Lowbrow art

THIS graffito was found in Gorham’s Cave, a cavern which faces the Mediterranean in Gibraltar, on the southern extreme of the Iberian peninsula. It may not look much, perhaps like a grid for a game of noughts and crosses, but it is at least 39,000 years old. Since modern humans are not believed to have arrived in the area until several thousand years later, it must therefore have been scratched by a Neanderthal man or woman. It is thus an example of something Neanderthal that could possibly pass as art.

That it is a deliberate artefact rather than, say, the accidental consequence of butchering meat, is clear from experiments which were carried out by Clive Finlayson of the Gibraltar Museum and his colleagues. They found they could make similar scores (the longest is about 20cm) in similar limestone, using stone tools recovered from the cave. But, as they describe in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, doing so required both precise control of the tool and dozens of passes to achieve the required depth. Some 300 or more strokes were needed to carve the complete pattern, which required considerable effort and care.

The minimum age of the engraving is known from that of undisturbed strata that were covering it. It is not known what the engraving represents, but it was made to be seen by its maker and others. The engraving might be a symbol to show that the cave was occupied. Its significance is that it shows Neanderthals were capable of abstract thought and creativity of a type hitherto thought to be unique to modern humans.