Ancient Mystery Unveiled: Neanderthal’s 43,000-Year-Old Fingerprint Discovered in Spain Challenges History
If this analysis is correct, the implications could be enormous. Based on the “strategic position” of the dot, scientists now see it as a sign of “symbolic behavior,” meaning Neanderthals could think about things in an abstract way.
While this doesn’t settle the debate about Neanderthals’ ability to create art, it does certainly make a compelling argument that they could.
A Prehistoric Red Dot Found On A Stone In Spain Captures Archaeologists’ Attention
In 2022, a team of researchers began digging at the San Lázaro rock shelter in Segovia, Spain, when they came across a peculiar 7.8-inch stone.
“The stone was oddly shaped and had a red ochre dot, which really caught our eye,” David Álvarez Alonso, an archaeologist at Complutense University in Madrid, told The Guardian. “We were all thinking the same thing and looking at each other because of its shape: we were all thinking, ‘This looks like a face.’”
Of course, humans recognizing a face in an object is nothing new. Humans are hardwired to see patterns in objects, and seeing faces — a psychological phenomenon known as pareidolia — is highly common. However, this typically only applies to Homo sapiens.
Pedro A. Saura RamosDetail of the red dot made by a Neanderthal 43,000 years ago.
But what if our prehistoric Neanderthal cousins were also wired the same way?
“As we carried on our research, we knew we needed information to be able to advance the hypothesis that there was some purposefulness here, this was a symbolic object and that one possible explanation – although we’ll never know for sure – is that this was the symbolization of a face,” Álvarez Alonso said.
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