Dr. Genevieve von Petzinger

And so to think that, you know...

there's this huge spread of them, and we don't really know what they were capable of.

We have these remnants, but we would need to get serious about it and actually start tracking it down and tracing it a bit more to understand.

And so Ardales, though, looks like it could be another really good spot.

And I think, frankly, around Malaga, down in the south of Spain in general, has huge promise for exciting new Neanderthal information to come out in the future about the art there.

Okay.

So this is, I mean, this is off the top of my head.

And so this is what I would call, this is what we would call in the field like anecdotal evidence, which means as somebody, because I've at this point, I think I've worked in like 107 caves.

I've worked in a lot of caves.

So part of it is just the pattern recognition piece, right?

Like when you've worked in that many sites, you start to kind of get a feel for like, oh, I'm seeing this again.

That's interesting.

If I had to anecdotally classify some art as being Neanderthal, I would say hands, not exclusively necessarily because we definitely have humans making them too, but handprints for sure, especially the negative handprints and the spit painting.

Spit painting seems to have been a thing for them.

My colleague Barbara has some amazing sites where they were just going around like blowing red discs onto like stalactites and things in caves.

Like they were just marking the cave with them, right?

So I would say hands.

Spit painting is definitely one of their techniques that they like to use, for sure.

Hands, dots, these bigger discs, cupels, so again, like an engraved dot, lines, also a series of lines.

So that, don't forget, of course, the famous hashtag,