Artistic mediums certainly change. While modern humans have paint and paper, ancient humans had ochre and pebbles. However, both work well for finger painting, whether for Homo sapiens today or for Homo neanderthalensis thousands of years ago.
According to a new study in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, a team of researchers may have discovered one of the oldest art objects adorned with a fingerprint from across Europe. The object, a pebble, was stamped with ochre by a Neanderthal around 43,000 years ago and was found by researchers in Spain in 2022.
“This object contributes to our understanding of Neanderthals’ capacity for abstraction,” the researchers stated in their study, as it could “represent one of the oldest known abstractions of a human face in the prehistoric record.”
Indeed, the placement of the ochre fingerprint could suggest that Neanderthals were more advanced artists than traditionally thought, adorning objects not only with fingerprints ...
