‘Everything about it is weird’: Neanderthals may have created giant sensory structure in lightless cave, says archeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes
Modern humans have long drawn dividing lines between our own species and closely related living species, such as chimpanzees, and our long-lost hominin relatives, such as Homo erectus and Neanderthals. One of those bright lines was a conception of modern humans as Homo aestheticus, the only species to make and appreciate art.
But new archaeological findings have shifted that understanding. From painted shells to majestic stalagmite rings crafted by Neanderthals, emerging evidence suggests Homo sapiens weren’t the only hominins with an aesthetic sense.
Rebecca Wragg Sykes, an archaeologist with the University of Cambridge’s McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and the University of Liverpool, has studied how Neanderthals interacted with the material world. Sykes, who is also the author of the book “Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love Death and Art” (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2020), argues that Neanderthal clearly sought to modify objects for reasons other than pure survival. And they sometimes engaged in group building projects, perhaps to create sensory experiences.
Live Science spoke with Wragg Sykes about the most intriguing Neanderthal artifacts, why they matter, and what they can — and can’t — tell us about our closest human relatives.
(This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.)
Tia Ghose: So, one of the things that you’ve talked about are the archaeological discoveries, and some of those are really intriguing artifacts that suggest to us that Neanderthals had some artistic expression, even if you quibble about whether you would call it “art.”
Rebecca Wragg Sykes: Yeah.
TG: What do you think are some of the most impressive or illuminating examples of these?
RWS: I think there’s maybe three things that you can talk about. And yeah, I think it is worth sort of making the point explicit that “art” in itself is a very particular term and it has different meanings for different people. If we say, okay, we’re going to put that word aside… So we can see that there is definitely [Neanderthal] interest in mineral pigments, and that’s blacks, oranges, yellows, and reds and possibly white from chalk …
TG: And this is known from cave paintings? Or from where?
RWS: Well, “paintings” is a bit tricky …because there are a few sites claimed for Spain. But with those, the dating is a little bit uncertain and who actually did those, and that’s kind of ongoing work.
You’ve got an object that doesn’t seem to have a very clear relationship to just the everyday survival activities. What was that?
But from other places, we know Neanderthals are collecting pigment and processing it, sometimes in a way that is becoming liquid, and they’re doing this as early as 230,000 years ago.
There’s like two objects I think are interesting. One is a little shell, a little fossil shell from a site in Italy called Grotta [di] Fumane.
And that one is interesting because it’s not being collected for food purposes. This is, in itself, a material curiosity that someone has picked up and carried for a significant distance—about a 100 kilometers [60 miles] away is the nearest source they could have got this from a geological outcrop. But probably, it was carried over a longer distance. On the outside surface are traces of red pigment, and the source for that would have been 40 kilometers [25 miles] in a different direction from the cave where this object ended up.
You’ve got an object that doesn’t seem to have a very clear relationship to just the everyday survival activities. What was that? It’s really hard to say. There’s so many stories you could tell about that one object. All we know is that it was intentionally collected and then intentionally altered to change its visual appearance.
Related: Did art exist before modern humans? New discoveries raise big questions
The other thing that happens with color is that, in two circumstances, we have what looked like mixes of pigments, so they’re taking two different kinds of pigments and mixing them together to get a different color. And interestingly again, it’s not just like some random bit of bone; it’s on the inside of a little shell. This is a shell that you would actually eat the animal from, from a site in Spain, but it’s still an unusual object. The other one is a tiny little remnant [of pigment] on the talon of an eagle.
Neanderthals sometimes seem to be interested in collecting body parts of birds — which aren’t necessarily related to them [Neanderthals] eating them [birds] — like feathers and talons. So altogether, you’ve got unusual objects with some color on them and a bit of mixing sometimes. So that’s just one theme of their aesthetics, which I think is quite telling.
A different way of altering surfaces is by incising or engraving them, and we can see that on a number of different objects. It’s not lots and lots of them all over the place, but they pop up here and there. The most, sort of, complicated one that has been found is this one from Einhornhöhle, which is “Unicorn cave.”
And what’s interesting is that, unlike a lot of other sites where we have incisions or engravings that are like a linear series of marks, [on] this one, the markings intersect with each other and it makes a chevron form.
And then the third one is Bruniquel, the big stalagmite rings in the French cave. And that’s in some ways different to these other objects, which are small and sort of individual personal projects, perhaps — whereas Bruniquel is huge. Everything about it is weird. It’s very deep inside a cave system. We haven’t found another entrance to this, as far as we know. It’s about 300 meters [1,000 feet] deep inside a hill.
So it really is a construction of some sort.
TG: So what do these pieces tell us about Neanderthal culture or cognition? Does it change our picture of who they were?
RWS: The color mixing and the fossil shell might be individual projects. But with Bruniquel, that has to really be a group, collaborative activity because it’s such a lot of effort. I don’t think anybody would buy the idea that that was one Neanderthal going in and doing all that in a cave by themselves.
TG: So the significance of it being one Neanderthal versus many is that one Neanderthal might be a fluke, as opposed to a representation of their abilities?
RWS: Not a fluke, no. It’s more about what is the purpose of these aesthetic explorations?
TG: It was a shared aesthetic project, essentially.
RWS: At the moment there is no evidence that it’s a living site, it’s the only other option that we might consider: Is this an aesthetic project?
Caves themselves are a sensory experience.
Just being underground, you don’t get all the normal sensory input. So you start to hear the sounds more, and your visual stuff gets changed; you lose a sense of time as well. So the fact that they’ve done that in a very deep cave system, I think is really interesting. And so all of those things, I think, together suggest … Neanderthals are exploring their relationship to the material world in a way that goes beyond survival tech.
TG: How is the picture of Neanderthals now different from what it was 50 or 100 years ago?
RWS: Our openness to behavioral complexity in Neanderthals is massively bigger. Some archaeologists would say it’s too big and that things have gone too far the other way — and perhaps we don’t like the idea of Neanderthals being fundamentally different, fundamentally other, and that perhaps if we did meet Neanderthals, they wouldn’t actually be very nice.
But I don’t think a lot of the evidence around aesthetic stuff is unsupported.
But the issue is how we actually interpret that.
TG: I mean, it is hard because you look at these finds, and then there’s this drawing [by Homo sapiens] of a pig in Sulawesi [Indonesia]. There were Neanderthals in Europe at this time, and you look at the material culture there, and then Sulawesi. And you’re like, that’s definitely a pig. It’s a very nicely drawn pig.
RWS: It is. Yeah, that warty pig. But I think it’s a little bit like, even amongst recent and historic human cultures like our own, there is so much variability.
Some of the art is very graphic and representational; some of it is just very graphic, abstract-looking.
Most of those things have many layers of meanings. And a classic example is, a lot of the artistic traditions amongst Aboriginal Australian cultures, which are themselves different between those different cultures.
Without the ethnographic records and the oral history records as living communities who’ve inherited the meanings of those things, we would have no idea what they mean, because some of them are just, visually, you can only say they are circles, dots, lines — they intersect or they don’t.
[But for Neanderthals], there’s nothing so far that has a clear representational thing that we think we could read. There’s nothing legible to us. That doesn’t mean there were not, sort of, specific meanings to those.
But also, they don’t have to have stories or codes within them to be cognitively meaningful as an artistic project to whoever made them. If you give chimpanzees art materials to paint, they will be interested in it and they’ll do it and they’ll be really into it while they’re doing it.
But then they may not care about it after they’re finished. It’s not like they’re like, “My painting! Where should I put it up on the wall?” No. The meaning is in the moment. It’s in that experience. And then they’ve moved on.
TG: But I mean, it does seem like the Neanderthals, some of them seemed to have clung to things for some period of time.
RWS: Like the little shell, exactly.
This is the thing. We have to conceive of Neanderthals in some ways at a species level because they did exist as a species. But within that, you’ve got many populations.
Based on the genetics, you probably have communities that were very geographically restricted that very rarely encountered other communities.
Maybe for some of them, carrying a little shell and moving it around was something that was very explicitly meaningful within a whole group, or maybe for others, they had more interactions with stuff more like a chimpanzee, and then they left it.
And I think we have to expect that one thing is not going to explain all of what Neanderthals were up to.
