Did Neanderthals give art lessons to "modern" humans?

The discovery of an incised animal bone in Germany adds to evidence that Neanderthals in Europe were capable of symbolic expression before Homo sapiens got there.

This year marks a quarter of a century that I have been covering human evolution as a science journalist. The screenshot above is from my very first report, published January 26, 1996, about the discovery of Bruniquel cave in southern France, where Neanderthals apparently built a strange, complicated structure from pieces of stalactite and stalagmite. As you can see from the lead paragraph, at that time researchers had only recently begun to give Neanderthals credit for cognitive abilities—including language and the use of fire—that had previously been granted only to our own species, Homo sapiens.

In the 25 years since, human evolution researchers have hotly debated just what Neanderthals were capable of. The range of hypotheses is wide, from insistence that Neanderthals were greatly inferior cognitively to “modern” humans and could only muster a bit of symbolic behavior by copying what their superior cousins did, to often indignant assertions that Neanderthals were just as smart as moderns. This leaves the question, if Neanderthals were so smart, why did they go extinct while Homo sapiens not only survived but multiplied and was plentiful?

Of course there are many possible explanations other than cognitive differences, including differing adaptations to changing climatic conditions or demographic factors including the size of survival enhancing social networks. Reading the scientific literature could give one whiplash, as various hypotheses are lobbed back and forth like a tennis ball at Wimbledon. At the center of the debate is the question of Neanderthal art, as in, Did they do it or not? In this argument, art is a proxy for symbolic expression, once thought to be not only the sole domain of modern humans, but the sole domain of modern humans once they left Africa and got to Europe.

Even in the early days of these debates, some were pointing out that if you said art only happened when humans from Africa migrated to Europe, you were really saying that Europeans could do art but Africans could not. Richard Klein, an archaeologist at Stanford University, argued that there must have been a genetic switch around 50,000 years ago—the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic period in Europe, notable for an “explosion” of art and sophisticated stone tools—and that view was persuasive to many for many years (today it is very much a minority view.)

Thus Klein and others questioned whether the discovery of beautifully incised pieces of ochre at Blombos Cave in South Africa, dated as early as 100,000 years ago, really represented symbolic behavior, let alone art, even though it was surely done by modern humans as well. Klein et al., including archaeologist Randall White at New York University, continued to insist that something must have happened when humans hit Europe that transformed them from unsophisticated Middle Stone Age Africans into the kind of Michelangelos that painted the spectacular lions, horses, and other animals at France’s Chauvet Cave.

As for the Neanderthals of Europe, was there any question that anything of artistic value they may have learned came strictly from their brief overlap with the incoming modern humans who eventually replaced them entirely? Well, times have changed, along with paradigms of human evolution. Neanderthals gave us some of their genes, and perhaps they gave us art lessons as well.

"A 51,000-year old engraved bone reveals Neanderthals’ capacity for symbolic behavior”

If the title of this paper just published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution sounds just a little familiar, it’s because many similar papers claiming evidence for Neanderthal symbolic behavior have been published over the past decade or so. Some of them are pretty convincing, including the discovery of Neanderthal jewelry—the kind of body signaling that smacks of symbolic expression.

In the present case, a phalanx of a giant deer found at Einhornhöhle Cave in Germany’s Harz Mountains—a well known and explored fossil site—was found to be deeply incised with a pattern of parallel lines that only humans of one sort or another could have made.

I doubt that many will question that Neanderthals made the engravings, since the phalanx itself was directly dated using the radiocarbon method to at least 47,500 years ago and possibly older than 55,000 years. Even that minimum date is well before modern humans are known to have entered Western Europe. What researchers will argue about, of course, is whether these engraved lines can be interpreted as symbolic expression, just as Klein and others argued about the Blombos engravings. I think it’s a fair argument, even if no one has come up with a way to resolve it.

Where Neanderthal researchers really get into trouble, however, is when they claim that Neanderthals actually painted caves in Europe. That contention is guaranteed to bring what we journalists call a “firestorm” of controversy. That’s what happened back in 2012, when dating experts went into some Spanish caves featuring unquestioned artistic expression (a red disk and some human hand stencils) and came out with minimum dates of 41,000 years, when Neanderthals were plentiful in what is now Spain but modern humans were only barely arriving (and those exact dates are controversial.)

Not only that, but the dates were at least 4000 years earlier than the earliest known cave art at France’s Chauvet Cave, which clocks in at about 37,000 years before the present. Some scientists immediately jumped on the claim—including dating experts in France who had been long involved in the research in the Chauvet Cave. A key bone of contention was the research team’s use of the relatively new uranium-series dating technique (new as applied to cave art, that is, the technique has long been used to date corals.) And it was not lost on anyone that one vocal member of the team, João Zilhão of the University of Barcelona, had spent his entire career advocating that Neanderthals were the equals of humans when it came to brain smarts.

But a key argument by those who did not want to credit Neanderthals with the art was that the dating was too close to the overlap between Neanderthals and moderns in Europe to be sure who the artists really were.

So you can imagine what happened when a number of the same researchers published a paper in Science in 2018 pushing back the dates of art in Spanish caves to older than 64,000 years ago, using Uranium-thorium dating of thin carbonate crusts overlying the art. Since there is no evidence that Homo sapiens was in Europe that early, only Neanderthals could have done it—unless, of course, the dating was again wrong.

So that’s what the critics concentrated on, in a series of Technical Comments and other commentaries in Science and the Journal of Human Evolution, to which the original authors replied in kind, defending their results.

(My apologies that some of the links in this piece are to journals that are behind the paywall, I hope those interested will be able to get access in some way.)

The most thorough-going critique of the Spanish claims was published in the Journal of Human Evolution in October 2019, and authored by a large number of researchers with a long history of research at European Upper Paleolithic sites, especially in France.

(Full disclosure: The first author of this commentary is Randall White, formerly of NYU and someone I have known—and had been friends with—since at least the late 1990s. I had even profiled him for the New York Times. However, it was recently revealed that White had been disciplined by NYU back in the 1990s for sexual harassment of an aggravated kind, that led at least one student to leave archaeology, others to scramble to find other advisors, and White’s colleagues to spend years picking up the pieces. Since I am on record advocating that other colleagues avoid publishing with known abusers, I do not want to be a hypocrite in citing a paper he is first author on, even if by not doing so I would be remiss in the discussion of this debate.)

In this commentary, the authors argue both that the dating is wrong and that the archaeology is wrong, insisting that there is a “broad consensus” that figurative art starts when modern humans people the planet, and that there was an “artistic explosion” in Europe about 40,000 years ago. The only “remaining doubt,” they argue, concerns “a very short period from roughly 42-40ka,” when the last of the Neanderthals “seem to have coexisted” with the first modern humans.

I noted above that those most hostile to the idea that Neanderthals made art are archaeologists and others who are very invested in the special nature of the Upper Paleolithic in Europe. Anyone who has visited the painted caves of France or Spain might be able to forgive them for their fervor, as viewing this ancient art is a powerful emotional experience that stays with those of us who have done it—I am certainly one—for a lifetime. (Late last month I wrote about how such subjective factors can influence how human evolution researchers think about their finds.)

(There have even been accusations that Neanderthal advocates were engaging in some kind of “affirmative action” on behalf of a supposedly marginal species, a kind of Paleolithic political correctness. And Neanderthal boosters have, to be sure, counter-charged that the other side is guilty of a sort of speciesism akin to racism, in this case directed at our own human cousins.)

Of course we now know from ancient DNA studies that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred, including likely in Europe during the time of that overlap. Most attentive readers know that, although exactly what it meant has been left to our imaginations. I suppose, flexing my own fevered imagination, that such scenarios could range from sex-hungry male Neanderthals raiding Cro Magnon camps and making off with the most fertile females, to kumbaya sessions around the campfire where modern humans and their Neanderthal cousins gathered to share stories and cultural traditions.

Did Neanderthals do this? /Pedro Saura

And so we return to the question: Did Neanderthals give art lessons to “modern” humans?

I was fascinated to see that Tom Higham, the University of Oxford dating expert and author of the great new book about human evolution “The World Before Us,” raised just that question on page 41. “Who knows,” Tom writes, “modern humans might have seen these early representations and copied them?”

Since Tom has done more than almost anyone to carefully date the sites of the last Neanderthals and the first modern humans in Europe, I shot him a quick DM and asked him to elaborate about the new discovery in Germany. Here is what he had to say:

“This is a fascinating discovery which adds further evidence to the idea that Neanderthals were exhibiting behaviours that were previously thought to be the exclusive preserve of our species.

“The date estimates are close to the period when we see the first arrival of moderns into Europe. This raises the possibility that both Neanderthals and moderns may have influenced one another and perhaps shared innovations and symbolic behaviours. We know that there was genetic exchange, and while cultural exchange is extremely difficult to demonstrate archaeologically it must be considered a possibility.”

Anyone who follows human evolution research knows that what we thought yesterday is often not what we still think today. That’s true for all of science, of course, not to mention other spheres of life. So let’s dispense with special pleading on the question of Neanderthal art, and go where the science takes us—even if it ends up dragging us kicking and screaming to where we don’t really want to go.