The question of whether symbolically mediated behaviour is exclusive to modern humans or shared with earlier populations such as the Neanderthals has been hotly debated for decades. Now researchers at four European universities believe they have confirmed that personal ornaments and other objects uncovered in French caves were made by Neanderthal people.The archaeologists report that in the Grotte du Renne, Arcy-sur-Cure in France, the cave contains Neanderthal remains and large numbers of personal ornaments, decorated bone tools and colorants. But a long-running dispute centres on whether the various objects were made by modern humans and became mixed with Neanderthal remains from a previous period.
The researchers used modelling to rate the probability of the objects, including Neanderthal teeth, originating among the Neanderthals but later becoming mixed with material from later modern humans.
In a paper published in the journal PlosONE*, the researchers write that for most of the 20th century, personal ornaments, systematic pigment use and elaborate bone technology were associated with the co-emergence of Cro-Magnon people and the Upper Paleolithic, beginning in Western Europe with the Châtelperronian, the earliest industry of the Upper Paleolithic in central and south western France.
"Over the last three decades, a number of findings challenged this view, namely that in Africa, ornaments, pigments and abstract decoration occur among the immediate ancestors of modern humans, that anatomical modernity emerged earlier in Africa, that burial ritual, jewellery and body painting are known among European Neanderthals and that where the Châtelperronian is found with diagnostic fossils these are of Neanderthals, not modern humans."
They say the earliest evidence for anatomical modernity in Europe post-dates by many millennia the emergence of the Châtelperronian, corroborating the Neanderthal produced the objects found in the cave.
No sudden change or accretion was observed in the early stages of symbolic material culture but rather a discontinuous pattern of asynchronous emergence, disappearance and re-emergence of its features among both 'modern' and 'archaic' populations of the two continents.
"As a result, most paleo-anthropologists now acknowledge that 'symbolic thinking' and 'modern behaviour' are not species-specific features of anatomically modern humans and that Neanderthals were the makers of a symbolic material culture."
* A report on the research, "The Reality of Neandertal Symbolic Behavior at the Grotte du Renne, Arcy-sur-Cure, France" was published in PlosONE.