Neanderthal Art

Fifty thousand years ago, Neanderthal artists in Ice Age Europe painted symbols and handprints deep inside caves, leaving behind some of the oldest known art on the continent. These discoveries are transforming how we understand our closest human relatives. Today, Tristan Hughes is joined by Genevieve von Petzinger to explore the fascinating story of Neanderthal art. What kinds of images did Neanderthals create? What did these markings mean? And how might their artistic traditions have influenced the first groups of Homo sapiens who later arrived in Europe? MORE Homo Sapiens v Neanderthals Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-ancients/id1520403988?i=1000760668203 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/01POus7bWJQYw2K3O7nIDj?si=Ez_ciEw_T4u2o5eaA2WQGA Lascaux Cave: Ice Age Art Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-ancients/id1520403988?i=1000642225443 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/7sc0jkkZHHNHqfezOQ64lo?si=4dzhClceRICsb-LZ_1yiIw We're going on *TOUR* to Australia and New Zealand! - grab your tickets here https://fane.com.au/whats-on/an-evening-with-tristan-hughes/. Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week plus early access ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:18Tristan Hughes?

  Fifty thousand 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 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,

• 2:00Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 2:43Tristan Hughes?

  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.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:05Tristan Hughes?

  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.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  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. Now, the thing is, is that in order for us to be special, that means everybody else has to not be special. And it didn't help that the very first Neanderthal we ever found, so from the Neander Valley, Neanderthal in Germany, was in the 1800s.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  And this poor fellow had like arthritis and stuff. He was an older guy. He would have been hunched over like, you know, and then they would look, he's like this hunched back, 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 like. Just they got really deeply ingrained in the field. And it's been like this huge fight like throughout the 20th century and now to the 21st century even. Cause 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? Like, but you know, so this is where I understand at this point, probably I'd say 80 to 90%.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  80% 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 that this is 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 you know, 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.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  That somebody cared for somebody, they healed and lived for years afterwards, even though they would have been no use to anybody. From a physical point of view, because they couldn't have provided or hunted or like hunted or gathered. However, somebody cared for them or they have no teeth left and somebody fed, you know, mushed up food for them. Like 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, they're choosing special colors to use, right?

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Like with pigments, um, 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 of like, like, but, but they didn't make art. Like that was, it was so funny that like this was a thing. And so it's been really interesting because this has all happened over the course of my career. Like when I was an undergraduate, which now is like about just about 20 years ago. And so it's 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

• 6:58Speaker 02

  asked. 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, Sante Pabbo and his team there and Max Plank sequenced the genome. Oh, wait, our ancestors interbred with them. Well, now we need to rethink, what is a Neanderthal? Like if our ancestors are sleeping with these people, then like, how ape-like were they?

• 7:22Tristan Hughes?

  They can't be too different, yes.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Like, they probably talked and stuff. Like, you know, you're probably not going to go run off to the bushes with some guy who's like grunting and, you know, sort of scratching his lice like woman hoe. So, you know, it's like suddenly, almost for our own, like, like, oh, dear Lord, like, what did our ancestors do? Like, they were like, okay, well, maybe we need to revisit, what is this Neanderthal thing like that we're talking about? How's that? So that would be that, that's the fast forward through.

• 7:48Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, that was brilliant, Genevieve. And I must admit, a topic for another day, but I remember talking to Chris Stringer about this.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:54Tristan Hughes?

  Is imagining those first contacts between a Neanderthal and Homo sapien group and imagining, you know, how that language, you know, 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 is, that's another fascinating thing to explore for another day. And art is just one part of that larger story.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  Well, and because it is such a, I mean, art is a form of communication, right? So I think to think about that as well is that it is actually a way that provides potential connection between people, right? Because art is part of culture. And so this is kind of where I think we could see it that way. We should probably back up for the listeners slightly, because I would like this huge, like, round.

• 8:37Tristan Hughes?

  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 the Neanderthals?

• 8:45Speaker 02

  Here is the latest evidence, and I say this in a field where we can whiplash with like 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, fully functional, able to run, very similar. Their brains were a little bit smaller than

• 9:29Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:40Tristan Hughes?

  Ah, we might cover that quickly.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  And, and the reason why I will say that is, again, this, and so this is where understanding the family, the family history story is actually really important, which is that, so around 700 is a thousand 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 toolkit, same things. And then they would have started to kind of move in their

• 10:22Speaker 02

  own direction in both, 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? So, this is what's really fascinating to see too, is that, you know, there's the similarities and there's the differences. So, we've got these guys, they've split off, and then we have this extraordinary site called Sima de las Huises in Spain, where we have around 420,000 years ago, the very first example that we know of at the moment in the world, where they're intentionally placing their, their dead in a pit.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  And so people have argued whether this is Homo hydrobogensis or if these are early Neanderthals. So it's kind of like somewhere around 400-ish thousand, 500,000. They're starting to split enough that they might be different species now, right? Can you see how it's kind of like the slow progression? And so they were intentionally placing their dead in the bear in this pit. Simmetralascesis means pit of bones, basically. And they were able to do genetic sequencing on these people from like 440,000 years ago, I think. So what they were able to show is that these were early Neanderthals. They'd probably call them archaic. But the important thing from our point of view is this is right before Neanderthals split again to become Neanderthals in Europe.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  And there was an offshoot of them who became the Denisovans, the new species who went to Asia.

• 11:52Tristan Hughes?

  Okay.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  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-ish 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, like they have sort of this vision of them kind of being like short and squat and, you know, kind of like 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.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  Um, you know, so again, they were actually much more flexible and adaptive than we would think. And I think one of the big things, you know, 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 like Mayans and Romans were like exactly the same. Oh yeah, of course, they're just humans. Like, 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.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  And one of the coolest things that's come into our field, and I'm, I personally think is one of the most important pieces moving forward is the genetics. 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,

• 13:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:07Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 14:24Speaker 02

  That sounds about right. Yeah. So something like that. So again, very successful species. And, you know, it really makes you wonder too, speaking again of like, sometimes we just don't know what we don't know. Keep in mind, we're trying to rebuild entire worlds out of one tiny piece of stuff, which is that with that kind of time depth, most things have not survived. If it's organic materials, if it's wood, if it's, you know, skin, if it's anything like, we don't have it. We only have bones and stones. And so, you know, I often say it this way, which is, it's almost like we're like, it's like we're peeking through like a tiny keyhole in a door and we're trying to rebuild their entire world from it, right? So it's a really, this is where sometimes, you know, we have to really try and figure

• 15:09Speaker 02

  out what, not just, oh, this is the thing, but what could this thing tell us about either how they see the world or how they are thinking about the world? And that's what we're looking for in the archaeological record. That's what we use it for is we try and be like, oh, well, this is interesting. They're doing this new thing. That suggests something might have changed in their brain, or maybe they have this new culture thing, or like, this is why we care. Like, it's neat to just make lists of things, but really, what makes it so interesting is how we're able to try and understand these like mysterious and yet very closely related ancestors.

• 15:46Tristan Hughes?

  And that feels certainly even more the case when trying to find examples, you know, potentially of Neanderthal art. I mean, because generally, how basic can we go with trying to describe what we believe could be art left by Neanderthals? What types of art?

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:03Tristan Hughes?

  Are we going to be talking about?

• 16:04Speaker 02

  Okay, so first off, we need to start with what is, what is art? Let's go all philosophical. We're getting all existential. Okay, so we in the field use the term art because it's a very convenient three-letter word, right? Okay, so that when we're speaking amongst ourselves, we might use it as shorthand, but think of it as an umbrella term. Same way they use AI to mean like everything that's machine learning, we're using art in a similar way, which is that when we say art, we mean everything from graffiti in the bathroom up to the Mona Lisa. Right? So it's the full range. We are referring to any type of visual mark making.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  And so if I was being technically correct, or if I was giving a talk at a conference, like with my academic fellow academics, or if I was writing a paper, if I use the word art, I'd probably use it in quotation marks, and I'd be more likely to say graphic communication or graphic marks.

• 16:59Tristan Hughes?

  Okay.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  So that that way we're pulling out, because art almost has like a lot of Western connotations to it of like aesthetics and like what is, what is art and what is beautiful and what is, right? So let's pull that back. And what we want to talk about is the actual function of our ancestors making visual graphic marks on things with intention. That's what we're aiming for. So art writ large would be any intentional making of a mark in some sort of durable. Location, surface, etc., so that at some point, somebody else could potentially read it or understand it.

• 17:41Tristan Hughes?

  So we're not thinking at the moment, sadly, no, as of yet, Neanderthal Mona Lisa has been discovered or prehistoric Sistine Chapel equivalent. We're thinking more like, this is non-figurative drawings that have so far been discovered that we link with the Neanderthals.

• 17:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay, so I think this is though, this is a really interesting thing I'd like to point out, though, which is that we, again, because we're human, obviously, we're coming from our own perspective. And then also, we're all the products of our own culture and upbringing and everything like that. We, whether we mean to or not, we treat the Mona Lisa as being more impressive, important, high prestige than the macaroni art that your kid makes you and you put on your fridge, right? We treat it that way because of our own eyeglasses and our own filters on the world, right? We're like, we've been told this is, this is worth millions, this is adorable, right? But like, it, it, you know, that's really cute, you know, way, way to draw that stick figure. But, you know, so we don't treat them as having the same value.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  And I think we want to be really, really careful with that, which is that we don't know what the intention was with making these marks. Like, making something look pretty or having aesthetic value may not have had any relevance to them. Right? So we're, we don't want to, just because they weren't making, you know, pretty mammoths and prancing ponies like the humans were, doesn't mean that they weren't doing meaningful mark making, which was absolutely what they needed, right? Like, I think that's the important thing. It like, is almost to say, it's not like there's a pinnacle of awesomeness in art and that you need things like that lovely painting behind me or the picture behind you, like.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Those are not the best. They're just one version of art. And so I think that as an archaeologist, that's what we want to be really careful of is not accidentally privileging the pretty stuff, which has basically been my entire career. And again, no shade to anybody in the past, but you know, in a way, it's easier to study the animals because you're like, you know where to start. And, and I've read some really interesting stuff from some of the early French, um, you know, archaeologists and paleo people who studied the art in France and were sort of like, I don't know what to say about these abstract marks. But the beautiful thing is if it looks like a bison, at least you know it's a bison.

• 20:02Tristan Hughes?

  And this is

• 20:03Speaker 02

  You have a start point.

• 20:04Tristan Hughes?

  And these are the famous sites like Lascaux and Chauvet Cave, aren't they?

• 20:07Speaker 02

  Exactly, right?

• 20:07Tristan Hughes?

  And Altamira in Spain, you know, those, those iconic ones. If you type in Cave Heart.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, or Altamira in Spain, right? Like all the big ones that everybody, they call them show caves. That's what they're called. It's a showcase. And, um, and that is one particular outlet for graphic mark making. But again, it's only relevant or important in a certain context. I mean, it's not necessarily terribly useful if you're trying to count the number of days in a lunar cycle, right? Or, or if you're wanting to, you know, make some, I don't even know, like, you know, leave some sort of useful, like you're trying to make a map of your landscape, right? Like you don't get points for making the trees look extra nice. It's, it's functionality or like, do you see what I'm saying? So there's different properties of what makes things valuable. So there you go. I'm now stepping

• 20:56Speaker 02

  off the soapbox, but I just think we need to frame it that way so that we're not thinking of Neanderthals as being lesser than because they did not make shiny, recognizable picture art. What they seem to have been doing seemed to have been working, like what is success, right? Whatever it was they were doing seemed to be working very well for them. And so at that point, it is a success. And so maybe they just didn't need figurative art. Um, I know we're talking about Neanderthals today, but just for fun, I gotta drop this, which is one of the craziest things about humans. And so again, we've got, Neanderthals are making lines and other simple things on bones and stone, back to the bones and stones. You know, as of about four or 500,000 years ago, we start to see simple zigzags, lines

• 21:39Speaker 02

  on things. You know, we're starting to see these first actual making graphic marks. Um, and so we've got all that going on. Our own ancestors are doing similar things. So we've Multiple continents around the world are all doing very similar stuff, which is also where you're like, gee, I wonder where this comes from, since nobody else has ever decided to do this. And knowing they all come from the common ancestor, it seems like an interesting route to explore. But what makes humans so fascinating is somewhere between the lines and the zigzags and the little crosshatchings and stuff, we go from that to three different places on three different continents, like Europe, we've got Indonesia and we've got in Australia. Suddenly, they're all making animals.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  Like, what the heck happened? It's a black hole. We have no idea what happened in there. We don't know where it happened. We don't know what happened. But somewhere we went from nobody drew animals to suddenly somewhere. And again, because it comes out of nowhere, it's very unlikely that multiple groups of people all simultaneously decided after hundreds of thousands of years to just start drawing animals, right? So somewhere, probably before our own ancestors left Africa or quite recently after they did. Because again, for people who don't know, we're descended, most about seven billion people alive today are descended from about 10,000 people. So we're really closely related. And, you know, so again, same culture group, same language, probably took what they could do. So we don't know where it happened.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  But somewhere, humans went in their own direction, which again is not surprising. We're our own species, we're doing our thing. But that doesn't mean that Neanderthals or Denisovans are not just as cool.

• 23:26Speaker 03

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• 24:17Tristan Hughes?

  Well, we are going to delve into a few of these key sites so we can really explore these, you know, these artworks that have been associated with Neanderthals. I'm very happy that you mentioned in passing that earlier simple marking of Homo erectus. It's on a shell, isn't it, in Indonesia? Or was it Java, one of those places? But it's like 500,000 years old, the Trinyl or Trinyl marine shell?

• 24:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Trinyl, and it's a zigzag. Okay, so what matters again here for viewers and listeners is we sort of have like a mental checklist we go through, which is first of all, is this even an actual external made mark? Or is this like a natural crack in something? Okay. And so once we're like, oh, okay, it appears to be a purposeful mark. The next question is, is there some functional reason they might have been doing it, like trying to cut the clam out of the shell? Or, you know, cut meat off a bone? Is that why there's marks on this bone? Is because they were butchering it, right? Once we've ascertained it's not for those utilitarian functional reasons, then we get to, okay, we have a purposeful mark. It wasn't being done for typical food function utilitarian reasons. So we think there must have been some other meaning or

• 25:24Speaker 02

  purpose, even if we're not sure what it is. And so this is what makes that shell so exciting, is it's currently the oldest known example of something that is absolutely intentional, made with a tool, but serves no practical purpose.

• 25:37Tristan Hughes?

  Ah, okay.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  Now, that doesn't mean it's not important for some other reason, but it's not your food, shelter, warmth, right? So that's what makes it such a key piece. Though in more recent, you know, more recent years, there are just like smatters around the globe. And again, I wonder how much is that, you know, like when people have gone back to sites and revisited things, they find artifacts sometimes that had marks that they just, earlier generations had presumed it was not there, and therefore had not looked, if that makes any sense.

• 26:09Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, absolutely. And it's a nice, it's a nice example to highlight. And it's also just such an amazing artifact if you type it, type it into Google. But come on then, let's have a look at these sites associated with Neanderthal art. I know you've done a lot of work around it. And it seems like they're largely in Spain, in Western Europe. And we're going to go through them one by one, Genevieve, and we kind of describe the site itself. And then we'll explore the art associated with Neanderthals there. And the first one I have in my list is El Castillo. Now, not in Mexico, not the Maya, not the Great Pyramid at Chichen Itza, but this is something slightly different. Can you tell us what El Castillo is?

• 26:47Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So just to set the stage here, which is that we, El Castillo is from, it's a big cave, like a big, it's one of the other show caves, honestly. And for the record, it's open to the public still, mostly. So if you're ever in northern Spain, go, because I don't know how much longer they're going to leave it open for, but it is extraordinary. It is up on the side of a little, I mean, they call it Monte Castillo, but I'm from Canada with the Rockies. So it's a cute hill. But it's a hill overlooking a very important valley where there would have been herds that moved through during the Ice Age. So this is northern Spain, inland, not too far from Altamira, that kind of region. What we have is that El Castillo, at the time, it was

• 27:31Speaker 02

  a big cave mouth with a huge overhang. So a lovely place to live if you wanted to be up where you had a good view, you could see the herds, you could see things coming, you had good cover there. But again, keep in mind, people don't tend to live like inside caves because they're wet and drippy and muddy. But they often will live in the entrance or near an entrance, right? Because it provides some shelter. So that's kind of what we're dealing with at Monte Castillo. So Monte Castillo, if you go there, the entrance is fascinating because they've been excavating there for decades. And the scaffolding drops like at least 30, 40 feet. Like, there's people lived there in the entrance for like 150,000 years.

• 28:13Speaker 02

  So this is like way before modern humans ever got there. Neanderthals, and again, keep in mind, they didn't necessarily live there. Year round, maybe some did, some didn't. It depends on what's happening with the Ice Age weather around them. But people lived there for a hundred and fifty thousand years. And so that's a hundred and fifty thousand years worth of archaeology, sitting at the front of the cave and in all these beautiful little layers. So there's a very long history of people of all sorts living there. And what you find then is that there are these smaller entrances at the back of what would have been kind of like the main chamber. There would have been a couple of smaller passageways that then took you into, again, this cave that just opens up into this huge, like they're huge.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  Like the big chamber, when you first go through your little passage and then you come out the other side, is enormous. Like, it's like, you know, Lord of the Rings, when you go into like the dwarf hall, like it's huge, like it's a really big. So you walk into there and you go, now there's stairs, so, you know, which we appreciate, makes it less slippy and dangerous, but you can go down the stairs. There's art in all the, not so much in the main area, there's a little bit in the main area, but most of it is in offshoots and inside chambers or in like really lovely panels. And one of the things that makes El Castillo so amazing is that there's panels, like lots of, so a panel is what we're talking about, we're talking about a piece of the wall, which, you know, seems to be sort of bounded, like we're in a chamber, there's one big, nice, shiny whitish wall, because it's that limestone, right?

• 29:41Speaker 02

  And there's a bunch of them where it's like, there is three or four different groups of people left marks on the same wall. Like, these walls are complicated. And so there's one in particular where, um, which is where the very first time old dates came out, I think it was like twenty twelve, was the forty thousand year old. They did the first dates. And so for this, they're using what's called uranium series dating, which again,

• 30:04Tristan Hughes?

  Okay.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  cracked open everything. Because before that, we only had carbon dating, which requires charcoal or like organic material, and it's only good back to about forty thousandish or so.

• 30:13Tristan Hughes?

  And that's quite difficult for art as well, I'm guessing, to try and date something on the wall, yes.

• 30:17Speaker 02

  Yes. So, so again, you've got, there's things, like, so it's quite limited, right? You can only do black paint, it has to be charcoal. Um, there has to be enough of it that you can, you know, get, get a good sample from it. Uranium series. Because it's uranium, has a very long half-life. So you can date much further back because of those properties of it. And what we're measuring specifically is that when limestone, which is what these caves are all made of, um, when it interacts with water, it melts, it melts a little bit and it makes it come down the walls and make those beautiful translucent sheets that are called calcite. And that's what makes caves look so pretty, right? Is that sort of the constant dripping down and creating all these pretty white sort of translucent sheets?

• 30:58Speaker 02

  Well, in groundwater all over the world, not in scary levels or anything, there's tiny amounts of uranium. And so as they come down the wall and then they stick, the uranium sticks too. And what we can measure is the fact that over time uranium, because it's radioactive, breaks down into other things. Like there's a type of thorium it breaks into and a type of lead it breaks into. Those don't occur naturally. So people can measure how much of these other elements are now on the wall. And they can, they can backtrack to figure out how long it would have taken for that much to show up.

• 31:32Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, amazing. That's so cool.

• 31:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so what we're measuring here is not when it was made, we're measuring when it was covered up. So it's the minimum age of things. Isn't that crazy? So sometimes you could be talking about something that's twenty thousand years older, but it got covered up then. That's what we, what we know is what we can tell you is the minimum age of it. Isn't that neat? So there you go. There's your crash course in uranium series dating.

• 31:53Tristan Hughes?

  Well, I mean, the next big question then is you've got these new dating techniques available. And there's, there's been lots of amazing cave art on these walls which we'll explore. So what were the dates that people started to get back when they started to date these various bits of art?

• 32:08Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, it changed everything because now it didn't matter if it was an engraving or if it was red paint or black paint. If it got covered with calcite, you could date it, right? So this is, yeah, that, that it cracked the whole field open and that was about fifteen years ago now. So that's kind of where, that was the other genetics and dating methods like uranium are changing everything. So El Castillo was the first cave where they successfully got some really cool dates, which was, there was these sort of, they're called discs and they're basically spit painted. So like, like they're blowing it on the wall. And these discs were made at least forty thousand years ago because that's when they were covered up. And so the thing is though is that there was no humans at that cave forty thousand years ago.

• 32:47Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, right, interesting.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  At that cave. So this twenty twelve is was the moment. When suddenly people were like, there was the group who were like, hey, guys, guess what? Looks like Neanderthals were making art. And then there was the people who were like, no, they didn't. Yeah. So then we got into a fight, and this is where the fight has been going on ever since. Like, I think it's like I said, more and more people are joining as we go because one uranium series date. And with a new technique, and this is where there's nothing wrong in science with questioning things. It's important. Jean-Claude, who's like one of the grandfathers in our field, amazing, amazing archaeologist in his own right. Um, he pointed out that one date is not really a date. Right? Like, you you need corroborating it, you know, you know, so they had these good dates, super intriguing, you know. But now we've done uranium series, not just at El Castillo, but at other places.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  But what I'd like to sort of just flag with El Castillo, which is so interesting, is that these these spit painted discs actually go like this. So you can sort of see like they're like, they're almost like these little teacup saucer sized things like they're kind of about that size. And they're obviously kind of curling their hands. We there wherever you find them, like they're not common. But again, because I studied geometric signs, I've taken I take an interest in all those those non figurative, non shiny ponies, right? So all the caves I've ever inventory, they're always the oldest, most covered up with calcite. And, you know, so I had already started going, hmm. Like, I think this almost looks like if I had to guess, I would guess this might be a Neanderthal art motif.

• 34:19Speaker 02

  Rather than it being a human motif that our Neanderthals happened to be making.

• 34:23Tristan Hughes?

  I'm just having a look at the I'm just having a look at a picture of them on on Google search now. And they're just like kind of big red spots on the side of the wall, aren't they?

• 34:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they just like, so again, they were spit painting them on the wall.

• 34:33Tristan Hughes?

  Spit painting.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  There's a whole gallery of discs, if you look too. Um, I think I may have sent you guys a picture of those. So so you're welcome to use it. But so deep in different sections of the cave, we find these discs. And and there is Neanderthals all through the entrance way. So we know they were there. With the wall, though, where the discs were found, for instance, and there was also a hand that was covered up thirty seven thousand years ago. But so again, it was covered up, it's right near the disc, it looks similarly faded. If I had to guess, I would guess it was probably about the same age. But you know, so this is where we've got those guys. Then we have twenty seven thousand year old hands on the same panel, which would have been modern human.

• 35:09Tristan Hughes?

  Right, that's cool.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  Seventeen thousand year old yellow bison. And then I believe there's even some later stuff too, from about thirteen thousand on the wall. So that same panel. And so this is part of the problem too, is it's because the Neanderthals were like the first, they're the OGs, right? They were there first. So their stuff is really faded and has more layers of that calcite. So it's starting to look, it's harder to see with the eye. And then later, groups of people came in and it's a very nice wall and they made their marks too. And so there's lots of reasons why. And then of course, keep in mind that up until about fifteen years ago. I mean, frankly, the people who said Neanderthals made art almost were like given like tinfoil hats. Like that's how crazy it would seem to be.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  So, um, you know, this is where all of the inventories, and this is where I would argue that half of our problem is that we were working under the assumption that Neanderthals did not make art. Therefore, everything has been assigned to modern humans by default. Whether it makes sense or not. And so now our job is to start pulling that back apart and figuring out based on age, motifs, et cetera. Is there a Neanderthal tradition of art that is distinctly theirs? I think there is.

• 36:21Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, Genevieve, this is so interesting. So to clarify, with the dating that's now available. Let's say in the case of El Castillo Cave.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:30Tristan Hughes?

  If the dating comes back forty thousand years, all the way back to maybe a hundred and fifty thousand years, that age range that you know from other artifacts, I'm guessing like bones and uh, stuff like that and tools. You mentioned that there's, we knew that there were Neanderthals in this cave beforehand, living there. That you can then say, okay, that's when the 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 wall where you have evidence pre forty thousand years that we believe is Neanderthals. And then hands probably left by early, 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 can still go and see today.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  You can literally go stand in front of that panel. Yeah.

• 37:15Tristan Hughes?

  And you can see Neanderthal remains. Artistic remains probably and early Homo sapiens remains in the same place. That's incredible.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  That's why, that's why I say i- if you can go, go. Cause like I, I'm, again, they're, they're doing, they monitored the cave very closely. Like they have CO2 monitors and stuff throughout the cave. Cause 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, it has more tolerance, right? It's more like when you're in the little ones, you have to be really careful. Cause just two people breathing in there can make a big difference. But this, so this was 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 lai- like the front layers, which is a little, speaking of bones and stones, it's a little flat stone. Um, it's actually in the museum at Santander. So if you're going to that area, Santander is the capital and the museums there.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  It's got four engraved cupules, which are basically engraved dots in a row with one more either above or below in any 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. So I mean, I think that this is where, maybe it's been in front of us the whole time, but because we couldn't, cause those are 70, that's from a 70,000 year old dated layer. Like we know that layer is at least 70,000 years old. So those discs may actually be older. It's just that they were covered up later. Like we don't even know.

• 38:46Speaker 02

  So 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, it's like it happens slowly, right? Cause you need all the evidence to kind of weave together. And then you've got, for instance, a burial at a place called La Ferre Cie, um, which is in the Dordogne in France, which is a Neanderthal burial of a, it's a little girl. There is a stone slab in the burial with her, which has those engraved cupules on it. Like it is absolutely intentional. And they buried it with like, it had to be Neander- it was buried with a Neanderthal by Neanderthals. Before modern humans were in the vicinity, like, so this is again, like, it's been there.

• 39:31Speaker 02

  But because of the way that we were looking and understanding the art, we didn't, we didn't think Neanderthals were capable of doing it. And so therefore we didn't see it, which I think is, and that's what I mean, I'm, I'm, I really hope I'm not slamming, cause like, I'm, we all stand on the shoulders of the generations that came in front of us and they did really important, good work. But I think that it's such a good example of how are we limited by our own preconceived notions, right? Like, I'm sure I am too, and I'm sure future generations will be like mad. That one Tensiger lady, how did she not know, like, whatever, right? Like, but you know, this is how science works, is that we're constantly, there's new things, there's new stuff coming out. And this is where El Castillo and these other sites are so important. Because I actually think the next stage for us should be to start getting more serious about,

• 40:18Speaker 02

  can we identify specific motifs that are Neanderthal in origin? Rather than sort of, because right now, like, I built this big thing of geometric science. But anything above about forty thousand in there is fair game to be Neanderthals. And yet, we all have it classified under one species right now, which it shouldn't be. But we have to figure out how to crack it apart. And, and then the really interesting conversation I was having with some of my colleagues the other day. We were talking about the fact that all the oldest hands in the world actually come from areas where Neanderthals and Denisovans were. What if they taught us to make hands?

• 40:54Tristan Hughes?

  Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves too much. We've still got other sites to sort of.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  Slide that.

• 40:59Tristan Hughes?

  I understand, understand. We'll get to that in a moment. I must admit, I'm still looking at that gallery of red discs and I must admit. Well, it is extraordinary. I mean, move over, Mace, how this might be my new favorite prehistoric place in the world.

• 41:11Speaker 02

  You need to go.

• 41:12Tristan Hughes?

  I will need to go, exactly. I mean, is, because I want to move on to the next example now, the next cave in my list, but Genevieve, just to clarify. Is it that gallery of red discs? Is that the art from El Castillo, the, the main art that is now believed to be Neanderthals? There isn't any others we should mention?

• 41:28Speaker 02

  Um, ah, the, the discs and the hands are the big thing there, and then that artifact sitting there. So those are the big ones. The thing I would like to point out though, which probably a lot of people don't realize, is, so Monte Castillo. Has five sites, five different caves in it, all of which have art in them.

• 41:44Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, amazing.

• 41:45Speaker 02

  Yes. And one of the other caves, this one's close to the public, but this one is La Passiaga, which has the ladder shape in it, which dates to sixty five thousand plus.

• 41:55Tristan Hughes?

  Right. Well, let's do that one next.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  Yes, we need to, because it's literally, I think about two hundred meters further along.

• 42:00Tristan Hughes?

  Okay, so we've gone on our trip to El Castillo and now like you must wish to do La Passiaga or and we've been allowed in somehow, we've sneaked in. Explain this site, this cave to us, how different it is.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  So El Castillo seems to have been the living cave. It raised, it had big, you know, a big, beautiful veranda out front, basically, right? Like it had the big overhang, great view. It was the big cave. It makes sense. La Passiaga does not have any evidence of really living at the entrance, so it's probably more a cave they visited with a purpose. And it's got, again, several areas and there is, again, here we've got, there's definitely multiple layers of art. Like probably again, at least I would say, I would guess Neanderthal, stuff that's around twenty five thousand-ish plus years and then there's stuff that's probably around the fifteen to seventeen thousand in there. So again, lots of layering of things. So keep that in mind.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  Because that's one of the things that's confusing about the ladder is that in one of the passages of La Passiaga, there is this faded out thing that sort of officially is called a scoliform, which is Latin for ladder shaped. And this one again, was dated based on a little chunk, it looks like a little cauliflower, of calcite that grew over top of the paint. And so again, they were able to date that and to show that that grew there sixty five thousand years ago, roughly. So with the ladder, it's confusing for people, I think, sometimes because there's, it's basically like a big vertical thing with like crossbars, right? Doesn't mean it's an actual ladder, but it looks like that to our eyes. And there's also though, somebody's drawn a deer in it, but using different pigment.

• 43:39Speaker 02

  So from a different time period, so probably later. Because again, we don't have any evidence of Neanderthals making animal art, right? But yeah, so it's a very complicated and there's some dots nearby, but if you look at it using an algorithm that allows us to actually identify very specific shades of red.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  You can see that it's different colors. So that gives us a clue that things were made in a layered way at different times. But the oldest piece, the one where the little cauliflower is, is the sixty five thousand year old, roughly, you know, mas o menos, as they would say in Spain, so more or less, the latter. And so this is where it's important to note, though, how close it is to El Castillo. Because it's right down the way, so it would not be surprising if you have mark making people living there, that they might have used other caves for similar things.

• 44:30Tristan Hughes?

  But a very different, a very different example of art from the discs that we were just talking about. And from what you're saying, much older as well. This, I've got, once again, an image of it up at the moment. It's incredible. And you can see the rear end of that deer, which is created later as well, those dots nearby, and that other weird symbol to the right of it. And it's amazing.

• 44:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. So this is what I'm saying, is that you can see, though, yeah, I mean, the art is, it's just fascinating the way it's all done as well, and the way that people keep kind of coming back and doing more over top of, like, you can see where it's incredibly complicated to peel the layers back, right? And so this is where, again, modern technology, there's this thing called Raman spectrometry, which actually analyzes pigment at the chemical, at like, the atomic level. And so they can see the different ingredients in the different paints and the different layers, and then you can split them. And so this is the kind of thing, the work that's being done now, to understand, okay, what was made at the same time with the same paint recipe, what might have been made differently? So this is where my colleague, Amy Chase, she's working on her PhD right now, so I can't,

• 45:33Speaker 02

  I can't tell you the results because I haven't published it yet. However, her PhD, which is just such a cool one, because this is the kind of work that needs to be done, she has gone through and analyzed the, at the, you know, sort of at the atomic level, the mineral level, what, what the pigments were, because they found red pigments in the Neanderthal layers at El Castillo. So we know they were using these red ochre pigments to, which are on the walls. So her PhD is actually looking at how similar are the recipes that are on the walls to the ingredients that are in those layers? Because if it's the same, or very, very similar, right? Because usually the way you make paint is you start with it, oh, actually. I have some ochre.

• 46:17Tristan Hughes?

  So ochre.

• 46:17Speaker 02

  As one does.

• 46:18Tristan Hughes?

  So the obtaining, yeah, so explain the process of the obtaining of ochre and making something on the wall.

• 46:22Speaker 02

  This is ochre. It's found all over the world. It's, it's the, that's just the sort of the catchall term for iron oxide or hematite.

• 46:30Tristan Hughes?

  Ah, okay.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  Which is basically like rusty sediment. And so in different parts of the world, you get different variations of red, purple, things like that. So different vibrancies, that kind of stuff. So what that means though is that each of these has slightly different chemical signatures. Because they come from different places with other sort of like, some might have like bits of quartz in it, or bits of talc, or titanium, like just depends where you are. That way you can match up the paint recipes. Isn't that cool? So this is another whole new thing that's just been cracking open in like the last 10 to 15 years. Is also being able to directly read paint recipes and then figure out which chunks of ochre were used to make which things on the wall.

• 47:13Tristan Hughes?

  Right. So like, let's say that, so potentially it's like, that ladder was made with a type of ochre that originated from 20 kilometers from where they were. And it dates to 6,000 years. And we found ochre in the cave on the floor, which also came from there.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  With the same chemical profile.

• 47:28Tristan Hughes?

  And which suggests that that oak on the floor was used by these people to create that particular pattern. And then you can join the dots and there you go. You have more and more of a story.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  Do you see?

• 47:36Tristan Hughes?

  Fascinating. Yeah.

• 47:37Speaker 02

  I'm sorry, from the outside, I'm sure it seems excruciatingly slow, but these are kind of complicated things that like, we're having to sort of develop as we go. We're at the start of this. Like, I think we're just, like, I just gave a paper at a conference this year where I actually said, like, hey, guys, let's all work together on this, because this is a big project. Can we split off Neanderthal motifs? So like the specific shapes or types of things they were making, can we actually, for the first time, speak about a Neanderthal art tradition that is separate and distinct from a human tradition? And how do we figure out what those things are? Because that will also help us understand who was in what caves doing what, right?

• 48:18Speaker 02

  And then we can start to figure out the order of things. If we're going to ask crazy questions like, what if Neanderthals taught humans how to make hands? Where's the oldest hands, right? Like, we need to know enough information to understand if we're, all the oldest hands we're finding are with Neanderthals and Denisovans, then. It's illogical that humans invented it first. Right? But I think that so this comes, we have to change our own mindset about it first and to think about them again is not and also not being a monolithic entity, which is that in Crimea and in Eastern Europe, we have Neanderthals who seem to be not doing paint stuff so much, though again, there's some ochre, our colleague Francesco Derico and his team just identified ochre crayons in the Crimea

• 49:03Speaker 02

  that have that appear to have been used and scraped, which looks like they were being used to make pigment, which is cool. But at those sites, they have stones and bones, back to our stones and bones, with series of parallel lines, very intentionally carved parallel lines. And so that seems to be more their thing, as I would call them like the parallel line people over there. And so those are one set of Neanderthals are doing that while these other Neanderthals seem to be doing paintings or making little engraved circles. But we're not seeing the engraved circles over in Eastern Europe and into the Crimea area. We're seeing lines and more linear art. So we could be, again, we're probably not talking about one Neanderthal art. We're probably talking about culture groups who created their own traditions. Isn't that fun?

• 49:57Speaker 03

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• 50:48Tristan Hughes?

  I'll clinging back to what you were saying at the beginning that, you know, we're covering a large range of time and different groups over a large area and we just class them as Neanderthals, but you need to think a bit more than that.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:58Tristan Hughes?

  Okay, before we go on to the summarising questions, Genevieve, I also had in my notes Ardellus Cave, but are there any other key cave sites you'd like to mention where we also potentially have examples of Neanderthal art amongst, you know, early Homo sapien art as well that we haven't covered yet?

• 51:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, I think Ardellus is a really fascinating cave. I have worked there lightly with some of my colleagues, but it's not my cave, but there's, Pedro has been working there for like 30 plus years, he's amazing. And so this is his site, he just published a book actually on Neanderthals and Ardellus. So I'd like to shout him out. I don't, I think it's like an academic book, I don't know if you can download it, I think you might, I don't think it's not a moneymaker book, this is him wanting to share all his research. But what makes Ardellus so fascinating, and I have another colleague Barbara Osterbeck, and her work is on how people interact with caves very physically, like the embodiment of like putting paint on your hands and actually touching the cave walls.

• 51:59Speaker 02

  Neanderthals seem to have done that more than humans. So again, there seems to be different patterns and Ardellus is a fascinating example, because as my colleague Pedro, because again, he's done all the archaeology as well as the art analysis. Neanderthals appear to have been returning there regularly for very short periods of time, which almost thinks it might be some sort of ritualistic, like they were going to the cave in order to perform rituals. And there are hands all over the cave, there is little blown marks all over the cave. So again, that idea was, did they keep coming back in order to do certain ceremonies or rituals there? And the archaeology shows a whole lot of very tight layers, but returns, which is just fascinating.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  And so I didn't go down, there's one part down in the depth of there, but one of the things about Ardalis is really neat, just to help give your viewers and listeners an idea. And again, by the way, you can actually book a tour to go to Ardalis. It's controlled, but you can actually go to part of it. It is one of the most sparkly caves I have ever seen. It is all quartz calcite in there, like it is like you're walking into winter wonderland, like it's sparkling, it's just extraordinary. So from an, you know, again, an aesthetic point of view, if you were going to have a cave that was maybe your special ritual cave, it is a pretty darn cool cave. And it has huge like stalactites that look like massive chandeliers coming down from the ceiling, like it is a really neat cave. So you can see where it would have been a bit of an experience just to walk through there, I would imagine.

• 53:26Speaker 02

  But my colleague Barbara, she studied, I guess, down in the, one of the really deep sections, it's quite dangerous to get to. There's handprints there where actually they touched the wall and then just slid their hands down the wall. Like, so again, they're, they're interacting with the wall in these really interesting ways. Now, modern humans also appeared to have gone in there and done things too, but there's a very definite heavy presence of Neanderthal tools, sites, what we think is art, and the reason why we're bringing up Ardalis is because some of the other really old dates, again, using calcite and uranium series, come from some spit painted dots, so smaller ones that are on some of the, it's, um, it's just a beautiful curtain of calcite there.

• 54:09Speaker 02

  And so there's these little sprayed dots and those were also dated to around 65,000. So that's why people mention that cave is because it's, it's such a neat example of, um, that they didn't live there, but they appear to have returned frequently, at least during one period of time. Um, I was actually talking to my colleagues about it a while ago. We think there may be like a whole Neanderthal culture sitting down in southern Spain that just really hasn't been properly recognized. Because northern Spain has gotten more attention, um, and has been sort of studied more, but as things are starting to open up, it's looking like there may actually be quite a heavy presence of Neanderthals down south. So this is kind of a stay tuned, there's lots of work underway right now, but, um, you know, and, I mean, so think about it this way too.

• 54:53Speaker 02

  These are areas that have been studied for like, you know, 100 plus years, like France and Spain have a long history of Paleolithic art studies. You can do entire programs at university and then there's an emphasis on it, there's funding. Think about what else is sitting out there in the world? In other countries where maybe just nobody's, you know, there's not just, and again, this is not as a slam to anybody because some countries are just too poor and they have other priorities they need to pay attention to. Um, other countries just may not have thought of themselves as potentially having a lot of ancient art in them, or it just hasn't been an emphasis in the country. But you know, there is so many blank spots on the map between say there and like

• 55:33Speaker 02

  Denisova Cave in Siberia, where again, we know that Neanderthals lived there with the Denisovans. Like we have Denny from 90,000 years ago, it's a little girl who had one Neanderthal parent and one Denisovan parent. Like that's wild. And, and so to think that, you know, there, there, there's this huge spread of them and we don't really know what they were capable of. We have these remnants, but we, we need to, we would need to get serious about it and actually start tracking it down and tracing it a bit more to understand. And so Ardales though, looks like it could be another really good spot. And I think frankly, around Malaga down in the south of Spain in general, has huge promise for exciting new Neanderthal information to come out in the future about the art there.

• 56:17Tristan Hughes?

  And new caves and new art and, and just to kind of summarize what we've been talking about then Genevieve. So at least in caves, they're saying red ochre paints that we associate with Neanderthals now.

• 56:29Tristan Hughes?

  The main types of signs, the main types of graphic markings that you see, is it largely kind of the spit painting discs, those ladders, maybe a few hands? Is that the main types of art that we're associating with Neanderthals right now?

• 56:42Speaker 02

  Okay. So this is, I mean, this is off the top of my head. And so, and this is, this is what I would call, this is, this is what we would call in the field like anecdotal evidence, which means. As somebody, because I've at this point, I think I've worked in like 107 caves. I've worked in a lot of caves. So part of it is just the pattern recognition piece, right? Like when you've worked in that many sites, you start to kind of get a feel for like, oh, I'm seeing this again. That's interesting. If I had to anecdotally classify some art as being Neanderthal, I would say hands, not exclusively in a circle, because we definitely have humans making them too. But handprints for sure, especially the negative handprints and spit paintings. Spit painting seems to have been a thing for them. My colleague Barbara has some amazing sites where they were just going around like blowing red discs

• 57:27Speaker 02

  onto like stalactites and things in caves, like they were just marking the cave with them, right? So I would say spit painting is definitely one of their techniques that they like to use for sure. Hands, dots, these bigger discs, cupules, so again, like an engraved dot, lines, also a series of lines. So that, don't forget, of course, the, the famous hashtag from

• 57:52Tristan Hughes?

  Is that hashtag signs?

• 57:54Speaker 02

  From Goran's cave down in Gibraltar, which is again, there was no humans anywhere in sight. Like it's Neanderthal. And our colleague Francesco Derico, who does a ton of like experimental archaeology, and he's the guy you call in if you need to verify something. He went in and he verified that again, this was not just made because somebody was trying to sharpen a tool. Like there was something going on here. So Goran's cave has this amazing hashtag in it. And again, there's some other potential grids in other places. These hashtag remarks, which could now, though we should be looking and assessing calmly, like, don't presume it's human, because we've always presumed all these things were human. So this means we're going to actually have to go revisit it. But I would say

• 58:31Tristan Hughes?

  And still north and crosses, is this what thinking?

• 58:33Speaker 02

  A series of lines, simple crosses in some places, zigzags. Like I think that there's, and it could even be too, though, that some of those are almost like the, the baked in ancestral kit.

• 58:47Speaker 02

  And which again, I think, and again, people are gonna disagree with me, so please assume this viewers and listeners, which is this is my opinion. Not everybody agrees with me, but from what I'm seeing, and this is just based on what I'm seeing, it appears to me that this does track back to even earlier than we had previously understood, and it's just that each of them then moved in their own direction and developed out their art traditions in their own ways, no different than how different humans have moved around the planet and then really developed their own art traditions, right? Like, if you think about how different Polynesian art looks from, say, like, you know, Western, like, Italian Renaissance art, like, it's extraordinarily different. Both clearly cool in their own way, both come from the same species,

• 59:28Speaker 02

  but very different ways of doing their art. And so I think that we want to really flag that with humans and Neanderthals and stuff like that, and even within these groups, that there's a lot of variety and that maybe we just haven't had the tools before to see it, but I think we might be starting to now. So I think, stay tuned, it's an exciting time.

• 59:46Tristan Hughes?

  Very exciting, and I guess also one of those big questions, which there must be so many theories about now, Genevieve, and I'm sure you've got your thoughts as well, is trying to figure out what these signs, you know, what they all mean, what's the purpose of them, whether they're made with ochre paint, or whether they're, you know, their markings carved onto a portable object that the Neanderthals are taking along with them.

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, I think, so I think that this is where

• 1:00:11Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm so sorry to disappoint everyone. I don't think we'll ever be able to, like, decode it, right? Like, so it's just that, for one thing, we don't have enough repetition and examples, like, usually you would need something with more, like, if you think about what they were able to do with hieroglyphs or something like that, it's a very big set of symbols, which is repeatedly used across time so that you can get patterns of use from them, right? And then you can start to figure out, oh, these things usually are this, these things usually do that. They don't seem to be using their graphic marks quite that regularly and in quite a standardized way yet. It's prob- but again, so it's probably more that what they were doing was that there was important things to them that they were marking, right? Like, they were making marks in order to send,

• 1:00:54Speaker 02

  you know, information or messages about things that were important to them, and that information could have been, this is my piece of oak or don't touch it, right? Or this is the clan of the bison's cave, right? Like, for real, like, that could be stuff like that. There's other examples where it could be path markers in caves, like- Take this passageway, bad cave bear lives down there. Like, there really are examples of what look like path markers, too. So there's a huge variety of things. What I would say, though, is that I do believe that a lot of these geometric marks, certainly with the humans, could be actually figurative things that we just haven't quite identified what they are. Because if we're looking at some of the geometric marks, they look like stylized, real-world things.

• 1:01:38Speaker 02

  So I think on some level, certainly with the human stuff, because they were making figurative art that looked like, that was meant to replicate real-world items, I think we could probably at least get to a point in maybe figuring out some of what they were depicting. Like, what is this thing, right? Like, oh, maybe this is an arrow or a spear, or... That doesn't mean we can understand what it means, right? Because if you think about it, like, if you think about, like, a Christian cross, if you are part of a group of people who understands what a Christian cross is, that tiny symbol, think about the folders, it unlocks in your brain, right? Like, it unlocks 2,000 years of history, it unlocks the Crusades,

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  it unlocks the churches and the Reformation and the printing press, like, boom, right? Like, that's all this is. And yet, it's like, so, I mean, I think, I was thinking about it the other day, which is, I mean, language is one of the most compressed algorithms that's ever been invented, right? And so this is where, with the Neanderthals, with other things, I mean, you know, if they're doing non-figurative stuff, it's going to be harder for us because we don't know why they were making it. Like, 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, like, do they seem to have been counting? Like, was this some early form of counting?

• 1:03:00Speaker 02

  Especially, and you know, and things we could look for would be, do we see the same number? Like, if we've got a row of lines on a bone, is it always eight lines? You know, is it always five lines? Like, what are they doing? Like, 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.

• 1:03:46Tristan Hughes?

  Genevieve, we could do a whole nother episode on the early signs of, you know, humans after Neanderthals and what their meanings could be. I think I'll leave it on this last question, well, this last kind of statement, I guess, to ponder. Is we mentioned earlier how, you know, the evidence is very clear now that Neanderthals and humans, they did interact in, in Europe for a period of time. And fascinating to reimagine communicating with each other. And you mentioned how one of the ways they could have communicated was through art. It was fascinating to think whether, you know, given all of the information that may well have been embedded in the end, in their, 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.

• 1:04:30Tristan Hughes?

  And then, you know, the humans kind of take it on, embrace it and bring it on to the next level. That would explain why, you know, Neanderthal is so close to human art in some of these caves that we've explored.

• 1:04:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so I, I think it's a fascinating question about, yeah, who taught what, who, like who, who taught what to who. And then also keeping in mind that the place, 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 Shanadar. So when you have Ella on, you'll have to ask her about, because she's, she's been to Shanadar, which is so cool. That's in Iraq, you know, so again, we've got the, but maybe we don't know, we, we don't know where it happened. And one of the things I'll sort of finish with, because I, I know we're, we're hitting our time here.

• 1:05:23Speaker 02

  So two things, first of all, this really great Japanese video game company actually created a video game. Using the signs, like from the geometric signs, that's called I Mother. And it's about a Neanderthal woman who gets separated from her tribe. It's such a cool game. It's really hard. It's a puzzle game, so be prepared. But like you can actually, she uses symbols she's finding made by humans and stuff to start decoding things. Like it's really, they actually explored that whole idea. So I just had to throw it in there because it's a really interesting educational, like how do we do something educational with ancient history? The other thing I wanted to just flag is, so if we want to answer these big questions, because you can see we're talking about intercontinental questions. We're looking for patterns across continents.

• 1:06:08Speaker 02

  We're looking for patterns across hundreds of, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years. We could not live in a better time than right now to be asking those kinds of questions. Like, it feels like just that incredible intersection of technology meets capacity, right? Which is that we have all this data, which we've been busily squirreling away for the last hundred years. And we've been asking questions as big as we could, but we could be asking bigger. And a lot of what you're asking about goes to those really large questions of, we need to understand at a civilizational scale, both in terms of Homo sapiens and in terms of Neanderthals and Denisovans. What were they doing? And then where were the interaction points? What was happening?

• 1:06:53Speaker 02

  And then who had what first? And then do we see things move afterwards? And are they moving with different groups of people as they come together and then they separate? So first of all, we need to start filling in the blank spots on the map. We cannot do this without starting to fill in the world map. And so that is one of my big pushes right now. Is one of the reasons why I'm not working so much just in Europe, is I'm starting to work at the global scale. And so this is actually what I've been, I've been hiding in my own hermit cave for the last year. And I have designed a AI-integrated research system, which is for the whole field. And it will actually be, the public will be able to interact with it in the future as well. So we basically turned the AI into our librarian. And we're slowly but surely starting to input all the information from the field into it,

• 1:07:38Speaker 02

  so that we can start asking really big questions.

• 1:07:40Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, amazing.

• 1:07:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so this is, this is where it's just starting to come to life. It's, it's an extraordinary feeling to see.

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  Something that you'd always dreamed about like actually come to life? Because these are the kinds of questions that matter. These are the ones that like each of my colleagues that I'm working with, because I work with the first art team, which is a big group of folks who kind of work in the Iberian Peninsula. And then also we work with other institutions, you know, each one of us has like the question that we've always wanted to answer. And for most of us, they're the quite large scale questions, like, you know, of things we'd like to know. And with the technology that we're busy building out right now, I think we're actually going to be able to like tackle some of them, which is just extraordinary. And so I think that's where I'd like to leave it is.

• 1:08:26Tristan Hughes?

  This is Lia Kara. Is it Lia Kara?

• 1:08:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, which is the Living Intelligent Archive of Ancient Culture, Art and Relational Archaeology. And so Lia for short. So Lia's our librarian. But you know, so again, integrating in a graph style database, integrating in GIS, integrating in huge archival back literature in the field in order to have real truth. And then all of the photos and all of these things, you know, and in the future, we're looking at, can we train Lia to read hyperspectral scans? Which means full elemental level scans to help us rebuild those walls and those paint recipes. So, you know, this just, yeah, it's like, it's such an incredible thing to be like, what can we imagine?

• 1:09:07Speaker 02

  And then like, it's, it's actually within the realm of possibility now. So stay tuned. That's how I would say, we're at the start of an exciting new era.

• 1:09:14Tristan Hughes?

  Start of an exciting new era. That's a fascinating, that's a fantastic place to end this episode. Genevieve, it just goes to me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today.

• 1:09:22Speaker 02

  It was a pleasure. So it's always so fun to talk about it. As you can see, yeah, I mean, exciting times ahead. So, you know, thanks for giving me the opportunity to share it with the public because I really feel like with somebody who has the privilege of doing my passion as my job. And who again, has been supported by public grants and other things by people around the world. I feel like it's one of my obligations is to report back in and to make sure the rest of our Homo sapiens, you know, cohort know about it. Because like this belongs to all of us and I'm really excited as we move into the future to be able to share it more broadly with people.

• 1:09:57Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Dr Genevieve von Petzinger talking through the fascinating developing story of Neanderthal art. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Thank you so much for listening. Now, if you enjoyed this episode and you're enjoying the Ancients podcast, then please make sure that you are following the show on either Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That will allow us to keep doing this show and to share these amazing stories from our distant past, in this case, our Ice Age, very, very prehistoric past, with you, giving amazing experts like Genevieve the Spotlight for many, many years into the future. That's the aim. That is always the aim of the Ancients podcast, first and foremost. If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, we'd really appreciate that. Now,

• 1:10:42Tristan Hughes?

  don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe. Right, that's all from me. I will see you in the next episode.