A nearly 130,000-year-old bear bone has been deliberately marked with incisions and may be one of the oldest works of art in Eurasia made by Neanderthals, researchers say.
The roughly cylindrical bone, which is about 4 inches (10.6 centimeters) long, is decorated with 17 irregularly spaced parallel cuts. A right-handed person most likely made the piece, possibly in one sitting, a new study finds.
Carved bone is the oldest known symbolic art made by Neanderthals in Europe north of the Carpathians. This gives scientists insight into the behavior, cognition and culture of the long-dead cousins of modern humans who lived in Eurasia from about 400,000 to 40,000 years ago, when they became extinct.
“This is one of the rather rare Neanderthal objects of a symbolic nature,” Tomasz Plonka, professor of archeology at the University of Wroclaw, told Live Science. “These cuts have no utilitarian reason.” For example, the bone does not appear to be a tool or object of ritual significance, the study found.
Researchers discovered the bone in 1953 in the Dziadowa Skała cave in southern Poland and initially thought it was a bear rib. They dug up the bone from a layer dating to the Eemian period (130,000 to 115,000 years ago), one of the warmer periods of the last ice age. However, Płonka’s team determined that the bone was an arm bone (radius) that came from the left forelimb of a young bear, most likely a brown bear (Ursus arctos).
In the new study, the researchers examined the bone with a 3D microscope and computed tomography (CT), which allowed them to make a digital model of the bone. Based on this pattern, the researchers hypothesized that the scars display several characteristics of deliberate organization. For example, the scars were repeated, meaning that the incisions were repeated in a similar way; similar because they all belong to the same basic form, despite some differences in size; limited because the markings were limited to a certain area, although there was room for more; and organized as the cut marks are placed in a systematic manner, although their spacing varies slightly.
These sequences suggest that the prehistoric artist did more than just paint and may have had advanced cognitive abilities, the researchers wrote in the study, published April 17 in Journal of Archaeological Science.
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To understand how the cuts were made, the team made experimental marks on fresh cattle bones with replica flint blades and Middle Paleolithic knives, using seven cutting techniques, including back-and-forth movements and vigorous sawing motions.
The team found that the tracks were not consistent with butchering, tool use or animal trampling. They also appear to have been deliberately made, most likely in one fell swoop with a flint knife. Comparison of the cuts with experimental cut marks showed that nearly all cuts were made by rapid, repetitive motions of the knife toward the knife operator, according to the study.
“Most of the cuts have a very characteristic comma-like end that curves to the right. When our experimenter, who was right-handed, moved the flint tool toward him, the cuts curved to the right,” Plonka explained. “Therefore, we know that the Neanderthal who made these cuts was right-handed.”
It’s possible the maker was trying to transmit some kind of digital message, Plonka suggested.
Paul Pettitprofessor of archeology who specializes in the European Middle and Upper Paleolithic at Durham University in the United Kingdom praised the study for confirming a long-standing suspicion that the incisions made on this bear bone were carefully cut by a right-handed Neanderthal, rather than left accidentally by a carnivore gnawing on it.
Neanderthals had a peculiar habit of doing the like parallel characters on bones that researchers now believe to be some kind of symbolic culture. One of the most interesting examples is the skull of a Neanderthal woman with 35 mostly parallel threads.
“That such series of parallel incisions did appear in Neanderthals and not earlier suggests that they were a cultural practice that had meaning and function, rather than, say, the product of unconscious personal habits like modern drawing Pettit, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.
“It is extremely difficult – and controversial – to try to establish the specific information recorded by such ‘symbolic’ signs,” he added. However, “the incised bone from Dziadowa Skala Cave at least shows us that Neanderthals used visual culture to encode information, which is a truly human ability,” Pettit said.
