Neanderthals’ Unprecedented Creative and Artistic Past Comes to the Foreground

Neanderthals are Homo sapiens’s closest-known relative, and today we know we rubbed shoulders with them for thousands of years, up until the very end of their long reign some 40,000 years ago. Most researchers see no reason to believe our two species didn’t get along with each other back then, yet we haven’t been very kind to Neanderthals since their remains were first unearthed in the 19th century, often characterizing them as lumbering dimwits or worse. Even today, their name is sometimes hurled at misbehaving members of our own species, though there is no evidence they engaged in any kind of prehistoric hooliganism.

Well, with one exception, perhaps: What they did in Bruniquel Cave in southwestern France would certainly be frowned upon today. Hundreds of intentionally broken stalagmites were found there, arranged into two large, ellipsoid structures and several smaller stacks, during a time when — as researchers confirmed in 2016 — only Neanderthals were roaming Europe. No one knows what these structures were for, but they suggest a tendency toward creativity and perhaps even symbolism. No other structures of this kind have so far been discovered.

But there have been many other hints that Neanderthal minds were occupied with things many researchers did not expect, says archaeologist April Nowell of the University of Victoria in Canada. The author of a 2021 book, Growing Up in the Ice Age, Nowell outlines the most exciting new discoveries in a 2023 article, “Rethinking Neandertals,” in the Annual Review of Anthropology.

“In the past 10 years, things have changed quite dramatically,” she says. “I never thought we’d have the wide range of information about their lives that we do now.” In addition to many new fossil discoveries, new methods for analyzing ancient biological molecules have allowed researchers to examine ancient DNA and proteins that they didn’t even know still persisted.

Most remarkably, researchers have spelled out the entire Neanderthal genome for multiple individuals, offering new insights into their biology, as well as our own. There is no longer any doubt that human beings and Neanderthals interbred.

“Neanderthals are partly our ancestors, even if we didn’t evolve from them,” says paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London. In addition, the many freshly unearthed or newly analyzed artifacts, some now confidently assigned to Neanderthals thanks to improved methods for dating archaeological finds, make for quite a collection.

“If you’d have asked me 20 years ago, I would have said there was quite a big gap in behavior, and Neanderthals would have lacked many of the complex behaviors we find in Homo sapiens,” Stringer says. “Now that gap has narrowed considerably.”

Arts and Crafts

Some of the Neanderthal artifacts discovered were very practical in nature. Bits of twisted wood fiber attached to a modified stone flake found in France in 2017 suggest that at least some Neanderthals knew how to make rope, for example, which may have opened the door to fashioning other objects like clothes, bags, nets and mats.

There also is evidence that Neanderthals were heating birch bark to make adhesives — no mean feat. “A few researchers have recently tried to do the same in similar circumstances,” says Nowell, “and it’s a lot harder than most people thought.” Beyond daily chores, Neanderthals evidently liked to adorn themselves. We now know they were using colorful pigments like red ochre as far back as 200,000 to 250,000 years ago, maybe not just on objects, but also on their own bodies. Excavations have also revealed perforated and sometimes painted shells that were likely strung together and worn.

A creative Neanderthal in Croatia made a necklace or other adornment out of white-tailed eagle talons, and elsewhere, tool marks found on bird bones suggest that feathers were also popular. What about the famous cave art found in many sites in Europe and elsewhere? Until recently, none of these were thought to be Neanderthal. But in 2018, a study in Science demonstrated that the painted lines and dots on the walls of a number of caves in Spain must have been made by Neanderthals, since they were dated to a period when no Homo sapiens were yet around.

There also is evidence of engraving — “hashtags” carved into a cave wall in Gibraltar, as well as on a pebble, a flint flake and a giant deer’s toe bone. There are no indications yet that Neanderthals created any recognizable depictions of, for example, animals or people, says Nowell. That may have been a Homo sapiens innovation. “There are so many of these little isolated examples of interesting things Neanderthals were doing, these sorts of pulses of symbolic behavior. But they don’t seem to last for long periods of time or lead to something else as they clearly have in Homo sapiens populations,” she says.

Growing Up Human

One explanation for the differences in artistic expression may be that Neanderthals just thought differently. Perhaps a member of our own species excitedly asking a Neanderthal why they drew or carved what they did would have received nothing but a shrug. It is, of course, very hard to reconstruct what differences there may have been in brain structure or cognition, but Nowell is intrigued by a number of recent studies in which human brain cells were engineered to contain Neanderthal versions of some key brain development genes.

Most remarkably, researchers have spelled out the entire Neanderthal genome for multiple individuals, offering new insights into their biology, as well as our own. There is no longer any doubt that human beings and Neanderthals interbred. “Neanderthals are partly our ancestors, even if we didn’t evolve from them,” says paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London. In addition, the many freshly unearthed or newly analyzed artifacts, some now confidently assigned to Neanderthals thanks to improved methods for dating archaeological finds, make for quite a collection.