Several times in the past 10 years scientists have had to rewrite the textbooks on Neanderthals, the latest species of human to go extinct.
New research has suggested that Neanderthals may have created cave paintings before modern humans.
Paintings on the walls of a cave in Spain dating back 40,000 years are the oldest known in Europe and are now thought to have been made by Neanderthals and not modern humans. As new finds are made and new details emerge it is becoming increasingly evident that the Neanderthals were not our intellectual inferiors but intelligent and creative in their own right.
"It would not be surprising if they were indeed Europe's first cave artists," said João Zilhão, of the University of Barcelona. "In the context of what we've learned about Neanderthals in the last decade it really should not be very surprising."
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