Prehistoric dots and crimson hand stencils on Spanish cave walls are now the world's oldest known cave art, according to new dating results—perhaps the best evidence yet that Neanderthals were Earth's first cave painters.
If that's the case, the discovery narrows the cultural distance between us and Neanderthals—and fuels the argument, at least for one scientist, that the heavy-browed humans were ngot a separate species but only another race.
Of the 11 subterranean sites the team studied along northern Spain's Cantabrian Sea coast, the cave called El Castillo had the oldest paintings—the oldest being a simple red disk.
At more than 40,800 years old, "this is currently Europe's oldest dated art by at least 4,000 years," said the study's lead author Alistair Pike, an archaeologist at the University of Bristol in the U.K.
If the new dates are correct, they also could make the El Castillo art the oldest known well-dated cave paintings in the world—a title previously held by France's Chauvet cave paintings (pictures), believed to be at least 37,000 years old.
Pike's team teased out the new dates using a method that relies on known rates of decay in uranium—specifically uranium in calcium deposits that had formed over the paint. The mineral-based paint itself couldn't be dated, because it contains neither uranium nor the carbon needed for radiocarbon dating.
In several cases, the Spanish artwork proved older than previously estimated based on indirect methods, such as stylistic comparisons with paintings at better dated sites, according to the study, published today by the journal Science.
