More than 57,000-year-old fingerprints found in a cave in France are the oldest rock engravings made by a prehistoric Neanderthal, according to a study released today.
The cave of La Roche-Cotard, located in the Loire Valley in central France, has a number of non-pictorial marks on the walls that are interpreted as fingerprints.
The scientific team that conducted the study, which included French archaeologist Thierry Aubrey, who works at the Vale do Côa Museum and Archaeological Park, concluded, based on the shape, arrangement and order of the engravings, that they were deliberately organized and created. human hands, in this case a Neanderthal.
Thierry Aubry told Lusa that La Roche-Cotard’s engravings “are clear examples of abstract drawings made by a Neanderthal.”
Aubrey, technically and scientifically responsible for the Coa Valley Museum and Archaeological Park, analyzed the traces of broken stone inside the cave, a method of cutting that is attributed only to Neanderthals in Europe.
According to the archaeologist who published the Phos Coa cave engravings, the evidence collected “indicates that the cave was not visited after 57,000 years because its entrance was closed,” and it only became accessible after it was discovered and excavated at the beginning. XX century.
Specialists have come to date engravings on samples of deposits from the cave, obtained by the method of optically stimulated luminescence, widely used in archaeological dating, in particular of deposits, which makes it possible to determine, based on the light emitted during the process of optical excitation, the time elapsed since the grains that make up sediment, last exposed to sunlight.
The human origin of the non-objective and spatially structured footprints found in the La Roche-Cotard cave is “confirmed by planning and experimental studies,” said Thierry Aubrey Louzet.
The engravings show, according to the authors of the study published in the open access scientific journal PLOS ONE, that “the behavior and activities of Neanderthals were as complex and diverse” as those of Homo sapiens, modern humans, according to a note from the publisher of the publication.
For Thierry Aubrey, it remains to “establish a direct link” between the engravings and “one of the levels of occupation” of the cave by a Neanderthal that “may be older than 57,000 years”.
The Neanderthal man was small in stature and had a large brain volume, although smaller than that of Homo sapiens.
Its name comes from fossils discovered in the 19th century in the Neander Valley, Germany.
The species that dominates Europe lived between 400,000 and 35,000 years ago.