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Neanderthals carefully placed the skulls of steppe bison (a – f), aurochs (g), rhino (h, i) and red deer (j, k) in a cave in what is now Spain. |Image credit: Baquedano et al. Natural Human Behavior (2023) CC-BY-4.0
Neanderthals purposefully collected and placed animal skulls with horns and antlers in a cave in what is now Spain, a new study finds, suggesting that these extinct human relatives had complex cultural practices more than 43,000 years ago.
The Des-Cubierta cave in central Iberia was first discovered in 2009. In 2023, researchers announced the discovery of an unusual cave Classification of 35 Large Mammal Skulls Inside the cave. Most of the jaws are missing, but all skulls are from horned or angular species, e.g. prairie bison and bison. More than 1,400 stone tools were unearthed in the same layer, all in the typical Mostrian style. neanderthal.
“At first glance, deposits look confusing,” study lead author Lucia Villaescusa Fernandeza doctoral researcher in archeology at the University of Alcalá in Spain told LiveScience in an email. “What initially looked like a disorganized accumulation of material turned out to preserve a clear record of geological processes and human activity,” she said.
cave Experienced many rockfalls Over the thousands of years since its use, Villaescua Fernandez and her team separated the role of these disturbances from Neanderthal activity. This confirms Neanderthals’ long-term collection of animal skulls during a particularly cold period between 135,000 and 43,000 years ago, according to a study published Jan. 3 in the journal Archeology and Anthropological Sciences.
“This distinction is crucial in archeology, because understanding human behavior in the past requires first determining which parts of the archaeological record were created by humans and which parts were shaped by nature,” Villaescusa-Fernandez said.
To fill this gap, Villaescua Fernandez and her colleagues carefully mapped the locations of all the archaeological remains. They then compared the distribution of rockfall fragments with the distribution of animal bones and stone tools. It was clear that the bones had been placed inside the cave on purpose. “The materials have different origins and were not introduced into the cave through the same process,” Villaescua Fernandez said.
Although the time scale cannot be directly measured and the precise duration of the exercises remains uncertain, the team also found that animal skulls were repeatedly placed in specific areas of the cave over long periods of time. Villaescua Fernandez said this suggests the practice may have been going on for generations and is not directly related to economic or survival needs.
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The exact reasons why Neanderthals collected the skulls are unclear, but the selection, handling and placement of horned animal skulls in caves where they did not live “highlights their ability to engage in cultural practices not directly related to survival,” Villaescua-Fernandez said. “This has important implications for how we understand Neanderthal society, particularly in terms of cultural transmission and shared traditions,” she added.
“Discussions of Neanderthal symbolism often rely on flimsy evidence or optimistic interpretations,” Ludovic SlimakArchaeologist at the University of Toulouse, France, “naked neanderthal” (Penguin, 2024) People not involved in the study told Live Science via email. “Here the authors took a more grounded approach, testing whether the spatial organization of the remains can be explained by natural processes alone,” he said.
Slimak said the study’s findings were Debate over Neanderthal symbolism. “Instead of asking whether Neanderthals were ‘as symbolic as we are,’ we should ask what kind of meaningful behavior they developed in the way they did. This site shows that Neanderthal meaning worlds existed, but their structure was probably very different from that of modern humans.” Homo sapiens,” he said.
