{"id":168081,"date":"2010-01-11T10:31:53","date_gmt":"2010-01-11T15:31:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/80beats\/?p=8807"},"modified":"2010-01-11T10:31:53","modified_gmt":"2010-01-11T15:31:53","slug":"crafty-clever-neanderthals-made-jewelry-50000-years-ago-80beats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/168081","title":{"rendered":"Crafty & Clever Neanderthals Made Jewelry 50,000 Years Ago | 80beats"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"neanderthalJewelry\"The jewelry in Spain speaks mainly to the brains (of Neanderthals). So says a team of archaeologists this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/em><\/a>. Researchers led by Jo\u00e3o Zilh\u00e3o have turned up artifacts they believe to be jewelry dating back 50,000 years\u2014a time only Neanderthals<\/a> and not early humans occupied Europe\u2014suggesting to them that those Neanderthals were capable of the abstract thinking necessary to make symbolic art.<\/p>\n

Zilh\u00e3o’s team found shells and bones that showed evidence of craftsmanship, the scientists say. First, some of the shells were perforated and could have been strung and worn as a necklace. It’s not out of the question that those holes could be natural, but the team says the finds also appear to have been painted. If the researchers’ analysis is correct, the Neanderthals could have mixed up\u00a0reddish goethite and hematite, yellow siderite and natrojarosite, black charcoal and sparkly pyrite to create a spectrum of paints [MSNBC<\/a><\/em>]<\/span>.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Scientists have found similar artifacts in Europe before. But those finds were roughly 40,000 years old \u2013 dating to a period where Neanderthals and modern humans would have shared the European continent. This has led other researchers to argue that the purported Neanderthal artifacts represented mindless imitation or were from later periods, but they somehow got mixed into the wrong soil layers of the archaeological digs where they were uncovered [Christian Science Monitor<\/em><\/a>]<\/span>. The new finds, however, date to a time 10,000 years before our ancestors migrated to the European continent. So if these fragments truly show signs of handiwork, and if the dating is correct, that points to Neanderthals as the creators.<\/p>\n

For Zilh\u00e3o, this means that Neanderthal mental capacity was closer to that of early humans than we often give them credit for. Objects and compounds like these would have been used to \u201ctell other people who you are,\u201d Dr. Zilh\u00e3o said. \u201cThey are like socially recognizable identity cards.\u201d What\u2019s more, he said, \u201cthis is exactly how the same kinds of objects and finds are interpreted in early modern human contexts\u201d [The New York Times<\/em><\/a>]<\/span>.<\/p>\n

That wasn’t Zilh\u00e3o’s only Neanderthal study this week, either. He published a separate study in PNAS<\/em> addressing the question DISCOVER posed last month: Did we mate with Neanderthals, or did we murder them<\/a>? Analyzing the teeth<\/a> of a 30,000-year-old early human child skeleton, he says that it shows similarities to Neanderthals\u2014similarities that again raise the question of whether and how much early humans and Neanderthals interbred in Europe tens of thousands of years ago.<\/p>\n

Related Content:
\n80beats: Did Spear-Throwing Humans Kill Neanderthals?<\/a>
\n80beats: Controversial Study Suggests Early Humans Feasted on Neanderthals<\/a>
\n80beats: Rough Draft of the Neanderthal Genome is Complete<\/a>
\nDISCOVER: Did We Mate with Neanderthals, or Did We Murder Them?<\/a>
\nDISCOVER: Cavemen: They’re Just Like Us<\/a><\/p>\n

Image: Jo\u00e3o Zilh\u00e3o<\/em><\/p>\n

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The jewelry in Spain speaks mainly to the brains (of Neanderthals). So says a team of archaeologists this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers led by Jo\u00e3o Zilh\u00e3o have turned up artifacts they believe to be jewelry dating back 50,000 years\u2014a time only Neanderthals and not early humans occupied Europe\u2014suggesting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":641,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-168081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168081\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}