Moscow. August 3rd. INTERFAX.RU – Scientists have found that Neanderthals painted stalagmites in the Cueva de Ardales cave in Spain. This is reported by the scientific information portal Phys.org.
“Dating has shown that this art was at least 64,800 years old, and it was created at a time when modern people did not yet live on the continent,” – said in the message.
It has previously been suggested that the pigments were a natural phenomenon and were due to runoff of the iron oxide stream. However, new research has led to the conclusion that the composition and placement of pigments did not correspond to natural processes.
The pigments were sprayed on and blown, and the texture did not match the natural samples taken from the caves. This suggests that the pigments came from an external source.
More detailed dating showed that the pigments were used at different points in time, separated by more than ten thousand years.
“This confirms the hypothesis that the Neanderthals came several times over several thousand years to mark the cave with pigments,” – quoted research co-author Francesco d'Errico from the University of Bordeaux.
The new discovery adds more and more evidence that the Neanderthals, who became extinct about 40 thousand years ago, perpetuated the “symbolic meaning of space”, and their cave art played a fundamental role in the symbolic systems of some communities of these ancient people, scientists say.
The meaning of these symbols is still a mystery.
Paleogenetic studies have shown that modern inhabitants of Eurasia inherited from 2 to 4% of genes from Neanderthals. Neanderthals came to Western Eurasia about half a million years ago and became extinct about 40 thousand years ago. They have adapted to local infectious diseases, and several genetic variants introduced by them into the genome of modern humans are associated precisely with the work of immunity.
According to the hypothesis of the multiregional formation of modern humans, all the subspecies of ancient humans that served as a basis for them, including the Denisovans, Neanderthals and the hypothetical Eastern Man who lived in Southeast Asia, are descendants of Homo erectus – Homo erectus.
