What is critical, however, is the dating," said Gamble. "While I want Neanderthals to be painting, carving and engraving, I'm reserving judgment."

But Finlayson, who is the director of the heritage division at the Gibraltar Museum, is certain that the artifacts, and therefore the engravings, were made by Neanderthals.

"All European Neanderthal fossil sites from this period, including Devil's Tower Rock Shelter just one mile from Gorham's Cave, have this technology associated," he said in an email. "In contrast no modern human site in Europe has this type of technology. So we are confident that the tools were made by Neanderthals."


http://news.yahoo.com/study-claims-cave-art-made-neanderthals-182958505.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Cave markings 'bring Neanderthals closer to us'
AFP
By Jean-Louis Santini  2 hours ago



A file photo shows visitors looking at a work at the National Prehistoric Museum of Les Eyzies de Tayac in Dordogne, France, July 2008 (AFP Photo/Pierre Andrieu)



Washington (AFP) - Markings dating back 40,000 years suggest Neanderthals were considerably more sophisticated than previously thought, researchers say.

They reached their conclusions after the discovery of engravings deep in Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar -- the first Neanderthal cave etchings found anywhere in the world.

Are the deep grooves of horizontal and vertical criss-crossing lines art?

Archaeologists are refusing to go that far, but they say, it shows Neanderthals -- contrary to long-held beliefs -- did possess the capacity for abstract thought and expression.

"It brings Neanderthals even closer to us," said Professor Clive Finlayson, the director of the Gibraltar Museum and coordinator of the international team that carried out the research.

"It talks of high cognitive mental capacities in Neanderthals which are equivalent to humans."



A scientifically based impression of the face of a Neanderthal who lived some 50,000 years at the Museum of Human Evolution in Burgos, Spain, shown in June, 2014 (AFP Photo/Cesar Manso)


The findings were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

The paper, "A rock engraving made by Neanderthals in Gibraltar," was authored by a team that included specialists in the Neanderthal field such as professors Joaquin Rodriguez-Vidal, Francesco d’Errico and Francisco Giles Pacheco.

"The production of purposely made painted or engraved designs on cave walls is recognized as a major cognitive step in human evolution, considered exclusive to modern humans," the authors wrote.

D'Errico, of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), called it "the first example of cave art, an abstract representation made by Neanderthals and deeply engraved in the rock in a part of the cave they lived in."

The carving, discovered after years of excavation at Gorham's Cave, was eventually found beneath a Neanderthal sediment level that was itself discovered below a modern human sediment level.



Photo of a Neanderthal exhibit at the National Prehistoric Museum of Eyzies-de-Tayac, Dordogne, France, July 2008 (AFP Photo/Pierre Andrieu)


It was the first area of bedrock that was exposed by the researchers, suggesting there may be other engravings yet to be discovered.


- 'Not a casual mark' -

Researchers also tried to learn how Neanderthals might have made the engraving.

They used stone Neanderthal tools to show that each groove required consistent, repetitive strokes in a single direction.

"To produce one of the grooves required 60 strokes, always in one direction," Finlayson said, adding that the whole of the etching required up to 317 strokes.

"We were immediately showing that this was not a casual mark. This required effort."

The engraving was found in the farthest reaches of Gorham’s Cave, located in a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, where previous evidence suggests Neanderthals retired to rest.

"If there’s going to be a place where you’re going to have spare time to do these things, it’s going to be there," Finlayson said.

It is by no means the first study to find that Neanderthals were closer to our species than previously thought.

Close examination of the same cave in Gibraltar revealed that Neanderthals may have caught, butchered and cooked wild pigeons long before modern humans became regular consumers of bird meat, a study earlier this month said.

Other recent studies have shown that in addition to meat, Neanderthals ate vegetables, berries and nuts, that they took care of their elders and used sophisticated bone tools.

An enigmatic branch of the human family tree, Neanderthals lived in parts of Europe, Central Asia and Middle East for up to 300,000 years but vanished from the fossil record about 30-40,000 years ago.


http://news.yahoo.com/cave-markings-bring-neanderthals-closer-us-020628198.html

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The one with his mouth open is a VERY poor reconstruction.  Too lanky and way too dark.  They were adapted to the wintery conditions of ice-age Europe.

[Buster's Uncle]

Cave Carving May Be 1st Known Example of Neanderthal Rock Art
LiveScience.com
by Megan Gannon, News Editor  1 hour ago



This abstract cave carving is possibly the first known example of Neanderthal rock art.



Around 39,000 years ago, a Neanderthal huddled in the back of a seaside cave at Gibraltar, safe from the hyenas, lions and leopards that might have prowled outside. Under the flickering light of a campfire, he or she used a stone tool to carefully etch what looks like a grid or a hashtag onto a natural platform of bedrock.

Archaeologists discovered this enigmatic carving during an excavation of Gorham's Cave two years ago. They had found Neanderthal cut marks on bones and tools before, but they had never seen anything like this. The researchers used Neanderthal tools to test how this geometric design was made — and to rule out the possibility the "artwork" wasn't just the byproduct of butchery. They found that recreating the grid was painstaking work.

"This was intentional — this was not somebody doodling or scratching on the surface," said study researcher Clive Finlayson, director of the Gibraltar Museum. But the discovery poses much more elusive questions: Did this engraving hold any symbolic meaning? Can it be considered art


Close cousins

Neanderthals roamed Eurasia from around 200,000 to 30,000 years ago, when they mysteriously went extinct. They were the closest known relatives of modern humans, and recent research has suggested that Neanderthals might have behaved more like Homo sapiens than previously thought: They buried their dead, they used pigments and feathers to decorate their bodies, and they may have even organized their caves.

Despite a growing body of evidence suggesting Neanderthals may have been cognitively similar to modern humans, a lack of art seemed to be the "the last bastion" for the argument that Neanderthals were much different from us, Finlayson said.

"Art is something else — it's an indication of abstract thinking," Finlayson told Live Science.

Archaeologists recently pushed back the date of hand stencil paintings found at El Castillo cave in northern Spain to 40,800 years ago, which opens the possibility that Neanderthals created this artwork. But there is no solid archaeological evidence to link Neanderthals to the paintings.



Gorham's Cave may be the last known site of Neanderthal occupation before the hominids went extinct. In 2006, a carbon-dating study of charcoal from hearths inside the cave suggested that Neanderthals might have survived there until 28,000 year


Gorham's Cave

In Gorham's Cave, Finlayson and colleagues were surprised to find a series of deeply incised parallel and crisscrossing lines when they wiped away the dirt covering a bedrock surface. The rock had been sealed under a layer of soil that was littered with Mousterian stone tools (a style long linked to Neanderthals). Radiocarbon dating indicated that this soil layer was between 38,500 and 30,500 years old, suggesting the rock art buried underneath was created sometime before then.

Gibraltar is one of the most famous sites of Neanderthal occupation. At Gorham's Cave and its surrounding caverns, archaeologists have found evidence that Neanderthals butchered seals, roasted pigeons and plucked feathers off birds of prey. In other parts of Europe, Neanderthals lived alongside humans — and may have even interbred with them. But 40,000 years ago, the southern Iberian Peninsula was a Neanderthal stronghold. Modern humans had not spread into the area yet, Finlayson said.

To test whether they were actually looking at an intentional design, the researchers decided to try to recreate the grid on smooth rock surfaces in the cave using actual stone tools left behind in a spoil heap by archaeologists who had excavated the site in the 1950s. More than 50 stone-tool incisions were needed to mimic the deepest line of the grid, and between 188 and 317 total strokes were probably needed to create the entire pattern, the researchers found. Their findings were described yesterday (Sept. 1) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Finlayson and his colleagues also tried to cut pork skin with the stone tools, to test whether the lines were merely the incidental marks left behind after the Neanderthals had butchered meat. But they couldn't replicate the engraving.

"You cannot control the groove if you're cutting through meat, no matter how hard you try," Finlayson said. "The lines go all over the place."


A simple grid is no Venus figurine

The Neanderthals' brand of abstract expressionism might not have impressed Homo sapiens art critics of the day.

"It's very basic. It's very simple," said Jean-Jacques Hublin, director of the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. "It's not a Venus. It's not a bison. It's not a horse."

By the late Stone Age, modern humans who settled in Europe were already dabbling in representational art. At least a dozen different species of animals — including horses, mammoths and cave lions — are depicted in the Chauvet Cave paintings, which are up to 32,000 years old. The anatomically explicit Venus figurine discovered at Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany dates back to 35,000 years ago. Other busty female statuettes — the Venus of Galgenberg and the Venus of Dolní V?stonice — date back to about 30,000 years ago.

"There is a huge difference between making three lines that any 3-year-old kid would be able to make and sculpting a Venus," Hublin, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.

Hublin said this discovery doesn't close the question of Neanderthals' cognitive skills. Proof that Neanderthals were capable of making a deliberate rock carving isn't evidence that they were regularly making art, he said.

"My own feeling is that if Neanderthals regularly used symbols, and given their longtime occupation throughout large parts of the Old World, we probably would have found clearer evidence by now," said Harold Dibble, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who also was not involved in the study.

Dibble said he was convinced these markings were deliberate, but scientists need "more than a few scratches — deliberate or not — to identify symbolic behavior on the part of Neanderthals."

"Symbols, by definition, have meanings that are shared by a group of people, and because of that, they are often repeated," Dibble wrote in an email. "By itself, this is a unique example and without any intrinsic meaning … the question is not 'Could it be symbolic?' but rather 'Was it symbolic?' And to demonstrate that, it would be very important to have repeated examples."


http://news.yahoo.com/cave-carving-may-1st-known-example-neanderthal-rock-161731016.html