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Horse paintings at Tito Bustillo cave, Spain. Photo by Rodrigo de Balbin Behrmann from LiveScience.

Note: ‘Neandertal’ is the modern spelling of ‘Neanderthal’. Neandertals lived from about 130,000 – 28,000 years ago and were larger-boned and stockier than modern humans. The question of whether they should be considered Homo sapiens is unresolved.

Stupid joke: Ayyyy the Engineers were horses.

The basic questions about early European cave art—who made it and whether they developed artistic talent swiftly or slowly—were thought by many researchers to have been settled long ago: Modern humans made the paintings, crafting brilliant artworks almost as soon as they entered Europe from Africa. Now dating experts working in Spain, using a technique relatively new to archaeology, have pushed dates for the earliest cave art back some 4000 years to at least 41,000 years ago*, raising the possibility that the artists were Neandertals rather than modern humans. And a few researchers say that the study argues for the slow development of artistic skill over tens of thousands of years.

Figuring out the age of cave art is fraught with difficulties. Radiocarbon dating has long been the method of choice, but it is restricted to organic materials such as bone and charcoal. When such materials are lying on a cave floor near art on the cave wall, archaeologists have to make many assumptions before concluding that they are contemporary. Questions have even arisen in cases like the superb renditions of horses, rhinos, and other animals in France’s Grotte Chauvet, the cave where researchers have directly radiocarbon dated artworks executed in charcoal to 37,000 years ago. Other archaeologists have argued that artists could have entered Chauvet much later and picked up charcoal that had been lying around for thousands of years…

Read Did Neandertals paint early cave art? in Science.

Horse painting at Lascaux cave, only about 20,000 years old. Photo by Ralph Morse for Life magazine.