42 upvotes, 3 direct replies (showing 3)
View submission: Did Neanderthals make elaborate cave paintings?
I often see most cave paintings that depict animals and people as being attributed to early modern humans, while more simple and crude paintings associated with Neanderthals.
It's not really as simple as that. For decades, no one even considered that Neanderthals were really getting into cave art. For a long time it was a hard enough sell that Neanderthals were really into symbolic or ritual / "religious" behavior at all (suggested by the evidence of intentional burials and some equivocal data that at one time was thought to indicate burial with flowers).
Cave art has historically been attributed to anatomically modern *Homo sapiens* (AMHS) because Neanderthals weren't regarded as really doing anything like that.
That narrative has started to shift considerably in the last 10-20 years as archaeologists dated or re-dated some sites that contained evidence of ritual activity (the stalactite / stalagmite circle in Bruniquel Cave) and / or cave painting and found that it seems to have occurred prior to the arrival of AMHS in Europe. Since it probably wasn't AMHS, and we know that Neanderthals were there *and* that they were capable of a lot more cognitively than we used to believe, the hypothesis is that those were done by Neanderthals.
But no one is looking at "simple" vs. "complex" cave paintings and assigning them to Neanderthals or AMHS based on those subjective assessments. At least, no one who's worth listening to.
I am not, however, aware of any paintings similar to the elaborate wall art in places like Lascaux or Chauvet Cave that have been dated to periods before AMHS was present, so that may not have come up. But regardless, archaeologists / art historians would rely on more concrete evidence than "this is simple" or "this is complex" to try to identify who might have been the artists. Things like what kinds of artifacts were left in the cave(s) in a context that made it possible to assign them to a time period.
Comment by Kholzie at 27/01/2025 at 20:33 UTC*
33 upvotes, 2 direct replies
As a visual artist, I would also like to add that simple or complex art is not an indication of skill or intelligence. How one chooses to depict things is a very subjective choice and is wholly dependent on the artists intention. It may even be reliant on access to resources/materials.
Comment by TheVeryColourfulBean at 27/01/2025 at 19:53 UTC
9 upvotes, 3 direct replies
I see. I am quite fascinated by Neanderthals and I honestly feel that their intelligence is still very underestimated by most.
Comment by sharp11flat13 at 28/01/2025 at 01:44 UTC
7 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I think we also need to take into account the idea that 99.9999% of all prehistoric cave art has probably been lost to time and the elements. I tend to imagine that cave art was likely common but very little it has survived.