Specialization in sheep farming, a possible strategy for Neolithic communities in the Adriatic to expand throughout the Mediterranean

 

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITAT AUTONOMA DE BARCELONA

 

IMAGE: SHEEP TEETH AND JAWS ANALYZED IN THE STUDY. view more 

CREDIT: ALEJANDRO SIERRA.

The specialization in sheep in the early Neolithic populations of Dalmatia, Croatia, may have been related to the rapid expansion of these communities and the spread of agriculture throughout the central and western Mediterranean. This is suggested by a study led by the UAB and the CNRS, which also represents a methodological innovation in the study of prehistoric flocks. The research was recently published in Scientific Reports.

The spread of agriculture in the central and western Mediterranean took place rapidly. The first peasants, coming from the Adriatic, spread westwards across the Mediterranean to the Iberian Peninsula approximately 8000 years ago. The study of these societies provides insight into how they organized and expanded. It is known that they had an economy based on cereal agriculture and sheep and goat farming, but there is little information on how this agropastoral system worked.

The study now published investigated pastoral practices and the use of animal products in the Eastern Adriatic region, specifically in the Dalmatian sites of Tinj-Podlivade and Crno Vrilo. It was carried out by a team of researchers led by Alejandro Sierra, researcher at the Department of Prehistory of the UAB and the Natural History Museum of Paris, CNRS.

Researchers demonstrate that the early farmers at both sites specialized in sheep farming - and not sheep and goats as previously thought - with early pastoral practices and the use of products such as milk and meat from these ruminants. Most of the births at both sites were concentrated in early winter, probably in an attempt to organize the annual agropastoral calendar.

The results suggest that there was a common animal economy at both sites, which could be related to the mobility practiced by these early agricultural societies throughout the Mediterranean.

The rapid spread across the central and western Mediterranean probably occurred by sea, according to archaeological records found on different islands. "Sheep specialization may have had to do with an anticipatory mobility strategy, in which population groups carried out planning adapted to navigation in order to increase their chances of success, focusing on a species with many advantages, both for movement and settlement," says Alejandro Sierra.

For the first time, the research combined zooarchaeology, palaeoproteomics and stable isotopes to demonstrate the main composition of the herds and their management. "It is not only a historical finding, but also a methodological innovation," Sierra points out.

"It will be important to examine other sites around the Adriatic with the same methods to assess whether our results are specific to these two Dalmatian sites or represent a coherent pattern of Early Neolithic animal management across the region," the UAB researcher concludes.

Humans' ancestors survived the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs

 

A Cretaceous origin for placental mammals, the group that includes humans, dogs and bats, has been revealed by in-depth analysis of the fossil record, showing they co-existed with dinosaurs for a short time before the dinosaurs went extinct.

The catastrophic destruction triggered by the asteroid hitting the Earth resulted in the death of all non-avian dinosaurs in an event termed the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction. Debate has long raged among researchers over whether placental mammals were present alongside the dinosaurs before the mass extinction, or whether they only evolved after the dinosaurs were done away with. Fossils of placental mammals are only found in rocks younger than 66 million years old, which is when the asteroid hit Earth, suggesting that the group evolved after the mass extinction. However, molecular data has long suggested an older age for placental mammals.

In a new paper published in the journal Current Biology, a team of palaeobiologists from the University of Bristol and the University of Fribourg used statistical analysis of the fossil record to determine that placental mammals originated before the mass extinction, meaning they co-existed with dinosaurs for a short time. However, it was only after the asteroid impact that modern lineages of placental mammals began to evolve, suggesting that they were better able to diversify once the dinosaurs were gone.

The researchers collected extensive fossil data from placental mammal groups extending all the way back to the mass extinction 66 million years ago.

Lead author Emily Carlisle of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences said: “We pulled together thousands of fossils of placental mammals and were able to see the patterns of origination and extinction of the different groups. Based on this, we could estimate when placental mammals evolved.”

Co-author Daniele Silvestro (University of Fribourg) explained: “The model we used estimates origination ages based on when lineages first appear in the fossil record and the pattern of species diversity through time for the lineage. It can also estimate extinction ages based on last appearances when the group is extinct.”

Co-author Professor Phil Donoghue, also from Bristol, added: “By examining both origins and extinctions, we can more clearly see the impact of events such as the K-Pg mass extinction or the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM).”

Primates, the group that includes the human lineage, as well as Lagomorpha (rabbits and hares) and Carnivora (dogs and cats) were shown to have evolved just before the K-Pg mass extinction, which means their ancestors were mingling with dinosaurs. After they survived the asteroid impact, placental mammals rapidly diversified, perhaps spurred on by the loss of competition from the dinosaurs.

Humans’ evolutionary relatives butchered one another 1.45 million years ago

 

Cut marks on a fossil leg bone belonging to a relative of modern humans were made by stone tools and could be evidence of cannibalism

Peer-Reviewed Publication

SMITHSONIAN

 

IMAGE: VIEW OF THE HOMININ TIBIA AND MAGNIFIED AREA THAT SHOWS CUT MARKS. SCALE = 4 CM. IN A NEW STUDY PUBLISHED TODAY, JUNE 26, IN SCIENTIFIC REPORTS, SMITHSONIAN’S NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY PALEOANTHROPOLOGIST BRIANA POBINER AND HER CO-AUTHORS DESCRIBE NINE CUT MARKS ON A 1.45 MILLION-YEAR-OLD LEFT SHIN BONE FROM A RELATIVE OF HOMO SAPIENS FOUND IN NORTHERN KENYA. ANALYSIS OF 3D MODELS OF THE FOSSIL’S SURFACE REVEALED THAT THE CUT MARKS WERE DEAD RINGERS FOR THE DAMAGE INFLICTED BY STONE TOOLS. THIS IS THE OLDEST INSTANCE OF THIS BEHAVIOR KNOWN WITH A HIGH DEGREE OF CONFIDENCE AND SPECIFICITY. POBINER FIRST ENCOUNTERED THE FOSSILIZED TIBIA, OR SHIN BONE, IN THE COLLECTIONS OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUMS OF KENYA’S NAIROBI NATIONAL MUSEUM WHILE LOOKING FOR CLUES ABOUT WHICH PREHISTORIC PREDATORS MIGHT HAVE BEEN HUNTING AND EATING HUMANS’ ANCIENT RELATIVES. WITH A HANDHELD MAGNIFYING LENS, POBINER PORED OVER THE TIBIA LOOKING FOR BITE MARKS FROM EXTINCT BEASTS WHEN SHE INSTEAD NOTICED WHAT IMMEDIATELY LOOKED TO HER LIKE EVIDENCE OF BUTCHERY. “YOU CAN MAKE SOME PRETTY AMAZING DISCOVERIES BY GOING BACK INTO MUSEUM COLLECTIONS AND TAKING A SECOND LOOK AT FOSSILS,” POBINER SAID. “NOT EVERYONE SEES EVERYTHING THE FIRST TIME AROUND. IT TAKES A COMMUNITY OF SCIENTISTS COMING IN WITH DIFFERENT QUESTIONS AND TECHNIQUES TO KEEP EXPANDING OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORLD.” view more 

CREDIT: JENNIFER CLARK.

Researchers from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History have identified the oldest decisive evidence of humans’ close evolutionary relatives butchering and likely eating one another.

In a new study published today, June 26, in Scientific Reports, National Museum of Natural History paleoanthropologist Briana Pobiner and her co-authors describe nine cut marks on a 1.45 million-year-old left shin bone from a relative of Homo sapiens found in northern Kenya. Analysis of 3D models of the fossil’s surface revealed that the cut marks were dead ringers for the damage inflicted by stone tools. This is the oldest instance of this behavior known with a high degree of confidence and specificity.

“The information we have tells us that hominins were likely eating other hominins at least 1.45 million years ago,” Pobiner said. “There are numerous other examples of species from the human evolutionary tree consuming each other for nutrition, but this fossil suggests that our species’ relatives were eating each other to survive further into the past than we recognized.”

Pobiner first encountered the fossilized tibia, or shin bone, in the collections of the National Museums of Kenya’s Nairobi National Museum while looking for clues about which prehistoric predators might have been hunting and eating humans’ ancient relatives. With a handheld magnifying lens, Pobiner pored over the tibia looking for bite marks from extinct beasts when she instead noticed what immediately looked to her like evidence of butchery.

To figure out if what she was seeing on the surface of this fossil were indeed cut marks, Pobiner sent molds of the cuts—made with the same material dentists use to create impressions of teeth—to co-author Michael Pante of Colorado State University. She provided Pante with no details about what he was being sent, simply asking him to analyze the marks on the molds and tell her what made them. Pante created 3D scans of the molds and compared the shape of the marks to a database of 898 individual tooth, butchery and trample marks created through controlled experiments.

The analysis positively identified nine of the 11 marks as clear matches for the type of damage inflicted by stone tools. The other two marks were likely bite marks from a big cat, with a lion being the closest match. According to Pobiner, the bite marks could have come from one of the three different types of saber-tooth cats prowling the landscape at the time the owner of this shin bone was alive.

By themselves, the cut marks do not prove that the human relative who inflicted them also made a meal out of the leg, but Pobiner said this seems to be the most likely scenario. She explained that the cut marks are located where a calf muscle would have attached to the bone—a good place to cut if the goal is to remove a chunk of flesh. The cut marks are also all oriented the same way, such that a hand wielding a stone tool could have made them all in succession without changing grip or adjusting the angle of attack.

“These cut marks look very similar to what I’ve seen on animal fossils that were being processed for consumption,” Pobiner said. “It seems most likely that the meat from this leg was eaten and that it was eaten for nutrition as opposed to for a ritual.”

While this case may appear to be cannibalism to a casual observer, Pobiner said there is not enough evidence to make that determination because cannibalism requires that the eater and the eaten hail from the same species.

The fossil shin bone was initially identified as Australopithecus boisei and then in 1990 as Homo erectus, but today, experts agree that there is not enough information to assign the specimen to a particular species of hominin. The use of stone tools also does not narrow down which species might have been doing the cutting. Recent research from Rick Potts, the National Museum of Natural History’s Peter Buck Chair of Human Origins, further called into question the once-common assumption that only one genus, Homo, made and used stone tools.

So, this fossil could be a trace of prehistoric cannibalism, but it is also possible this was a case of one species chowing down on its evolutionary cousin.

None of the stone-tool cut marks overlap with the two bite marks, which makes it hard to infer anything about the order of events that took place. For instance, a big cat may have scavenged the remains after hominins removed most of the meat from the leg bone. It is equally possible that a big cat killed an unlucky hominin and then was chased off or scurried away before opportunistic hominins took over the kill.

One other fossil—a skull first found in South Africa in 1976—has previously sparked debate about the earliest known case of human relatives butchering each other. Estimates for the age of this skull range from 1.5 to 2.6 million years old. Apart from its uncertain age, two studies that have examined the fossil (the first published in 2000 and the latter in 2018) disagree about the origin of marks just below the skull’s right cheek bone. One contends the marks resulted from stone tools wielded by hominin relatives and the other asserts that they were formed through contact with sharp-edged stone blocks found lying against the skull. Further, even if ancient hominins produced the marks, it is not clear whether they were butchering each other for food, given the lack of large muscle groups on the skull.

To resolve the issue of whether the fossil tibia she and her colleagues studied is indeed the oldest cut-marked hominin fossil, Pobiner said she would love to reexamine the skull from South Africa, which is claimed to have cut marks using the same techniques observed in the present study.

She also said this new shocking finding is proof of the value of museum collections.

“You can make some pretty amazing discoveries by going back into museum collections and taking a second look at fossils,” Pobiner said. “Not everyone sees everything the first time around. It takes a community of scientists coming in with different questions and techniques to keep expanding our knowledge of the world.”

This research was supported by funding from the Smithsonian, the Peter Buck Fund for Human Origins Research and Colorado State University.

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JOURNAL

Scientific Reports

DOI

10.1038/s41598-023-35702-7 

Lessons in sustainability, evolution and human adaptation — courtesy of the Holocene

 

 

IMAGE: MACROBOTANICAL REMAINS FROM EL GIGANTE. view more 

CREDIT: UC SANTA BARBARA

The El Gigante rockshelter in western Honduras is among only a handful of archaeological sites in the Americas that contain well-preserved botanical remains spanning the last 11,000 years. Considered one of the most important archaeological sites discovered in Central America in the last 40 years, El Gigante was recently nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

“No other location shows, as clearly as El Gigante,” state UNESCO materials about the site’s universal value, “the dynamic character of hunter-gatherer societies, and their adaptive way of life in the Central American highlands, and in Mesoamerica broadly during the early and middle Holocene.”

Now, anthropologists Douglas Kennett and Amber VanDerwarker of UC Santa Barbara, UCSB postdoc Richard George and colleagues from multiple institutions have excavated and analyzed botanical macrofossils — such as maize cobs, avocado seeds or rinds — from El Gigante using modern technologies. Their results are published in the journal PLOS ONE.

“Our work at El Gigante demonstrates that the early use and management of tree crops like wild avocado and plums by at least 11,000 years ago,” Kennett said, “set the stage for the development of later systems of aboriculture that, when combined with field cropping of maize, beans and squash, fueled human population growth, the development of settled agricultural villages and the first urban centers in Mesoamerica after 3,000 years ago.”

The study provides a major update to the chronology of tree and field crop use evident in the El Gigante with 375 radiocarbon dates, finding that tree fruits and squash appeared early, around 11,000 years ago, with most other field crops appearing later in time — maize around 4,500 years, beans around 2,200 years ago. The initial focus on tree fruits and squash, Kennett noted, is consistent with early coevolutionary partnering with humans as seed dispersers in the wake of megafaunal extinction in Central America. Tree crops predominated through much of the Holocene, and there was an overall shift to field crops after 4,000 years ago that was largely driven by increased reliance on maize farming.

“The transition to agriculture is one of the most significant transformations of our Earth’s environmental and cultural history,” Kennett said. “The domestication of plants and animals in multiple independent centers worldwide resulted in a major demographic transition in human populations that fueled the transition to more intensive forms of agriculture during the last 10,000 years. Agriculture also provided the economic foundation for urbanism and the development of state institutions after 5,000 years ago in many of these same regions.”

The botanical materials at El Gigante, remarkably well preserved, reflect the transition from foraging to farming, providing a rare glimpse of early foraging strategies and changes in subsistence. Unique in its location along the southern periphery of Mesoamerica, and for its lower elevation than the dry caves of central Mexico, the authors note, El Gigante serves as a macrobotanical archive for interactions and the flow of domesticated plants between Mesoamerica, Central America and South America. Broader still, it enables researchers to examine the long term evolutionary and demographic processes involved in the domestication of multiple tree and field crops.

“The quality of the plant preservation at El Gigante is simply unmatched, giving us a deeper understanding of how ancient Hondurans managed their forests, domesticated a variety of plant species and intensified their cultivation of key resources over millennia,” said VanDerwarker. “What seems clear is that practices of forest management and field cultivation were closely linked and evolved in tandem.”

And therein, Kennett added, some lessons for modern society can be inferred.

“Our work shows that different types of agricultural systems supported human populations in Central America and that some were more sustainable than others,” he said. “Forest management and arboriculture persisted for thousands of years before it was eclipsed in importance by the expansion of maize farming after 4,000 years ago. The archaeological record provides an archive of human adaptation that should be considered in the context of anthropogenic alteration of our Earth’s climate today. These ancient archives could help rural farmers in Central America adapt to changing conditions moving into the future.”

Anarcheological first: A poem by Virgil appears on the remnants of a Roman oil amphora

 

Peer-Reviewed Publication

 

IMAGE: REMNANTS OF A ROMAN OIL AMPHORA view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF CORDOBA

Measuring just 6 centimeters wide and 8 long, the magnitude and exceptionality of the discovery has left the European archaeological community flabbergasted. It is a fragment of an oil amphora from the Roman region of Betica, manufactured about 1,800 years ago, with a written text on it, found during prospecting carried out in the municipality of Hornachuelos (Córdoba) by members of OLEASTRO, a joint project between the Universities of Cordoba, Seville and Montpellier. Thus far, nothing would have been extraordinary about the find, as countless pieces of pottery from ancient Rome have been found. Monte Testaccio in Rome, an artificial mound comprised of Roman pottery, is an infinite source of information about the Roman olive and wine industry. In fact, at first, the research team was not particularly surprised to receive the fragment from Francisco Adame, a resident of the village of Ochavillo, the first person who noticed that little piece of Rome when walking through Arroyo de Tamujar, an area very close to the village of Villalón (Fuente Palmera).

Neither was the research team astonished by the fact that the amphora featured words, as this is quite common too. In fact, the information printed on amphorae (producers, quantities, control…) has allowed archaeologists to understand the history of agricultural trade during the Empire. Likewise, it was hardly shocking to find a piece of an amphora in an area like theplain of the Guadalquivir River, considered one of the nerve centers of olive oil production and trade throughout the Empire. In the surroundings of Corduba, modern-day Cordoba, a good part of the olive oil consumed by Rome was produced and packaged, as evidenced, for example, by the remnants of amphorae with "Betica" seals preserved on Mount Testaccio.

Thus, the fragment of an amphora with text on it seemed, at first, just another piece, devoid of special interest. Everything changed, however, when the epigraph was deciphered, revealing the following words

S
vais
avoniam
glandemm
arestapoqv
tisaqv
it

Through overlaying, the researchers were able to infer that the text corresponds to the seventh and eighth verses of the first book of The Georgics, a poem by Virgil dedicated to agriculture and life in the countryside, written in 29 BC, which say:

Auoniam[pingui]
glandem m[utauit]
aresta, poq[ulaque]
[inuen]tisAqu[eloia]
[miscu]it [uuis]
C[ambió] la bellota aonia por la espiga [fértil] [y mezcl]ó
el ag[ua] [con la uva descubierta]

Virgil was the most popular poet of his time, and still many centuries later. The Aeneid was taught at schools, and its verses routinely written as a pedagogical exercise for many generations. Thus, it is common to find them on the remains of ceramic construction materials, with many authors deducing that these tablets had educational functions (Roman schoolchildren wrote Virgil on their chalkboards) and funerary ones (Virgil's verses served as an epitaph on many occasions). But, why on an amphora? And why The Georgics, and not The Aeneid? Posing these questions, the researchers on the project realized that the tiny fragment of pottery could be a unique piece, and one of extraordinary value, since Virgil's verses had never been documented on an amphora destined for the oil trade.

The authors' main thesis in the work, published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology (University of Cambridge), in which Dr. Iván González Tobar appears as principal investigator) (PhD, University of Córdoba, currently a Juan de la Cierva researcher at the University of Barcelona, and hired by the University of Montpellier when the piece was found) is that the verses were written on the underside of the amphora without anyone expected to notice them, only as a sign of the knowledge and culture of the person who wrote them, revealing a certain level of literacy in the fertile plain of the Guadalquivir area.

Who wrote it? Here, the authors posit several possibilities: that they were written by a specialized worker of the establishment with a certain degree of literacy, or someone from the nearby villages related to an aristocratic family owning the factory. They are also open to the possibility that a child worker wrote it, as the regular use of young workers at this type of establishment has been previously documented.

In any case, the verses on the amphora from Hornachuelos/Fuente Palmera make it a unique piece posing many more questions in need of answers.

Referencia: González Tobar, I., Soler i Nicolau, A., & Berni Millet, P. (2023). Las Geórgicas de Virgilio in figlinis: A propósito de un grafito ante cocturam sobre un ánfora olearia bética. Journal of Roman Archaeology, 1-22. doi:10.1017/S1047759423000156 

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JOURNAL

Journal of Roman Archaeology

DOI

10.1017/S1047759423000156 

Cave excavation pushes back the clock on early human migration to Laos

 

IMAGE: THE TEAM EXCAVATED THROUGH LAYERS OF SEDIMENTS AND BONES THAT GRADUALLY WASHED INTO THE CAVE AND WERE LEFT UNTOUCHED FOR TENS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS. view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO BY FABRICE DEMETER

CH 

Fifteen years of archaeological work in the Tam Pa Ling cave in northeastern Laos has yielded a reliable chronology of early human occupation of the site, scientists report in the journal Nature Communications. The team’s excavations through the layers of sediments and bones that gradually washed into the cave and were left untouched for tens of thousands of years reveals that humans lived in the area for at least 70,000 years – and likely even longer.

“When we first started excavating the cave, we never expected to find humans in that region,” said University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign anthropology professor Laura Shackelford, who led the research with Fabrice Demeter, a professor of anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. “But beginning that first season when we started work there, we found our first modern humans. At the time, that made them the only early modern human fossils in the region.”

While the remains of modern Homo sapiens dating back roughly 197,000 years have been recovered in Israel, genetic studies suggest the main phase of early human migration out of Africa and into Asia occurred much later – around 50,000 years ago, Shackelford said. Her team’s earliest excavations in Tam Pa Ling found bone fragments from modern human remains dating to about 40,000 years ago. But as the excavations dug deeper, the age of sediments and animal remains found alongside human bones dated back much earlier.

In 2019, the team had excavated as far as they could in the cave, reaching bedrock about 23 feet (7 meters) below the surface. The excavations yielded dozens of animal bones and many fragments of human skeletal remains. The deepest human bone recovered – a partial tibia – was resting on bedrock near the bottom of the trench. Analyses of sediments taken not far above this bone indicate the soil was deposited there between 67,000 and 90,000 years ago.

“The entire section of the trench goes from about 30,000 years ago to 80,000 to 100,000 years ago,” Shackelford said. “Flood season after flood season, the sediments and bones washed into the cave and were deposited. They’ve been sitting there ever since.”

The team used a variety of techniques to date the sediments and nonhuman mammal bones found at different depths in the cave. For the soil samples, the researchers relied primarily on a technique called optically stimulated luminescence, which reveals how much time has elapsed since sediments were last exposed to light. Numerous soil samples were collected from the cave in total darkness and taken back to the laboratory for analysis.

The researchers used several other techniques to date the soils, human and animal bones and teeth found at different depths in the trench.

The human remains were fragmentary, but the site yielded two pieces of skull – both from the frontal region of the head – one of which dated to about 35,000 years ago and the other much older, dating to roughly 67,000 years ago, Shackelford said.

At first, a comparison of the physical characteristics of the fossils baffled the researchers, Shackelford said.

"What we saw was that the youngest fossils, the first ones we found, looked old,” she said. “And the oldest fossils that we found at the very bottom looked younger. It was the opposite of what we would expect to find because as you get deeper in time, you think of things becoming more archaic, more like ancestral populations.”

There are two potential explanations for the differences between the older and younger fossils, Shackelford said. One, the older fossil may be from an ancestral population that had more modern characteristics than their descendants, who interbred with people with more archaic features. The other possibility is that the two skulls represent two distinct migrations into the region.

“We don’t know how they’re related, but we have two very different looking groups of humans,” Shackelford said. “The older fossil was most likely part of an early migration – a failed migration because it did not give rise to people who are still alive today.”

The team was unable to extract viable DNA from the human remains, a common problem in studies of ancient remains from tropical sites, Shackelford said.

“I think the only way to settle our questions is with genetic data,” she said. The team is preserving the human fossils in a freezer in the hopes that more refined DNA extraction and analysis techniques will one day yield more answers.

The National Geographic Society supported this research.

 

Neanderthal cave engravings are oldest known – over 57,000 years old

 

Finger-marks on a cave wall in France were made before Homo sapiens entered the region

VIDEO: ANIMATED 3D MODEL: THE MAIN DECORATED WALL OF THE ROCHE-COTARD CAVE. :

https://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/988718

CREDIT: MARQUET ET AL., PLOS ONE, 2023, CC-BY 4.0 (HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/4.0/)

Markings on a cave wall in France are the oldest known engravings made by Neanderthals, according to a study https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0286568 published June 21, 2023 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Jean-Claude Marquet of the University of Tours, France and colleagues.

Research in recent decades has revealed a great deal about the cultural complexity of Neanderthals. However, relatively little is known about their symbolic or artistic expression. Only a short list of symbolic productions are attributed to Neanderthals, and the interpretation of these is often the subject of debate. In this study, Marquet and colleagues identified markings on a cave wall in France as the oldest known Neanderthal engravings.

The cave is La Roche-Cotard in the Centre-Val de Loire of France, where a series of non-figurative markings on the wall are interpreted as finger-flutings, marks made by human hands. The researchers made a plotting analysis and used photogrammetry to create 3D models of these markings, comparing them with known and experimental human markings. Based on the shape, spacing, and arrangement of these engravings, the team concluded that they are deliberate, organized and intentional shapes created by human hands.

The team also dated cave sediments with optically-stimulated luminescence dating, determining that the cave became closed off by infilling sediment around 57,000 years ago, well before Homo sapiens became established in the region. This, combined with the fact that stone tools within the cave are only Mousterian, a technology associated with Neanderthals, is strong evidence that these engravings are the work of Neanderthals.

Because these are non-figurative symbols, the intent behind them is unclear. They are, however, of a similar age with cave engravings made by Homo sapiens in other parts of the world. This adds to a growing body of evidence that the behavior and activities of Neanderthals were similarly complex and diverse as those of our own ancestors.

The authors add: “Fifteen years after the resumption of excavations at the La Roche-Cotard site, the engravings have been dated to over 57,000 years ago and, thanks to stratigraphy, probably to around 75,000 years ago, making this the oldest decorated cave in France, if not Europe!”