Dr. Genevieve von Petzinger

With the Neanderthals, with other things, I mean, if they're doing non-figurative stuff, it's going to be harder for us because we don't know why they were making it.

We don't know what was important.

Now, if we can kind of start to...

identify repeating examples of things, we might be able to try and figure out a little bit.

Do they seem to have been counting?

Was this some early form of counting?

And things we could look for would be, do we see the same number?

If we've got a row of lines on a bone, is it always eight lines?

Is it always five lines?

What are they doing?

So I think that's where you can start to

find some signal in the noise it doesn't mean that you can necessarily get to the point of being able to read it and I think that's where we have to be really careful I wish I wish but I just don't see how we could because we don't have the cultural context and so this is where but I think we can we can definitely learn more and and and with the human stuff there is the possibility of maybe even identifying some more like oh maybe these actually represent little dwellings and houses or like we could probably get to that level

Yeah, and so I think it's a fascinating question about who taught what to who, and then also keeping in mind that the place in time where the interbreeding seems to have taken place is more like in the Middle East, which means they might be picking up art

making traditions from Middle Eastern Neanderthals, which could be completely different from European Neanderthals, right?

So that's also a fascinating question, because we don't know much.

Like, we have caves like Shanidar.

So when you have Ella on, you'll have to ask her about... Because she's been to Shanidar, which is so cool.

That's in Iraq.

You know, so again, we've got the... But...

Maybe we don't know.