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have produced new evidence that pushes back the date for complex
art to at least 65,000 years ago. These three sites offer a number of
paintings in red or black, incorporating animals, dots, and geometric
patterns alongside hand stencils, hand prints, and engraved
iconography.
“Our dating results show that [some of] the cave art at these three sites
in Spain is much older than previously thought,” said team member
Alistair Pike from the University of Southampton. “With an age in
excess of 64,000 years, it predates the earliest traces of modern
humans in Europe by more than 20,000 years.”
element thorium doesn’t. When water soaks through soils into a cave,
uranium is carried with it and then gets trapped in mineral deposits; it
then radioactively decays at a predictable rate becoming thorium.
Measuring the relative amounts of uranium and thorium in minerals
can reveal their ages and provide a minimum date for any paintings
beneath these deposits.
A close up of the A closer view of the red ladder shape,.Photo by: C.D Standish, A.W.G. Pike
and D.L. Hoffmann
The three Spanish caves with paintings were found to have mineral
crusts overlying the images that were at least 64,800 years old,
although this is the minimum date for the art; we must consider that it
could be considerably older. This is without doubt the oldest directly
dated art in Europe and close in age to the oldest examples on the
planet.
“One wrong move, and you might remove some pigments from the wall
that were there for thousands and thousands of years,” said Hoffmann,
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the lead author of both studies. “There’s this overwhelming feeling you
get when you first get in.”
With the revelation that both Neanderthals and modern humans had an
equal ability to produce rock art, as well as other discoveries showing
near equality in tool use, ingenuity, ritual behavior, and genes
associated with speech, some researchers are calling into question
whether Neanderthals were truly a distinct species. There has long
been a divide over whether Neanderthals might not properly be
considered a sub-species of Homo sapiens and this new evidence
supports the argument that they were an isolated subgroup of our own
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“According to our new data, Neanderthals and modern humans shared
symbolic thinking and must have been cognitively indistinguishable,”
said Joao Zilhao of the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced
Studies in Barcelona, and who was involved in both studies. “On our
search for the origins of language and advanced human cognition, we
must, therefore, look much farther back in time, more than half a
million years ago, to the common ancestor of Neanderthals and
modern humans.”