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Humans

Neanderthals made the oldest cave art in the world

By Michael Marshall

22 February 2018

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This is some of the oldest cave art in the world

P. Saura

We now know for sure that our extinct Neanderthal cousins were artists who regularly drew on cave walls. The finding implies the capacity to make art may have been inherited from the common ancestor we share with Neanderthals, which lived 500,000 years ago.

Many European caves contain prehistoric art, all of which has been attributed to modern humans, though there have been past claims of Neanderthal paintings with weak evidence.

Alistair Pike of the University of Southampton, UK …

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