Are Neanderthals Responsible for World’s Oldest Cave Paintings?

The oldest cave paintings known to man – paintings of seals – may be as ancient as 43,500 years old. That’s a lot older than what were previously thought to be the oldest paintings which dated back 32,000 years.

The wondrous caves of Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc in the South of France were originally thought to be the oldest caves that evidenced our very human capacity for art when our Upper Paleolithic ancestors decided to paint some bison, forever immortalizing themselves and the cave of Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc. The cave was named after speleologist Jean-Marie Chauvet who, along with fellow speleologists Eliette Brunel-Deschamps and Christian Hillaire, wrote extensively about the amazing 1994 discovery.

While woolly mammoths, bison and a multitude of other animals sketched in red ochre 32,000 years ago is indeed wildly exciting, even more so is the discovery of much much older paintings from 42,000 to 43,500 years ago. These have been discovered in Malaga, Spain in the Cave of Nerja and have been dated using the charcoal located beside them.

The Cave of Nerja was originally found by youngsters looking for bats way back in 1959, but today it is currently a hotbed of studies being conducted. The first thing to be done is to date the seal paint pigment which is due to be analyzed after 2013. However, the charcoal left beside six of the paintings has already been radiocarbon dated to up to between 42,000 and 43,500 years old. This has led to speculation that the paintings may have been created by Neanderthals, something academics once thought virtually impossible. But if Neanderthals didn’t leave the Iberian Peninsula until 37,000 years, it’s certainly possible that they may have been responsible for painting the seals.

However, even if the paintings are found to be older than 37,000 years, Paul Pettit of the University of Sheffield says, “We can’t be absolutely sure that Homo sapiens were not down there in the south of Spain at this time.” So even if the seals are 43,500 years old it’s still possible that Homo sapiens rather than Neanderthals created them, but more details to come may shed further light on just who was responsible for what are now the world’s oldest cave paintings.

Sources: http://gizmodo.com/5883082/this-is-the-first-painting-humanity-ever-made
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/chauvet/en/
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21458-first-neanderthal-cave-paintings-discovered-in-spain.html


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