Several painters have pressed their hands against the naked rock and stencilled their outlines with red and yellow pigment. There are dots, triangles, a ladder and what looks to modern eyes like an ant wearing a jetpack. Precise dating of their chemistry shows that some were executed at least 65,000 years ago, more than 20,000 years before Homo sapiens turned up in Europe. It is now beyond any reasonable doubt that the rock artists were Neanderthals. The discovery, published in the journal Science, challenges not only the idea that our intelligence is somehow historically…

Source: The Times February 23, 2018 00:00 UTC