Determining what is and isn’t art is tough. Determining who did and didn’t make a particular art piece is tougher.
That’s the problem that torments the paleoarchaeologists and paleoanthropologists who study prehistoric paintings, anyway. And though they typically agree about which ancient scrapes, scratches and marks were made by human artists and which were not, they sometimes struggle to attribute those ancient markings to specific human species.
According to a new paper in PLOS ONE, however, researchers have had some recent success in the task of matching archaic art to its makers. Following their analysis of a series of paintings in a cave in central France, these researchers say that the art was the unmistakable work of Neanderthals, making them the oldest “unambiguous” Neanderthal paintings known to science.
