World’s oldest fingerprint is also a clue that Neanderthals created artwork

One day round 43,000 years in the past, a Neanderthal guy in what’s now central Spain got here throughout a big granite pebble whose gratifying contours and indentations snagged his eye.

Something within the form of that quartz-rich stone – possibly its bizarre resemblance to an elongated face – can have pressured him to pick out it up, find out about it and, sooner or later, to dip one in all his hands in crimson pigment and press it towards the pebble’s edge, precisely the place the nostril on that face would had been.

In doing so, he left at the back of what’s considered the arena’s oldest whole human fingerprint, on what would seem to be the oldest piece of European moveable artwork.

The discovery, which might enrich our working out of the way Neanderthals noticed and interpreted the arena, has come to gentle after nearly 3 years of analysis by way of a workforce of Spanish archaeologists, geologists and police forensic mavens.

The dig workforce spotted there was once one thing bizarre concerning the stone – which is solely over 20cm in duration – once they discovered it whilst excavating the San Lázaro rock safe haven at the outskirts of Segovia in July 2022. It didn’t seem like one thing that were used as a hammer or an anvil; it didn’t seem like a device in any respect.

“The stone was oddly shaped and had a red ochre dot, which really caught our eye,” stated David Álvarez Alonso, an archaeologist at Complutense University in Madrid.

“We were all thinking the same thing and looking at each other because of its shape: we were all thinking, ‘This looks like a face’. But obviously that wasn’t enough. As we carried on our research, we knew we needed information to be able to advance the hypothesis that there was some purposefulness here, this was a symbolic object and that one possible explanation – although we’ll never know for sure – is that this was the symbolisation of a face.”

Determined to check their conviction that the crimson mark was once a human fingerprint positioned intentionally between the indentations that may have been the eyes and mouth of a face, the workforce enlisted the assistance of different mavens. Further investigations showed that the pigment, which contained iron oxides and clay minerals, was once now not discovered somewhere else in or across the cave.

“We then got in touch with the scientific police to determine whether we were right that the dot had been applied using a fingertip,” stated Álvarez Alonso. “They confirmed that it had.” The print, they concluded, was once human and may well be that of an grownup male.

“Once we had that and all the other pieces, context and information, we advanced the theory that this could be a pareidolia [catching sight of a face in an ordinary, inanimate object] which then led to a human intervention in the form of the red dot,” stated the archaeologist. “Without that red dot, you can’t make any claims about the object.”

Álvarez Alonso argues that the dot’s life raises questions that every one level in the similar route.

“It couldn’t have been a coincidence that the dot is where it is – and there are no markings to indicate any other use,” he stated. “So why did they bring this pebble from the river to the inside of the cave? And, what’s more, there’s no ochre inside the cave or outside it. So they must have had to bring pigment from elsewhere.”

The workforce’s findings, reported within the magazine Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, make stronger the concept Neanderthals – who died out some 40,000 years in the past – have been in a position to acts of creative and symbolic advent, that means trendy people weren’t the primary to make use of artwork as a way of expression.

“The fact that the pebble was selected because of its appearance and then marked with ochre shows that there was a human mind capable of symbolising, imagining, idealising and projecting his or her thoughts on an object,” the authors write.

“Furthermore, in this case, we can propose that three fundamental cognitive processes are involved in creating art: the mental conception of an image, deliberate communication, and the attribution of meaning. These are the basic elements characterising symbolism and, also prehistoric – non-figurative – art. Furthermore, this pebble could thus represent one of the oldest known abstractions of a human face in the prehistoric record.”

Álvarez Alonso and his colleagues are having a look ahead to the talk that their discovery will reignite over whether or not trendy people have been the primary artists.

“We’ve set out our interpretation in the article, but the debate goes on,” he stated. “And anything to do with Neanderthals always prompts a massive debate. If we had a pebble with a red dot on it that was done 5,000 years ago by Homo sapiens, no one would hesitate to call it portable art. But associating Neanderthals with art generates a lot of debate. I think there’s sometimes an unintentional prejudice.”

Still, stated the archaeologist, he and the remainder of the workforce believed probably the most logical rationalization was once that any person, a long time in the past, “saw something special in this pebble”, picked it up and set about imbuing it with that means.

“Why would a Neanderthal have seen it differently from the way we see it today?” he requested. “They were human, too. The thing here is that we’re dealing with an unparalleled object; there’s nothing similar. It’s not like art where, if you discover a cave painting, there are hundreds more you can use for context. But our assertion is that the Neanderthals had a similar capacity for symbolic thought to Homo sapiens – and we think this object reinforces that notion.”