Cave Arts By Neanderthals

World's oldest cave arts crafted by Neanderthals 

The world's oldest known cave painting work created by Neanderthals, rather than modern humans, showing that our extinct cousins were far from being uncultured brutes as previously believed, a study has found. A High-tech analysis of cave art at 3 Spanish sites, published in the journal science, shows that the paintings were created over 64,000 years ago - 22,000 years before modern humans arrived in Europe.

        " This is an incredibly exciting Discovery which suggests Neanderthals were much more sophisticated than is popularly believed," said Chris Standish, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton in the UK. "Our results show that the painting we dated are, by far, the oldest known cave art in the world, and were created at least 20,000 years before modern human arrived in Europe from Africa - therefore they must have been painted by Neanderthals," said Standish.

         This means that the Paleolithic ( ice age) cave art - including pictures of animals, dots and geometric signs - must have been made by Neanderthals, a 'sister' species to homosapiens, and Europe's soul human inhabitant at the time. It also indicates that they thought symbolically, like modern humans, researchers said.

       An International team of scientists used a state of the art technique called uranium-thorium dating to fix the age of painting as more than 64,000 years. Until now, cave art has been attributed entirely modern humans as claims to a possible Neanderthals original have been hampered by imprecise dating techniques, researchers said.

     However, uranium-thorium dating provides much more reliable result then methods such as radiocarbon dating, which can give false age estimates , they said.

    A team of researchers from the UK , Germany , Spain and France analysed more than 60 carbonate samples from three sites in Spain -La Pasiega, Maltravieso and Ardales. All three caves contains red or black paintings of groups of animals, dots and geometric signs, as well as hand stencils, had prints and engravings .