Wouldn’t that be cool? Archaeologists have found a new artifact that could, if you squint, change our understanding of Neanderthal cognitive abilities. David Álvarez Alonso, an archaeologist at Complutense University in Madrid, and his team discovered a stone at the San Lázaro rock shelter near Segovia in July 2022. This stone is slightly more than 20 cm in length and it is granite. It features a unique red ochre dot, along with contours and indentations that indicate it could be the first ever known representation of a human face.
Therefore, the discovery of the stone has sparked immense debate about Neanderthal artistry and symbolic thought. The research team was enthralled by the red ochre dot. They think it is the world’s oldest complete human fingerprint, left by an adult Neanderthal male approximately 43,000 years ago. As a result, this discovery turns our historical understanding of Neanderthals’ intelligence on its head. It indicates they too may have produced art in forms not unlike our early Homo sapiens ancestors.
Álvarez Alonso went so far as to call the stone “strangely shaped.” He astutely observed that its form doesn’t look like other tools (hammers, anvils, etc.) He and his colleagues suggest that the stone could represent a once-mighty giant. They hope it might be portable art produced by Neanderthals. As he elaborated, “If you have no red dot, you can’t even say this object is red.”
The researchers took additional measures to ensure the dot’s application was as intended. Álvarez Alonso called the scientific police. The point of this was to see if their hunch about that dot being made with the fingertip was right. Those results indicated that the placement of the dot was by design. This confirmed enough for them to prove their theory that it was no mere accident.
The ramifications of this finding reach far beyond just this one object. Álvarez Alonso wanted to emphasize the wider context of Neanderthal creativity, pushing back on expectations that downplay their potential. “They were human, too,” he asserted. “The thing here is that we’re dealing with an unparalleled object; there’s nothing similar. But it’s different than art. If you discover one cave painting, you can go down the rabbit hole to hundreds more to get more context.
This claim has spawned a furious contention in the scientific world about whether Neanderthals were capable of expressing this Neanderthalpression. Álvarez Alonso noted, “And all Neanderthal-related stuff triggers a huge discussion. Now picture that same pebble—with the same incised red dot—made 5,000 years ago by fellow Homo sapiens. We’d joyfully call it portable art today. Wrapping Neanderthals in creative expression raises plenty of controversy. I think there’s sometimes an unintentional prejudice.”
The research team believes the stone’s features may be variations of pareidolia. This phenomenon is called pareidolia, when people perceive meaningful patterns, such as faces, in random stimuli. Álvarez Alonso described the challenge of pulling together this context and information. With these pieces in place, they pushed the needle theory further, proposing the idea that this could be a pareidolia and then further, implying human intervention with the red dot.
The stone’s very existence informs us with thrilling new insights into Neanderthals. It equally allows us to venture into the development of human imagination and symbolic thinking. Our researchers are still hard at work analyzing this unprecedented discovery. For them, the important thing is that it inspires other discussions about the cognitive equivalences of Neanderthals to modern humans.