U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6378/912.full

by diodorus • 8 years ago

24 14 8 years ago

science.sciencemag.org

sillyquiet• 8 years ago

Coherent symbolism and art by literally another species (assuming you subscribe to their status as a species distinct to H. sapiens and not a subspecies). This concept is pretty mind-blowing.

robin_reala• 8 years ago

Species is a fuzzy concept, but it appears that Neanderthals and Sapiens could at least produce fertile offspring.

behindmyscreen5• 8 years ago

Infertility of offspring is not the boundary line that define species.

gdubs• 8 years ago

I’m reading Carl Sagan’s “Dragons of Eden” right now, and in light of that book this news is delightful, but not at all surprising.

wuliwong• 8 years ago

I am way out of my depth here but I've read a couple of articles recently talking about the migration of homo sapiens out of Africa possibly occurring far sooner than was previously thought [1]. That was the first one I could remember. After a quick read of this it seems that their reason for attributing this to Neandertals is only the dating. I maybe way off here but it seems premature to draw too many conclusions about the creators of this art without some sort of additional evidence.

[1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6374/456

behindmyscreen5• 8 years ago

Evidence of modern humans existing in Israel that long ago does not mean a migration occurred. Those remains could be from a group that ranged only that far and died out.

If they can tie their genetics to the genetics of non Africans then yes, you have your evidence for earlier migration, but you still need to show that modern humans could likely have been in Iberia during the time frame of the cave paintings.

The burden of the evidence that it could have been modern humans lays at the feet of those who say it could have been modern humans, not at the feet of those claiming neanderthal did it since there is ample evidence of neanderthal populations all over Europe during this time frame.

imhelpingu• 8 years ago

You talk about burden of proof like the overarching topic of contention isn't whether or not Neanderthals had the capacity for symbolic thought at all. The observation that we keep inventing new OOA migrations and then pushing them back by hundreds of thousands of years is entirely noteworthy as is the fact that these conclusions about Neanderthals are based on certainty that humans arrived in Europe 40K years ago instead of 60K years ago.

acidburnNSA• 8 years ago

In case anyone is interested in some of the details about radioisogenic dating there's a simple writeup here: https://whatisnuclear.com/geology.html

doug1001• 8 years ago

seems to be about some new dating site for Spanish geologists

U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art

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