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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists.
You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. 50,000 years ago, in a cave nestled high up in a hill in what is today northern Spain, a group of Ice Age hunters gather for a special purpose.
Firelight illuminates the cave wall in front of them as they begin their work. Mixing their saliva with rich red ochre, they artfully blow this prehistoric paint over the vertical rock's surface, creating a line of bright red discs. Markings filled with meaning. Next, they place their hands on the wall and do the same again, creating striking red outlines.
Handprints that will remain there for the next 50,000 years. 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.
Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. So it's always a pleasure to talk about my favorite subject with people who actually want to hear me talk about it.
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.
No, not... Okay. So much of this goes back to... I mean, again, this is... We could go deep down the rabbit hole, but the really fast version of this is Darwin, evolution, thoughts that humans are special. Everything goes back to the 1800s, right? Basically.
And the fact that they're like, oh, well, you know, we're humans, we're special, we're the stewards of the earth, everybody else are animals. And even again, amongst humans, we had issues with thinking that everybody was equal. So we're already dealing with that problem. And then... We have another species.
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Chapter 2: What ancient art did Neanderthals create?
He's like this hunchback, you know, sort of like half ape thing. And then that reinforced their beliefs at the time. which was that we're the only ones that are like us. And it's really interesting to see how they got really deeply ingrained in the field.
And it's been this huge fight throughout the 20th century and down to the 21st century even, because there's still people now today who would still argue with me in my field that Neanderthals did not make art. Isn't that crazy? But So understand, at this point, probably I'd say 80% to 90% of the field probably is on Team Neanderthal with me.
However, there is still a piece who would disagree with us. Just keep that in mind. When I'm talking about Neanderthals, this is my opinion, and this is not necessarily everybody in the field. At this point, it's probably the majority, but it's still being contested. Scholars love to fight about things. It's kind of partially what they do.
So that, though, is the deep story, is that everything's been a fight. So step one, oh, my gosh, they're burying their dead. Well, wait a second. That sounds like they cared about people. Maybe they aren't such animals. Oh, look, they're putting things in their graves as though maybe they thought people went somewhere after they died. Or look, they cared for people.
Like we've got examples of very serious injuries that somebody cared for somebody. They healed and lived for years afterwards, even though they would have been no use to anybody afterwards. from a physical point of view, because they couldn't have provided or hunted or gathered. However, somebody cared for them, or they have no teeth left, and somebody mushed up food for them.
There's so much evidence of kindness and care and connection there, right? And so it's like, slowly but surely, all of the barriers of what make modern humans, Homo sapiens, special, different, up here on our little pedestal, have started to knock away, right? And so, oh, wait, they're wearing jewelry. Oh, look, they're choosing special colors to use, right? Like with pigments.
Oh, look, they're carefully collecting eagle feathers and crow, like raven feathers, for real, and talons. And they seem to have been doing something that maybe was a headdress. What a crazy concept. So you can see how art was like the last bastion, right? But they didn't make art. It was so funny that this was a thing.
And so it's been really interesting because this has all happened over the course of my career. When I was an undergraduate, which now is just about 20 years ago, And, um, so not very long ago. And at that point we were taught as undergrads that humans and Neanderthals did not interbreed and that Neanderthals may have been doing some things, but they don't seem to have quite been us.
Like that was, and I'm not slamming my professors. Like that was just, that was the common thing. And then, you know, fast forward about five years, Svante Paabo and his team there and Max Plank sequenced the genome. Oh, wait, wait, Our ancestors interbred with them. Well, now we need to rethink what is a Neanderthal?
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Chapter 3: What evidence supports the idea of Neanderthal artistic expression?
We should probably back up for the listeners slightly because I would like this huge like round.
No, I know. Come on, let's do the big basics. Shall we explain what exactly are Neanderthals? Talk us through this or who exactly are Neanderthals?
Here is the latest evidence, and I say this in a field where we can whiplash with new genetic information. So this is what we know. We are a sister species with Neanderthals, meaning we have a common ancestor who we believe to be Homo erectus. We do not have genetics back that far, so we can't prove prove it, okay? But everything points to Homo erectus as being sort of the common point.
They moved out onto the other continents. They survived till about 250,000 years ago, maybe even longer in Asia. So very successful, widespread species. Neck down, they looked like us. Fully functional, able to run, very similar. Their brains were a little bit smaller than ours, but already making excellent progress. They're doing complicated tools. They're doing really interesting things.
Personally, I actually think they might be where the very earliest graphic marks were made was actually with those guys.
We might cover that quickly.
And the reason why I will say that is, again, this is where understanding the family history story is actually really important, which is that so around 700,000 years ago, two groups of Homo erectus went in different directions and never saw each other again. And so what you see happening is that it's called sort of genetic diffusion.
You know, the group that went this way, certain things in the environment may have nudged certain traits to be more successful, right? In the other direction, other things might have also nudged. But they had like the same basic package, if that makes any sense, probably the same cognitive package when they left. So different, the same toolkits, same things.
And then they would have started to kind of move in their own direction in both locations. Neanderthals seem to be sort of born, bred, raised in Europe, and our ancestors are from Africa. So both descendants of Homo erectus, just in different parts of the globe, and a fascinating example of what happens when different environmental conditions shape your upbringing, right?
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Chapter 4: How did Neanderthal art challenge previous beliefs about human uniqueness?
to become Neanderthals in Europe. And there was an offshoot of them who became the Denisovans, the new species who went to Asia. And so that happened around 420,000. And so now we have the players. We've got Neanderthals in Europe, we've got Denisovans in Asia, and we've got our own Homo sapiens relatives in Africa.
And we would consider Homo sapiens to be a full-blown different species by around 300,000 this years ago, though, again, that number could change. It was 200,000 not that long ago. But the bottom line is, We're still incredibly similar. And so Neanderthals, again, they have sort of this vision of them kind of being short and squat and kind of hanging around up just in the ice.
But Neanderthals had a huge range. They actually came all the way down to the Middle East. I've seen Neanderthal sites in Jordan, for instance. So again, they were actually much more flexible and adaptive than we would think.
And I think one of the big things for your viewers as almost a takeaway today to keep in mind, because it's so interesting that we do this, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of years of a species' history today. We treat them as one group. Isn't that crazy? That would be like us pretending that Mayans and Romans were exactly the same. Oh yeah, of course, they're just humans.
I guarantee you differences occurred in their culture and in their behavior and like the things they do, the way they organize themselves. Like it's so funny because we've often treated them as, oh, Neanderthals do this or Neanderthals never, they don't do this or this is what, you know, there's lots of variation.
And one of the coolest things that's come into our field, and I personally think it's one of the most important pieces moving forward is the genetics, right? And what this is allowing us to do is to actually identify groups of humans and then also groups of Neanderthals so that we can recognize like, hey, there's these Western Neanderthals who seem to have been doing certain things.
And then, oh, isn't this neat? Ice sheets move up and down. Because again, an ice age is not just one thing. They're kind of constantly moving and shifting. We see the Western guys go trotting over all the way into Russia. And so, you know, this is the thing. They're very mobile. They're moving around. But there's huge genetic variation between even the Neanderthal groups.
Now, when I say huge, obviously, this is teeny, teeny, tiny, tiny changes at a full DNA level, but enough that we would consider them again, that we're like, oh, this is neat. We can actually track their differences.
And just so we know the date range as well, Genevieve, so a large area, quite robust in their body features, but as you say, that diversity, that variety as well. But time period for Neanderthals, do we think roughly over the last 500,000 years or so down to about 45,000 years ago?
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Chapter 5: What types of images and markings are associated with Neanderthal art?
You mentioned that we knew that there were Neanderthals in this cave beforehand living there, that you can then say, okay, that's when Neanderthals were there. Anything younger, okay, that's when it's like it was modern humans. To then have those dates come back on that same stretch of world where you have evidence pre-40,000 years that we believe is Neanderthals.
And then hands probably left by early modern humans. And then that development in art with actually a bison being shown on the same wall. That's amazing to have that all in the same cave that you could still go and see today.
You could literally go stand in front of that panel.
And you can see Neanderthal remains, artistic remains probably, and early Homo sapien remains in the same place. That's incredible.
That's why I say if you can go, go. Because like I'm... Again, they're doing... They monitor the cave very closely. Like they have CO2 monitors and stuff throughout the cave. Because the thing you have to worry about is people breathing in it too much and triggering the growth of like fungi and stuff. However, because it's such a big cave... it has more tolerance, right?
It's more like when you're in the little ones, you have to be really careful because just two people breathing in there can make a big difference. So this one's a good cave that way. One of the things I just wanted to flag too is that there is a 70,000 year artifact that came out of the front layers, which is a little, speaking of bones and stones, it's a little flat stone.
It's actually in the museum at Santander. So if you're going to That area, Santander is the capital and the museum's there. It's got four engraved cupels, which are basically engraved dots in a row with one more either above or below in an orientation. It is absolutely intentional. Like somebody didn't just accidentally make four marks in a row with one more on top or bottom.
And it kind of has the same feeling to it as the gallery of discs, which is down in the heart of the cave where there's all of these spit painted discs all along this wall. I think that this is where maybe it's been in front of us the whole time, but because that's from a 70,000-year-old dated layer. We know that layer is at least 70,000 years old. Those disks may actually be older.
It's just that they were covered up later. We don't even know. It may be that they're more in line time-wise. with the artifacts. And this is where you can see that it's such a puzzle, hey? Like, this is what we do, is we try and put little puzzle pieces together to try and rebuild and understand what's happening. And so it's like it happens slowly, right?
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Chapter 6: How do modern dating techniques impact our understanding of Neanderthal art?
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
Genevieve, we could do a whole another episode on the early signs of humans after Neanderthals and what their meanings could be. I think I'll leave it on this last question, or this last statement, I guess, to ponder. We mentioned earlier how the evidence is very clear now that Neanderthals and humans did interact in Europe for a period of time.
It's fascinating to reimagine communicating with each other. You mentioned how one of the ways they could have communicated was through art.
It's fascinating to think whether, given all of the information that may well have been embedded in Neanderthals, maybe their discs or their hand markings or the ladders and so on, whether they were able to communicate that knowledge across to humans that they interacted with. And then the humans kind of take it on, embrace it and bring it on to the next level.
That would explain why Neanderthal art is so close to human art in some of these caves that we've explored.
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. We don't know where it happened.
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