It has been two years since scientists discovered the pattern above carved into the wall of Gorham’s Cave on the shoreline in Gibraltar, but it was just made public yesterday.
Archaeologists have determined that the carving, approximately 39,000 years old, is the work of one of the Neanderthals who lived in that area from about 200,000 to 30,000 years ago. They have also proved that it wasn’t made by accident – carving this with stone tools would have taken hours of painstaking effort. "This was intentional — this was not somebody doodling or scratching on the surface," said study researcher Clive Finlayson, director of the Gibraltar Museum.
Why the Neanderthal disappeared has been a mystery, but it has long been assumed that they were not as intelligent as Homo Sapiens and couldn’t compete. Recent discoveries seem to call that theory into question as we learn that they were more like modern humans than previously thought. It’s been found that Neanderthals buried their dead, for example, and they used pigments and feathers to decorate their bodies.
No one knows the significance of the carving – what it represents or what it was for – but there is lots of speculation. Was it a religious symbol, a map, or abstract art?
We may never know for sure.
I think it proves that those stupid Neanderthals invented Tic-Tac-Toe, or maybe even Twitter.
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