Neanderthal culture: Old masters

Nature have published a News Feature on our work on dating cave art in Spain and the debate surrounding the symbolic capabilities of Neanderthals.

Last October Nature Journalist Tim Appenzeller accompanied me and my collaborators from Spain on a sampling trip to El Castillo cave in Cantabria, Northern Spain. We were collecting samples from calcite that has formed on top of the hundreds of ice-age paintings in the cave. The date of formation of this calcite, formed by the same process that creates stalagmites and stalactite in caves can be determined by the uranium-thorium method (based on the radioactive decay of uranium) and so provides a minimum age for the art. Samples retrieved on previous expeditions showed some of the art to beat least 40,000 years old, at least 10-15000 years older than previously thought. This dates them at least to the time of the arrival of the first modern humans to the area, and the time of the disappearance of Neanderthals. If these new samples date to significantly before 40,000 then it will show the art was done by Neanderthals. The News Feature discusses the possibility that Neanderthals painted caves and exhibited other forms of symbolic behaviour, and reveals a highly polarized debate. Hopefully our dating programme will help resolve this debate in the near future.