More evidence for the intelligence of Neanderthals has been unveiled, in the form of some rather dull sea shells.
However that’s dull in the physical, not the scientific, sense. Joao Zilhao, of the University of Bristol, and colleagues report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences* that they recovered shells stained with pigment from sites in Iberia dated to up to 50,000 years old. These shells may have been painted and many are perforated, suggesting they may have been strung together to be worn. (* – link not yet live.)
The shells mirror previous finds from Africa that, as Zilhao’s paper notes, “are widely accepted as evidence of symbolic thinking among the earliest anatomically modern humans”. Previous evidence of symbolic ornaments among the Neanderthals in Europe has been dismissed, they say, on grounds such as it being merely imitation of human behaviour without understanding.
But Zilhao’s new shells predate human-Neanderthal contact. “The association of this material with the Neanderthals is, literally, rock-solid,” they write.
Chris Stringer, a palaeontologist from the Natural History Museum in London, told the BBC, says the find is the latest addition to the body of evidence suggesting Neanderthals were far from the dim-witted creatures of popular imagination.
“It’s very difficult to dislodge the brutish image from popular thinking,” he says. “When football fans behave badly, or politicians advocate reactionary views, they are invariably called ‘Neanderthal’, and I can’t see the tabloids changing their headlines any time soon.”
This paper is the second related to Neanderthals published by Zilhao in PNAS in the space of a week. His other paper details the teeth of an early Upper Palaeolithic child found in Lagar Velho, Portugal and compared it to a Neanderthal sample, a late Upper Palaeolithic child and a human sample. They found that “a simple Neanderthal versus modern human dichotomy” was inadequate to explain their findings.
“This new analysis of the Lagar Velho child joins a growing body of information from other early modern human fossils found across Europe that shows these ‘early modern humans’ were ‘modern’ without being ‘fully modern’,” says Zilhao (press release). “Human anatomical evolution continued after they lived 30,000 to 40,000 years ago.”
Image: courtesy of Joao Zilhao