Dr. Genevieve von Petzinger

Is that hashtag signs?

From Goren's Cave down in Gibraltar, which is, again, there was no humans anywhere in sight.

Like, it's Neanderthal.

And our colleague, Francesco Jericho, who does a ton of, like, experimental archaeology, and he's the guy you call in if you need to verify something.

He went in and he verified that, again, this was not just made because somebody was trying to sharpen a tool.

Like...

There was something going on here.

So Gorham's Cave has this amazing hashtag in it.

And again, there's some other potential grids in other places, these hashtaggy marks, which could now, though, we should be looking and assessing calmly, like, don't presume it's human.

Because we've always presumed all these things were human.

So this means we're going to actually have to go revisit it.

Series of lines, simple crosses in some places, zigzags.

Like, I think that there's... And it could even be, too, though, that some of those are almost like...

the baked-in ancestral kit, and which, again, I think, and again, people are going to disagree with me, so please assume this, viewers and listeners, which is this is my opinion.

Not everybody agrees with me, but from what I'm seeing, and this is just based on what I'm seeing, it appears to me that this does track back to even earlier than we had previously understood, and it's just that each of them then moved in their own direction and developed out their art traditions in their own way.

It's no different than how different humans

have moved around the planet and then really developed their own art traditions, right?

Like if you think about how different Polynesian art looks from, say, like, you know, Western, like Italian Renaissance art, like it's extraordinarily different.

both clearly cool in their own way, both come from the same species, but very different ways of doing their art.

And so I think that we want to really flag that with humans and Neanderthals and stuff like that.