Department of Human Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany.
Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton, Avenue Campus, Highfield Road, Southampton SO17 1BF, UK.
Science. 2018 Feb 23;359(6378):912-915. doi: 10.1126/science.aap7778.
The extent and nature of symbolic behavior among Neandertals are obscure. Although evidence for Neandertal body ornamentation has been proposed, all cave painting has been attributed to modern humans. Here we present dating results for three sites in Spain that show that cave art emerged in Iberia substantially earlier than previously thought. Uranium-thorium (U-Th) dates on carbonate crusts overlying paintings provide minimum ages for a red linear motif in La Pasiega (Cantabria), a hand stencil in Maltravieso (Extremadura), and red-painted speleothems in Ardales (Andalucía). Collectively, these results show that cave art in Iberia is older than 64.8 thousand years (ka). This cave art is the earliest dated so far and predates, by at least 20 ka, the arrival of modern humans in Europe, which implies Neandertal authorship.
尼安德特人的象征性行为的范围和性质尚不清楚。尽管已经提出了尼安德特人体装饰的证据，但所有洞穴绘画都归因于现代人。在这里，我们介绍了西班牙三个地点的年代测定结果，这些结果表明洞穴艺术在伊比利亚半岛的出现时间比之前认为的要早得多。覆盖在绘画上的碳酸盐壳的铀-钍 (U-Th) 年代测定为拉帕西加 (坎塔布里亚) 红色线性图案、马尔特拉维索 (埃斯特雷马杜拉) 手印和阿尔达莱斯 (安达卢西亚) 红色绘有洞穴钟乳石的最小年龄提供了依据。这些结果共同表明，伊比利亚半岛的洞穴艺术比 64.8 千年前（ka）还要古老。这种洞穴艺术是迄今为止有日期记录的最早的洞穴艺术，至少早于 20 千年前现代人到达欧洲，这意味着尼安德特人是其作者。
