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ARCHAEOLOGY

Boning up on Neanderthal art

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 5, pages 1201–1202 (2021)Cite this article

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A decorated bone object adds to the mounting evidence that Neanderthals were capable of advanced behavioural complexity and could produce artistic representations.

In evolutionary terms, ‘anatomically modern humans’ are members of our own species, Homo sapiens, who developed a ‘modern behaviour’ manifested in the accumulation of innovative and sophisticated material cultures. By contrast, evidence for technology and symbolic behaviour in Neanderthals (who lived between about 430,000 and 40,000 years ago1) has commonly been seen as limited or less developed. Writing in Nature Ecology & Evolution, Leder et al.2 present a decorated bone produced by Neanderthals who lived over 51,000 years ago in the Harz Mountains in what is now northern Germany. The presence of incisions artistically arranged in a chevron pattern on the bone of a giant deer, supports the symbolic meaning of this find and raises new questions about how complex Neanderthal behaviour might have been.

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Fig. 1: Earliest appearances of innovative and sophisticated material cultures associated with anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals.

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  1. Centre for Human Evolution Research, Department of Earth Sciences, Natural History Museum, London, UK

    Silvia M. Bello

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Correspondence to Silvia M. Bello.

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Bello, S.M. Boning up on Neanderthal art. Nat Ecol Evol 5, 1201–1202 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01506-z

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