Could these marks on a cave wall be oldest-known Neanderthal “finger paintings”?

Archaeologists have concluded that a series of engravings discovered on a cave wall in France were made by Neanderthals using their fingers, some 57,000 years ago. They could be the oldest such marks yet found and further evidence that Neanderthals' behavior and activities were far more complex and diverse than previously believed, according to a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE. As Kiona Smith previously reported for Ars, evidence that Neanderthals could think symbolically, create art, and plan a project has been piling up for the last several years. For instance, about 50,000 years ago, Neanderthals in France spun plant fibers into thread. In Central Italy, between 40,000 and 55,000 years ago, Neanderthals used birch tar to hold their hafted stone tools in place, which required a lot of planning and complex preparation. In 2016, we reported on archaeologists' announcement that a Neanderthal group wrested hundreds of stalagmites from the floor of a cave inside Bruniquel Cave in Southern France to build elaborate circular structures, their work illuminated only by firelight. Archaeologists have also found several pieces of bone and rock from the Middle Paleolithic—the time when Neanderthals had most of Europe to themselves—carved with geometric patterns like cross-hatches, zigzags, parallel lines, and circles. That might mean that the ability to use symbols didn’t originate with modern humans. For instance, in 2018, archaeologists claimed that uneven lines observed in the soft, chalky outer layer of a small, thin flint flake were a deliberate marking. It was found in Kiik-Koba Cave, which overlooks the Zuya River in the Crimean Mountains. The engraved flake came from a layer between 35,486 and 37,026 years old. Archaeologists found the skeleton of a Neanderthal infant in the same layer, leaving no doubt about who lived at Kiik-Koba when the stone tools were made and used. In 2021, archaeologists announced they'd found a geometric design akin to "offset chevrons" carved into the second phalanx, or toe bone, of a giant deer in a cave now called Einhornhohle in the Harz Mountains of Northern Germany. The carver was almost certainly a Neanderthal, based on the bone’s radiocarbon-dated age, because no one but Neanderthals lived in Europe until around 45,000 years ago. The authors argued that this was a legitimate project; it took imagination to plan the design and figure out that a few individual lines would add up to a more complex pattern. It took resources and planning to assemble the tools, and it took time and effort to actually carve the pattern, as well as a good supply of small, sharp flint blades. The researchers could vouch for that because they tried it themselves, using cow phalanges and hand-knapped blades of Baltic flint, the stone a north German Neanderthal bone-carver would most likely have had access to. Neanderthals in Spain painted the walls of caves and made shell jewelry painted with ocher pigment around 64,000 years ago. The art analyzed in La Pasiega, Maltravieso, and Ardales Caves is unequivocally Neanderthal. Uranium-thorium dating of rock deposited over paintings in all three caves indicates that the paintings can’t be any younger than 64,000 years. Unlike the first Homo sapiens, who didn't show up until 20,000 years after the rock of the caves began flowing over the art, Neanderthals had lived in the region since at least 243,000 years ago. And in a sea cave called Cueva de los Aviones, on the southeastern coast of Spain, archaeologists found shells decorated with red and yellow pigment with holes punched in them as for a string. They’re generally assumed to be jewelry, which is another kind of symbol. Here, too, flowing water had deposited a flowstone over the layer of sediment in which these shells were found. Uranium-thorium dating said the flowstone couldn’t be any younger than 114,000 years. In fact, they predate every comparable set of artifacts found so far by at least 20,000 to 40,000 years.

The engravings analyzed for this latest paper were discovered in a cave called La Roche-Cotard on the banks of the river Loire in France, first discovered in 1912 after the entrance was exposed during an 1846 quarrying. The cave was further excavated in the 1970s and again from 2008 on. Among the finds was a flat piece of flint dubbed the "Mask of La Roche Cotard," because it was shaped like a face and had a piece of bone pushed through a hole, believed to represent eyes. The most recent estimation places its date to about 75,000 years ago. Archaeologists remain divided as to whether the flint is an example of artistic expression in Neanderthals or whether it was a more pragmatic object. There were also seemingly organized engravings on the walls that resembled marks made by fingers ("finger flutings"), as well as occasional red ochre spots. There were other marks as well, identified as either being left by animal claws, natural smoothing of the walls through repeated contact with animal fur, or the metal tools used during the 1912 excavations—oh, and a single modern graffito dated to 1992. Jean-Claude Marquet, of the University of Tours, and several colleagues decided to take a closer look at the finger flutings to provide a more detailed description and to demonstrate that they were, indeed, finger marks made by Neanderthals. The team first dated samples of cave sediment using a technique called optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating, which determines the time since sedimentary grains were last exposed to daylight. They concluded that the cave had been sealed off by sediment brought in by the flooding of the Loire around 57,000 years ago, well before Homo sapiens made their way into the region. Stratigraphic dating yielded an earlier date of around 75,000 years ago, which would make this "the oldest decorated cave in France, if not Europe," the authors wrote. Since the only stone tools found in the cave over the last century are those associated with Neanderthals, that provides two lines of evidence in support of the hypothesis that Neanderthals created the finger flutings.

Marquet et al. also modeled the entire cave with photogrammetry to more precisely locate the engravings and to carefully distinguish between the different kinds of traces. They focused on the suspected finger flutings for further analysis, then drew reproductions of the panels and carefully noted their detailed observations. The team concluded that the marks were deliberate, organized, and intentional shapes—arch-shaped tracings, for example, or two contiguous tracings forming sinuous lines. "There is little graphic evidence associated with Neanderthals, and that is mainly on mobile objects (pebbles, slabs, bones), rather than walls," the authors wrote. "In contrast, the walls of La Roche-Cotard testify to something different: the frequent repetition of thoughtful gestures, organized in space both on the wall surfaces and with respect to the cave as a whole." To determine whether the flutings were made by some kind of tool or with fingers, the team conducted an experiment off-site in a pilot cave: a nearby cavity dug in the same type of rock (Turonian yellow tuff) three or four centuries ago. They created similar marks on the walls of the pilot cave using flat fingers, edged fingers, bone, wood, antler, flint, and metal points. They then used photogrammetry on the experimental panels and compared them to the ones in the La Roche-Cotard Cave and compared the ancient finger flutings with more recent marks thought to have been made with metal tools in 1846. They concluded that the flutings had indeed been traced with human fingers. The symbols are abstract, not figurative, so one can only speculate as to their meaning or why they were made, even though it's clear the marks were intentional, per Marquet et al. "It is not possible for us to establish if they represent symbolic thinking," the authors concluded. "Nevertheless, our understanding of the relationship between Neanderthals and the symbolic and even aesthetic realms has undergone a significant transformation over the past two decades, and the traces preserved in the cave of La Roche-Cotard make a new and very important contribution to our knowledge of Neanderthal behavior." DOI: PLoS ONE, 2023. 10.1371/journal.pone.0286568  (About DOIs).