Neanderthals didn’t just survive Europe’s Ice Age landscapes – they ventured into deep caves and made art. What they left isn’t figurative like the later animal scenes of Homo sapiens.

Instead, it is a repertoire of hand stencils, geometric signs, finger-drawn lines, and even built structures. This type of artmaking points to creative intent and symbolic behavior long before our species arrived.

The latest synthesis of discoveries from France and Spain shows that these nonfigurative markings and installations predate modern humans in western Europe by tens of millennia.

The research moves the long-running debate about Neanderthal cognition from speculation to evidence.

Neanderthal art decoded

All confirmed examples so far are nonfigurative – no animals or humans. Instead we see hand stencils made by blowing pigment over a hand, “finger flutings” pressed into soft cave surfaces, linear and geometric motifs, and purposeful arrangements of cave materials.

Neanderthals inhabited western Eurasia from about 400,000 to 40,000 years ago and have often been caricatured as the archetypal “cavemen.”

Questions about their cognitive and behavioral sophistication persist, and whether they produced art sits at the center of that debate.

Despite proof that Neanderthals used pigments and made jewelry, some researchers resisted the idea that they explored deep cave systems to create lasting imagery.

New dating work from researchers at Université de Bordeaux has shifted that view. In three Spanish caves – La Pasiega (Cantabria), Maltravieso (Extremadura), and Ardales (Málaga) – researchers documented linear signs, geometric shapes, hand stencils, and handprints made with pigments.

At La Roche-Cotard in France’s Loire Valley, Neanderthals left suites of lines and shapes in finger flutings (the trails left when fingers move through soft cave mud).

Testing Neanderthal creativity

Deep inside the Bruniquel Cave in southwest France, Neanderthals broke off stalactites into similarly sized sections and assembled them into a large oval structure, then lit fires on top.

It was not a shelter but something stranger – and if you saw it in a contemporary gallery, you might well call it “installation art.”

Now that well-dated examples exist in Spain and France, more finds are likely. The challenge is timekeeping: establishing reliable ages for Paleolithic cave art is technically difficult and often controversial.

Stylistic comparisons and links to excavated artifacts can help, but they only go so far.

Aging art in stone

There are three main ways to anchor ages. First, if black pigment is charcoal, radiocarbon can date when the wood burned.

But many black figures were drawn with mineral pigments (for example, manganese), which can’t be radiocarbon dated, and even genuine charcoal carries a risk. The date reflects when the wood died, not when someone used it.

Second, calcite flowstone (stalactites and stalagmites) that overgrows art is a natural time cap. Uranium–thorium dating can pin down when the calcite formed, giving a minimum age for the pigment or scoring beneath it.

Using this method, researchers dated calcite on top of red motifs in La Pasiega, Maltravieso, and Ardales to older than ~64,000 years.

Even at that youngest bound, the imagery predates the first Homo sapiens in Iberia by at least ~22,000 years, and Middle Paleolithic archaeology – the Neanderthals’ “calling card” – is abundant in all three caves.

Finger fluting by Neanderthals

The simplest fit to the data: Neanderthals made the marks. Objections arose, though. Did the samples truly overlie the art? Can the method be trusted? They did, and uranium -thorium dating has been a workhorse for half a century.

Third, sealing sediments can bracket human access. At La Roche-Cotard, meandering finger tracings form wavy, parallel, and curved lines arranged deliberately in soft wall mud.

Sediments that later plugged the entrance date to ≤54,000 years ago (likely earlier), well before Homo sapiens appeared locally, and the cave’s tools are exclusively Neanderthal. That adds a new mode – finger fluting – to the Neanderthal artistic repertoire.

Neanderthal art is now accepted

Taken together, Spanish pigment panels, French finger flutings, and the Bruniquel construction build a coherent picture. Neanderthals repeatedly entered deep caves, manipulated materials, and left intentional marks.

Even ardent skeptics must agree that these data unambiguously reveal artistic activities in deep caves that can only have been made by Neanderthals.

This is not the same art tradition later seen in Upper Paleolithic Homo sapiens, and that difference matters. Figurative scenes may indeed have been a sapiens specialty, but nonfigurative does not mean nonsymbolic.

Hand stencils are signatures of presence; geometric signs encode choices; finger flutings map movement and gesture onto stone.

In Bruniquel, assembling broken speleothems into an oval and kindling fire on them suggests planning, teamwork, and symbolic or ritualized behavior.

Redefining what makes us human

The art could represent Neanderthal individuals becoming more aware of their own agency in the world. It might constitute the first evidence of engagement with an imaginary realm.

If even rare innovations by young individuals can seed cultural change in chimpanzees, then sporadic, deliberate cave acts by Neanderthals could likewise accumulate into traditions. Later visitors may have recognized and respected those earlier marks.

Methodologically, the field has sharper tools: uranium–thorium caps, entrance-sealing chronologies, and cautious use of radiocarbon where charcoal is clearly primary.

Each new site will need the same rigor, because cave walls host both ancient imagery and modern contamination – and because claims about cognition hinge on getting time right.

For now, the picture is clearer than it has ever been. Neanderthals were not mute bystanders in deep time. They navigated the dark, selected places and materials, and made choices that outlived them.

And once you acknowledge those choices as art, you have to grant the minds that made them.

The study is published in the journal Scientific Reports.