Neanderthals Built Mysterious Cave Structures 175,000 Years Ago (Photos)

Constructions discovered deep in a French cave rank among the earliest human building projects ever discovered, but their purpose remains unclear

The ringed walls are made from nearly 400 stalagmites that have been pulled from the ground and stacked on top of one another. Photograph: Michel Soulier/SSAC

But fresh tests on the structures, reported in the journal Nature, reveal the simple walls to be much older than thought. Stalagmite tips and pieces of charred bone found in the walls date them to at least 175,000 years ago. According to French and Belgian scientists who led the research, only Neanderthals could have built the structures. While bears in the cave left behind claw marks, paw prints, tufts of fur, and even hibernation holes, they were not able to stack stalagmites into foot-high walls, the researchers say.

Neanderthals lived in Eurasia from about 400,000 to 40,000 years ago and died out just as modern humans arrived in the region. Though often dismissed as thick-browed thugs, our human relatives were immensely capable, as evidenced by hauls of stone tools and other artefacts they left behind. The Neanderthals harnessed fire, lived in shelters, wore clothes, and mastered the art of stone tool making. Some researchers believe they deliberately buried their dead, and even adorned the graves with offerings such as flowers.

But that is not all. The Iberian Neanderthals had a fondness for sea shells, and turned scallop and cockle shells into jewellery by painting them with mineral pigments and probably threading them on strings. Other Neanderthals made artificial glue by careful burning of tree bark, to help fix their sharp stone tips to spear shafts.

Parts of the walls show clear signs of fire damage, with the stalagmites blackened or reddened, and fractured from the heat, leading researchers to suspect that the Neanderthals embedded fireplaces in the structures to illuminate the cave. Photograph: Etienne Fabre/SSAC

For all the feats Neanderthals achieved, until now, building had never seemed one of their strong points. “Early Neanderthals were the only human population living in Europe during this period,” Jacques Jaubert at the University of Bordeaux writes in the journal, suggesting the early human species were even more sophisticated than even expert researchers appreciated.

The site is remarkably well preserved because the stalagmites became encased in calcium carbonate soon after the walls were built. Had they not been constructed so deep inside the cave, however, they would probably have weathered away in the 175,000 years since they were erected.

What the structures were for is far from clear. “At this stage, all options are open,” said Soressi. It is not even certain that the walls were made for a specific purpose. But more intriguing to Soressi is what the Neanderthals were doing so deep inside the cave, where the lack of natural light would have left them in total darkness without fires to illuminate the space. The discovery raises plenty of questions, she adds. Were the walls built when Neanderthals found themselves deep inside the cave by chance, or was making underground structures a common practice for them?

“It’s becoming really clear with the Neanderthals, that given their abilities and capacities, there is not so much of a jump between them and contemporaneous modern humans,” Soressi said. “But this is very strange behaviour. I’d like to understand why they did it.”

Source TheGuardian

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