The oldest drawings made by Neanderthals have been discovered by archaeologists in a cave in France. Their age is at least 57 thousand years, according to a study published in the journal PLOS ONE.
Much of the Stone Age art found in Europe has been attributed by scientists to Homo sapiens. For a time it was believed that Neanderthals only started creating art objects when they met modern people, but the few discoveries in recent years have shown that in fact Neanderthals had created much earlier. For example, they made painted and perforated shells found in Spanish caves, which is a manifestation of symbolic thought. However, few such discoveries have been made and their interpretation is still controversial among scientists.
Kristina Thomsen, CC-BY 4.0
In their latest work, researchers led by Jean-Claude Marquet from the University of Tours (France) have described the oldest example of Neanderthal wall art known to science. The discovery was made in the cave of La Roche-Cotard in central France, the entrance to which was closed by natural deposits until the 19th century, and the first studies were carried out at the beginning of the 20th century.
During the study of the cave, a series of lines drawn with the fingers and marks made with tools were found on its walls. The scientists used photogrammetry techniques to create a 3D model of these “etchings” and compare them with similar artifacts already known, as well as with line patterns made by scientists on an experimental basis.
Based on the shapes, arrangement and distance between the lines, scientists concluded that they were deliberately created by human hands. The age of the images was roughly determined by studying the sedimentary deposits in the cave by the method of optically stimulated luminescence and amounted to around 57,000 years. It was so many years ago that these deposits were last exposed to the sun and then stopped depositing in the cave.
This dating method is based on an estimate of the radiation dose absorbed over a period of deposit accumulation. The age and the fact that the stone tools found in the cave belong to the Mousterian era (late 42 thousand years ago) leave no doubt that the drawings were made by Neanderthals and that is the earliest graphic manifestation of their symbolic activity.
“It is undoubtedly the oldest “decorated” cave in France, everyone agrees. And it is the oldest cave in Europe and even in the world with a wall engraving,” Marche told Russian media. He recalled that earlier in three Spanish caves, specialists had also dated drawings of Neanderthals using the uranium-thorium method. “But the problem is that then 50 experts published an article in which they said that the dating had been done poorly and therefore not credible,” he added.
“Compared to the flow of chunks we’ve seen over the past 10-15 years in this field, this work is simply a masterpiece. This is not a passing job and they will come back to it many times, ”says the associate professor of the Department of Archeology at the Faculty of History of Moscow State University named after MV Lomonosov, a specialist in art of the Palaeolithic Vladislav Zhitenev. “La Roche-Cotard has become a bright new star in a small list of objects that can be attributed with a high degree of certainty to probable evidence of Neanderthal symbolism, but further research is needed to biologically identify the originators of the lines of The bottom line is that we now need new, more rigorous terminology to distinguish concepts such as “sapiens art in the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic” (or to understand when we begin to call the activity symbolism of sapiens called art) and “symbolic art. the activity of Neanderthals.”
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