#disclaimer: i am very sick and currently at the mercy of a one-two punch of codeine and sudafed so if this doesn't make sense i'm sorry

[kaijutegu]

Hey I have a question

I saw you on another post about human* compassion

Someone said on a Different post that Art is a very human trait (one captured throughout history) and I wanted to know if there is examples of art from other human cousins (neanderthals, etc.) That you could tell me about?

YES

so we know now that Neanderthals were CLEARLY super into fiber art but we also know that they did some other amazing stuff! Neanderthals definitely had the capacity for creativity and made some really cool stuff! Thing one: Neanderthals invented the hashtag

Ok it's not really a hashtag. It's an engraving on the wall of Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar. It's definitely Neanderthal– it predates anatomically modern human arrival by a few thousand years– and it's not a leftover artifact of tool use or hide scraping or anything. It might just be an abstract carving for fun, or it might even be a map! A kind of "you are here" in the cave.

2. Thing Two: The Badass Eagle Necklace

You know what's a HUGE BIRD? The white-tailed eagle. There's multiple eagles represented in this array of talons, and there's perforations and wear-related rubbing on the facets. You can't really use eagle talons as knives and they're too curvy to be good awls– and the wear isn't on the claw tips, it's where these would have rubbed against other beads or knots on a leather thong. How impressive would this have been to see gleaming on someone's chest? And that's not all! It's also likely they used feathers for adornment, too. Feathers don't survive well, but bones do, and when you look at the long flight feathers of a bird, you'll actually see that there's these little bumps on the bird's ulna where they are. When they're pulled out with force, there's some trauma that occurs to the bone. Which we see in bird remains associated with Neanderthals!

Now there's a few reasons to pull the primary flight feathers of a bird. You can use them to write or paint, or to fletch an arrow, or as part of religious ceremonies, or you can wear them. It's a guess what the Neanderthals were doing with them, but it's an educated guess. We know they didn't have the kind of microlith points that indicated arrows that need fletching. We also know they didn't write and they didn't seem to do much in the way of painting. They could have used the feathers for religious purposes; we simply cannot know about their religion. But bird-based jewelry wasn't an isolated phenomenon to Krapina, where the talon necklace is from. There's evidence for it at other sites, too! And frankly, feathers and bird parts just look neat. There's absolutely no reason to assume that Neanderthals didn't have an aesthetic appreciation for the world around them, after all!

Thing Three: Look At This Stuff And Tell Me It Wouldn't Sell Great On Etsy

In addition to eagle talons, Neanderthals made pendants out of shells and teeth.

What's even cooler? They used the same designs as anatomically modern Homo sapiens. While the materials and designs vary, the techniques are identical, showing potential transfer of information between the species!

(Left group is anatomically modern human tools and jewelry; right group is Neanderthal.)

We also know that stuff TRAVELED. They weren't just making things for themselves that stayed in one place, they were moving materials around! And not just stone for tools, but things that could only have existed to make them look pretty.

So Neanderthals really were into shells. They actually went DIVING for them in the ocean in Italy, which is pretty incredible. And while many of those shells ended up as tools, some of them ended up as jewelry!

This shell originally wasn't broken- it just had the two holes pierced in it and could have been worn on a cord. (God, an actual cord! Not just a strip of leather but an honest to goodness braided cord! That's THEIR invention, not ours!!!) But what's super cool about this shell is that it was painted! Orange pigment was applied to it. Why? Who knows! That's the thing about looking at an extinct group's aesthetic choices. Sometimes things have deep symbolic meanings. Other times, they just look nice. I think it's kind of amazing to think about this whole rich inner life we can't really understand, but we can grasp at. The person who made this lived and died about 50,000 years ago, before anatomically modern humans were even present in the area. And yet we can know that they liked the color orange enough to take a pretty shell, carefully drill holes in it so it could be worn flat, and painted a stripe on it. An orange stripe. Did it remind them of the sunset? Of the color of a loved one's hair? Did they like the way it looked against their own skin? Or maybe the bright pigment just cheered them up! We'll never know for sure but these are all reasons we wear things. Why not them, too?