Germany’s Einhornhöhle, or Unicorn Cave, in the Harz Mountains got its name from the treasure hunters who thought fossilized remains in the dark passages belonged to unicorns. Archaeologists digging at the site recently found something almost as unlikely: a 50,000-year-old deer bone with a geometric pattern carved by Neanderthals. The discovery, reported on Monday by a team of researchers from the University of Göttingen and the Lower Saxony State Office for Heritage, adds to a growing body of evidence that Neanderthals created symbolic objects—perhaps what we would call art.
Artifacts found at Unicorn Cave in the 1980s proved the site was actually a hideout for Neanderthals during the Middle Paleolithic period (roughly 300,000 to 30,000 years ago). A German team of archaeologists revisited the cave in 2014 for new excavations, and, in 2019, while investigating the untouched layers of Ice Age soil buried there, they found well-preserved animal bones with cut-marks. Among them was the toe bone of a prehistoric (and now extinct) giant deer.
“It showed six groves which together form a chevron-like decoration,” said Thomas Terberger, a prehistoric archaeologist at the University of Göttingen in Germany and one of the authors of the new study in Nature Ecology & Evolution, in an email to ARTnews. Radiocarbon dating proved the object dated to 51,000 years ago—when Neanderthals were the only human species roaming this part of Europe—and analysis on the bone showed that these etchings weren’t butchering marks. (The researchers even performed some of their own experiments carving cow toe bones, and found that the bone was likely boiled first.)
“Step by step we learned that we not only found an exciting object, but that we are dealing with a small bone of a large Ice Age animal that was definitely decorated by Neanderthals,” Terberger said. “From my point of view this find belongs to the initial phase of the use of symbols and is on the way to making art.”
The carved deer bone is just the latest bit of evidence that Neanderthals engaged in symbolic behavior. From other discoveries around Eurasia, scientists know our extinct cousins may have mixed pigments and adorned their bodies with feathers and talons. In 2014, archaeologists reported the discovery of a hashtag-like geometric carving inside a Neanderthal cave in Gibraltar. But do those works amount to art? This latest finding isn’t likely to settle the debate. TO READ ENTIRE ARTICLE, CLICK HERE...
