Neanderthals 'may have made art just like modern humans'

Neanderthals may have made art just like modern humans do, researchers in Spain have said.

The findings, published in the Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences journal, challenge existing assumptions that art began with homo sapiens.

Researchers said a pebble excavated from central Spain in 2022 seemed to have been made to look like a face by having a painted dot where a nose would be – suggesting it may be an early artwork.

"It has gradually been determined that the origin of symbolic behaviour and apparently also of art was not exclusive to modern humans but can also be attributed to Neanderthals," the researchers said.

"From the outset, we could tell it was peculiar," David Alvarez-Alonso, lead author on the paper, told Sky News' US partner NBC News.

The pebble dates back between 42,000 and 43,000 years and was found in the San Lazaro rock shelter in modern-day Segovia.

It was thought to have been deliberately brought to the shelter and found in a space where humans lived.

The red dot was confirmed by Spain's forensic police to be a fingerprint, offering another level to the discovery, as it is one of the most complete Neanderthal fingerprints identified to date.

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"This pebble could thus represent one of the oldest known abstractions of a human face in the prehistoric record," the researchers said.

They added: "The pebble was selected because of its appearance and then marked with ochre [showing] that there was a human mind capable of symbolising, imagining, idealising and projecting his or her thoughts on an object... in creating art."

Neanderthals were a distinct species of early humans that went extinct around 40,000 years ago but lived alongside modern humans in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.