Science Says: European art scene began with Neanderthals

NEW YORK (AP) — From the murky depths of Spanish caves comes a surprising insight: Neanderthals created art.

That's been proposed before, but experts say two new studies finally give convincing evidence that our evolutionary cousins had the brainpower to make artistic works and use symbols.

The key finding: New age estimates that show paintings on cave walls and decorated seashells in Spain were created long before our species entered Europe. So there's no way Homo sapiens could have made them or influenced Neanderthals to merely copy their artwork.

Until now, most scientists thought all cave paintings were the work of our species. But the new work concludes that some previously known paintings — an array of lines, some disks and the outline of a hand — were rendered about 20,000 years before H. sapiens moved into Europe.

That's a surprise that "constitutes a major breakthrough in the field of human evolution studies," said Wil Roebroeks of Leiden University in the Netherlands, an expert on Neanderthals who didn't participate in the new work.

Source: Yahoo News