All articles tagged with #la roche cotard
Archaeologists discovered deliberate finger engravings in a sealed Neanderthal cave in France, dating back over 57,000 years, challenging the view that symbolic behavior was unique to modern humans and suggesting Neanderthals possessed complex cognitive abilities.
Neanderthals likely created Europe's oldest-known engravings, discovered in a French cave sealed for tens of thousands of years, according to a study published in PLOS One. The cave of La Roche-Cotard, 150 miles southwest of Paris, contained eight panels with more than 400 traces of abstract lines and dots. The researchers concluded that the engravings were made by Neanderthals with their fingers, just as the researchers did in an experiment. The engravings are lines called "finger flutings," made when someone swiped their fingers flat along the silt-covered wall. The cave closed up at least 57,000 years ago and possibly as long as 75,000 years ago, making it "highly unlikely" that anatomically modern humans had access to the inside of the cave.