See more 60,000-year-old Neanderthal rock art

This question has worried paleontologists and archaeologists since 2018, when the study was published.

confirming that the red ocher pigment was found on the stalagmite dome of the Cueva de Ardales.

Judging by the analysis, this work of art is at least 64.8 thousand years old: it was made at a time when modern people did not inhabit the continent.

New analysis showed that the composition and locationpigments could not come out naturally - instead they were applied by spraying and blowing. Moreover, the pigment was not obtained from the cave, it was presumably brought there on purpose. And this happened not once, but over the course of several years.

But the new discovery once again confirms thatThe Neanderthals, whose ancestry became extinct about 40 thousand years ago, were not the crude and simple relatives of Homo sapiens, as they have long been portrayed.

The authors of the new work note that pigments are not art in the narrow sense of the word, but rather the result of graphic work with the aim of perpetuating information.

Read more

See how a black hole begins to destroy a star

New particle discovered at the Large Hadron Collider

Heatwave caused massive melting of Greenland ice sheet