Tristan Hughes

Today, those markings have become the legacy of those Ice Age painters.

But those painters, they weren't modern humans.

They weren't Homo sapiens.

They were Neanderthals.

And they were leaving behind some of the oldest known art in Europe.

So what do we know about this archaic art?

What types of images did Neanderthals draw?

What did it mean?

And how might Neanderthal art have influenced that of our ancestors, of the first groups of Homo sapiens that interacted with them?

I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the fascinating, developing story of Neanderthal art with our guest, Dr Genevieve von Petzinger.

Genevieve, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Oh, absolutely.

Go wild on this topic as well.

So, I mean, Neanderthal art, first of all, this belief that it has been there for so long that it's only modern humans who can make art, it seems that more evidence is coming to the fore now that that is not the case.

I mean, that was brilliant, Genevieve.

And I must admit, a topic for another day, but I remember talking to Chris Stringer about this, is imagining those first contacts between a Neanderthal and Homo sapien group and imagining how that language, the language barrier would have been

how they would have got past it.

Kind of these ideas of the translators of the prehistoric age of these early humans and modern humans, like how they communicated.

That's another fascinating thing to explore for another day.

And art is just one part of that larger story.