Authors: Larissa Straffon (SFF Centre for Early Sapience Behaviour, SapienCE, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway), Claudio Tennie (Working Group Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany)
Categories: Perspective, cultural transmission, visual art, hominin cognition, Neanderthal art, Pleistocene art
Source: Evolutionary Human Sciences
Authors: Larissa Straffon, Claudio Tennie
Despite growing consensus that cognitive differences between Neanderthals and modern humans were not as significant as once assumed, visual art remains disproportionately associated with Homo sapiens. This paper explores why that is. Rather than appealing to underlying cognition, we argue that early art was pushed and pulled by social dynamics and demographic contexts on a larger scale and eventually formed through cultural transmission. Drawing on the archaeological record, we focus on pigment use, ornamentation, engravings and painting. We suggest that these practices initially remained ad hoc while still functioning as tools for social signalling and intergroup communication in the small-scale communities of Neanderthals and early modern humans. We argue that visual art moved beyond ad hoc practices under conditions of increased population density and interaction – first via the crystallization of art as a tradition and second, as cumulative cultural art. Lack of cognitive ability is not a well-supported explanation for the empirical low frequency of Neanderthal art. Instead, we propose effects of differences in social connectivity and population densities as an alternative. By reframing art as a flexible, context-dependent behaviour, we challenge essentialist models and advocate for a pluralistic view of cognitive and cultural expression across different hominin groups.
Simple Neanderthal art wasn’t about lesser minds, it was about social life. Culture and connection shaped art evolution
One of the aims of cognitive archaeology is to reconstruct the evolution of human mind and behaviour using traces found in, or inferred from, the archaeological and paleoanthropological records (Mithen, 1998; Renfrew, 1993). However, the interpretations provided by this field have often been dominated by an underlying recurrent narrative suggesting that Homo sapiens possesses certain abilities (e.g. advanced theory of mind, symbolic thought, syntactic language) that gave ‘us’ an evolutionary advantage over extinct hominins (for elaboration Barham & Everett, 2021; Breyl, 2021; Cartmill, 1990; Corbey & Roebroeks, 2001; Gould, 1990; Landau, 1993; Langbroek, 2012). Apart from language, few of these proposed abilities have proven more contentious than art.
For the whole of the twentieth century, the emergence of visual art was often coupled to the (now outdated) European Upper Palaeolithic ‘creative explosion’ model (Pfeiffer, 1982), particularly due to the representational imagery found in the painted caves of France and Spain, such as Lascaux and Altamira. Most explanations assumed that it was not until some 50,000–30,000 years ago that modern humans acquired the capacity to ‘think in symbols’ and, consequently, to make art (Klein & Edgar, 2002; Mithen, 1996). The creative explosion hypothesis therefore predicted that all extinct hominins and even the earliest members of our own species would have lacked symbolic thought and art-making abilities. Yet, by the turn of the century, finds of red pigment processing, personal ornaments made of gastropod shells, and engraved geometric patterns, namely from the Middle Stone Age (MSA) South African site of Blombos Cave, were dated much earlier than the 50,000 year mark – between 70,000 and 100,0000 BP (d’Errico et al., 2001; Henshilwood & d’Errico, 2011; C. Henshilwood et al., 2004; Henshilwood et al., 2018). Since those findings, red ochre pigments and personal ornaments of similar and even older ages have been recovered in the north and south of Africa and in the Middle East (Bouzouggar et al., 2007; d’Errico et al., 2009; Hovers et al., 2003; Sehasseh et al., 2021; Vanhaeren et al., 2006). This has led researchers to reconsider not only the chronological depth of visual art as preceding the Upper Palaeolithic, but also its categorical definition, which was previously reserved only for figurines and paintings, as well as the location(s) of its earliest appearance(s) shifting from Europe to Africa and the Levant (McBrearty & Brooks, 2000; McDermott, 2021; Scerri & Will, 2023).
As a consequence of this reappraisal of the archaeological record, the broadened category of Pleistocene visual art now comprises forms as diverse as pigment use, engraved patterns, items of bodily decoration such as beads and pendants, incised and engraved designs on various media, figurines, sculptures, reliefs, carvings, and painted motifs (Moro-Abadía & González-Morales, 2010; Nowell, 2006). Crucially, it is currently agreed that our species’ visual art behaviour did not emerge in a sudden event, or in a single location, and that different art forms did not have to appear simultaneously. Rather, visual art developed over a long time, appearing, disappearing and reappearing in different periods and places, and had a great formal diversity.
Visual art has become an important component of human evolution research, particularly to the extent that it can be used to generate and test hypotheses about human cognitive and cultural evolution (d’Errico, 2003). Here, the problem of false negatives looms large. Probably not all early human populations produced art, and some of the visual art that existed has been undoubtedly lost. The latter is most likely true where ephemeral practices (e.g. sand painting) and highly perishable materials (e.g. wood, hides, bark, fur, fibres, and the human body) were involved (d’Errico, 2024). Indeed, empirical findings on the simulated survival of visual art examples in contemporary hunter-gatherer populations showcase this long-recognized problem vividly (Stibbard-Hawkes, 2025). This, together with the back-extension of surviving finds, support the hypothesis that (at least some) H. sapiens populations were already endowed with the underlying cognitive capacities for art-making prior to 100,000 years BP (Currie et al., 2024).
What is more, H. sapiens might not have been the only producer of visual art. A number of recent discoveries have suggested that visual art may have been practiced by extinct human groups as well, particularly Neanderthals. There is a growing consensus that the cognitive capacities of these hominins (regarding inference, problem-solving, and mindreading, for example) might have been in many ways comparable to modern humans’ (Breyl, 2021; Shea, 2011). This is backed by sound evidence that some Neanderthal populations displayed sophisticated technologies such as control of fire (Henry, 2017). They also used fire to make complex birch bark tar production techniques (Schmidt et al., 2023) that are, if not cumulative, certainly not easily discoverable (Schmidt et al., 2019) and where such adhesives were used for the backing of tools (Niekus et al., 2019). Neanderthals also produced botanical fibre rope and string (Hardy et al., 2020) and exhibited flexible foraging strategies and advanced social skills (Roebroeks & Soressi, 2016). Finally, they curated potentially ritual spaces such as the recently discovered Bruniquel Cave in France (Jaubert et al., 2016) and Cueva Des-Cubierta in Spain (Baquedano et al., 2023). Most notably for this discussion, Neanderthals processed and used colour pigments, produced personal ornaments, and created visual signs on various techniques and formats (Hoffmann et al., 2018; Pitarch-Martí et al., 2021; Rodríguez-Vidal et al., 2014). The last three have at times been put forward as Neanderthal art practices and employed to argue that their cognitive capacity was comparable to that of H. sapiens (Langley et al., 2008). In this paper, we suggest that this specific comparison may be problematic.
We do not, at all, deny that Neanderthals, or any other extinct human group for that matter, possessed the anatomical or cognitive capacities to create items that would be perceived today as visual art in similar ways as the items described before. What we argue here (1) that attributing art-making to Neanderthals has become a way of ‘humanizing’ them while simultaneously denying them of their own cognitive and cultural histories; (2) that visual art is a misleading proxy for cognitive evolution – not least as it contains examples that must be understood within the framework of cultural evolutionary pathways; and (3) that the abovementioned technologies imply ability in terms of procedural knowledge and processing which may be equal or even more complex than art-making; therefore, there is no basis to rank art-making as ‘higher’ in a presupposed, and quite possibly false, cognitive hierarchy.
First, we give a general overview of proposed Neanderthal art practices focusing on four categories of Pleistocene visual pigment use, body ornaments, engravings, and painting. We then turn to the distribution of these examples to assess whether they constitute culturally evolved traditions of art-making, i.e. practices that are socially learned by necessity and could not be fully reinvented ad hoc without the required cultural background (Tennie et al., 2016). Finally, we explore the potential roles of Pleistocene art in an attempt to explain the landscape of early hominin visual art production.
We should first clarify that we are not opposed to using the word ‘art’ itself, which is known to be a modern term loaded with connotations of non-functionality and self-purpose that are debatable in themselves – and which, more importantly, cannot be uncritically applied to prehistory (Davidson, 2023; Nowell, 2006; Soffer & Conkey, 1997). Still, the general term ‘art’, if it is applied ‘with caution’ (Lewis-Williams, 2002:41), can remain a useful (but broad) umbrella concept when it ‘merely’ refers to the apparently panhuman tendency to make and respond to aesthetic stimuli, including all forms of art practices across time and space (Morphy, 2009; van Damme & Zijlmans, 2012). But either in a narrow or in a broad sense, ‘art’ frequently alludes to a number of manifestations included in the so-called plastic or visual arts (e.g. painting, sculpture, ornamentation, architecture) and the performing arts (e.g. dance, music, theatre, storytelling, poetry). Here we focus exclusively on evidence for the production of visual art, for two preservation and evolutionary origin. Whereas the performing arts leave only indirect traces in the archaeological record, the production of visual artworks more frequently endures the passing of time, rendering them accessible for direct study. Second, some have suggested that the various ‘arts’ did not evolve together, with the performing arts claimed as older (Cross & Morley, 2009). Moreover, visual art and music, for instance, make use of quite different neural and affective resources in contemporary humans (Brown et al., 2006; Fitch, 2005; Zaidel, 2010). Therefore, it seems more fruitful to study the evolutionary trajectories of the different arts separately (Lewis-Williams, 2002). Thus, when speaking of art, we refer to visual art specifically.
An important caveat of the archaeological record, be it of Neanderthals or H. sapiens, is that it in fact is difficult to identify art objects from the past. Archaeologists have usually relied on formal definitions of art, using aesthetic or symbolic properties as criteria. That is, the idea that to be art, an object should have qualities that amount to beauty or ‘specialness’, such as symmetry and balance (Currie et al., 2011), or that it should be non-utilitarian and endowed with ‘meaning’ (Henshilwood & d’Errico, 2011). However, neither aesthetics nor meaning are exclusive to or sufficient for a classification of art (van Damme & Zijlmans, 2012). A functional definition of art would further argue that, beyond its formal properties, an art object signals, evokes, or transmits information to a perceiver (Conkey, 2006; Lewis-Williams, 2002). Accordingly, we define visual art broadly to include objects, practices, and patterns made, modified, and displayed to encode information and engage attention through the manipulation of qualities such as colour, shape, texture, and composition (Straffon, 2019). Examples may range from body art and simple abstract arrangements to complex figurative representations.
As mentioned in the previous section, the diversity of Pleistocene visual art forms was surely higher than what has survived in the archaeological record and what has been detected so far. Those cases that have been detected may be comprised in a few categories based on technique, pigment use, personal ornaments, incised or engraved surfaces, figurines, and painting (Straffon, 2019). Of course, these categories are a simplification, and we assume those that have been lost to archaeology included, for example, designs on wood, fibres, leather, and body art. As we will see, with the potential exception of figurines, all other techniques have been reported in Neanderthal contexts across different periods and regions. A thorough overview of purported Neanderthal-made art is beyond the scope of the present paper (for detailed accounts, we d’Errico et al., forthcoming; Langley et al., 2008; Meneganzin & Killin, 2025; Roebroeks, 2008; Wragg Sykes, 2020; Zilhão, 2007). Rather, we focus on recent finds (over the past two decades) from European sites which have been shifting the field towards a general acceptance of Neanderthal artistic behaviour. Regarding dates and hominin attribution, we rely here on the work, interpretations, and opinions of the cited scholars. For this reason, we include mainly instances which, to our present knowledge, have been identified, published, and accepted by (the majority of) the archaeological community as of Neanderthal authorship.
This category refers to the use of pigments made, for instance, of iron-rich minerals (red ochre), manganese oxide minerals (black), and sulphate minerals (yellow). The archaeological evidence of pigment use is ambiguous in that we only see traces of the raw material and its final purpose has to be inferred (d’Errico et al., 2012). Although we do find some cases of pigment applied to objects, it is not clear whether these qualify as evidence of an art behaviour (Roebroeks et al., 2012). For example, ochre has many utilitarian applications (e.g. processing hides, adhesive, sunblock, medicinal remedy) that would not necessarily involve any aesthetic intentions (Wadley, 2005), even if both practical and artistic uses are not mutually exclusive (McBrearty & Stringer, 2007; Rifkin, 2012). However, the fact that mineral pigments are well documented in the record minimally suggests that hominins were aware of their practical and visual properties, which they exploited accordingly (Barham, 1998). It is therefore usually assumed that ochres especially were mostly used as a colouring agent. Typical ochre minerals like limonite or hematite can be rubbed directly on surfaces to apply colour or be crushed to produce powders of reddish shades (Henshilwood et al., 2011).
Mineral pigments have been recorded across different Middle Palaeolithic locations in Europe. One of the earliest is the site of Maastricht-Belvédère in the Netherlands, dated to 250,000–200,000 years BP, where red ochre was found in association with lithic industries (Nielsen et al., 2012). Other Mousterian sites with traces of Neanderthal pigment use have been found in Czech Republic, France, Spain, and Italy (d’Errico et al., forthcoming). Such findings become more common in the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition. Pigments have been found, for example, in the French Châtelperronian sites of Grotte du Renne (Fig. 1; Caron et al., 2011), Roc-de-Combe, Le Basté and Bidart, which yielded several pieces of ochre with signs of scraping and grinding (Dayet et al., 2014). Finds of red, black, and yellow pigment mixes contained in shells at the Middle Palaeolithic sites of Cueva de los Aviones in Spain and black pigment crayons at Pech de l’Aze in France have led to interpretations of their cosmetic use, in face or body painting (d’Errico & Soressi, 2018; Zilhão, 2012).Figure 1.Châtelperronian pigment minerals from Grotte du Renne. Red (1–3) and black (4, 5). After Caron et al. (2011), reproducible under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.
This category includes instances of (presumably) intentional mark-making. Mark-making refers to the action of purposefully producing lines, designs, or abstract patterns by incising, drawing, or engraving surfaces (Dissanayake, 2016). These may not require much effort to create but may involve reasonable dexterity and precision to produce a discernible design (when this was intended). Intentional mark-making has been put forward as a basic hominin behaviour that eventually supported the emergence of visual art (Mithen, 1996b) and may be traced as far back as half a million years (Joordens et al., 2015). We focus here on engravings on hard materials (e.g. walls, stones, bones), as these are the examples that most often survive in the archaeological record.
There are a number of incised and engraved objects from Neanderthal contexts that have been known for many years (García-Diez et al., 2013; Shaham et al., 2019; Soressi & D’Errico, 2007), such as the engraved bone and pecked rock from La Ferrassie in France (Zilhão, 2012), the marked bone from Bilzingsleben, Germany (Mania & Mania 1988), the streaked pebbles from Chez Pourre-Chez Comte in France (Lhomme & Normand, 1993), and the pecked pebble from Axlor in Spain (García-Diez et al., 2013), just to mention a few. Over the past decade, the number of such finds has increased substantially. One that has received much attention comes from Gorham’s Cave, Gibraltar. There, a large (c.30 cm) geometric engraving reminiscent of a contemporary hashtag (‘#’) was found on the bedrock floor, dated to 39,000 BP, assigned to a Neanderthal occupation period (Rodríguez-Vidal et al., 2014; Fig. 2A). Other cases include an incised flint cortex from Crimea, c.37,000 BP (Majkić et al., 2017), and animal bones such as an engraved cave bear vertebra from Serbia, c.44,000 BP (Majkić et al., 2018), a hyena femur from France, c.72,000–60,000 BP (d’Errico et al., 2018), and the phalanx of a giant deer from Einhornhöle in Germany, c.51,000 BP (Leder et al., 2021; Fig. 2B). The latter has a series of precise, regularly spaced incisions that form a geometric design (Leder et al., 2021). Finally, a special case is a series of so-called ‘finger flutings’ (hand-made abstract tracings on soft calcite) preserved on various cave walls at the Mousterian site of La Roche-Cotard, France, dated to c.57,000 BP (Marquet et al., 2023).Figure 2.(A) Neanderthal-attributed engraving on the floor of Gorham’s Cave, Gibraltar. Image by S. Finlayson. (B) Engraved giant deer bone of Einhornhöhle, Germany. Image by A. Hindemith. Both pictures reproducible under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.
This category includes small, durable objects that are modified for suspension or attachment to other materials, including beads, pendants, and charms used, for instance, in decoration or as jewellery (Kuhn & Stiner, 2007). The type of ornaments described here entail only natural objects (e.g. shells, stones, animal teeth) that have been slightly altered for stringing, namely perforated or grooved. The amount of labour applied to them is not considerable, although the modification process may still have required skill and good knowledge of the materials (Tátá et al., 2014).
The best-known example of possible Neanderthal personal ornaments is the collection of Châtelperronian beads and pendants from Grotte du Renne in Arcy-sur-Cure, France, c.37,000 BP (Fig. 3). This includes mammoth ivory pendants, pierced animal teeth, and other seemingly decorative items found in apparent association with fragmentary Neanderthal remains (Caron et al., 2011; d’Errico, 2003; Higham et al., 2010). At the Spanish site of Cueva de los Aviones (c.115,000 BP) four shells were found, some with perforations and ochre residues indicating they may have been intended as pendants (Zilhão, 2012). Cueva Antón (c.50,000 BP), also in Spain, has yielded a possible ornament made of a large shell of Pecten maximus bearing pigment remains (Zilhão et al., 2010; Fig. 4A).Figure 3.Châtelperronian ornaments from Grotte du Renne made of perforated and grooved animal teeth (1–6, 11), a fossil shell (9), and animal bone (7, 8, 10). After Caron et al. (2011), reproducible under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.Figure 4.(A) Ornamental shell of Pecten maximus with pigment remains from Cueva Antón, Spain. Image from Zilhão et al. (2010). (B) Eagle talons possibly used as jewellery, from Kaprina, Croatia (Radovčić et al., 2015). Image by L. Mjeda. Both pictures reproducible under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.
In addition to shells, ivory, and teeth, it seems Neanderthals may have used bird feathers, talons, and bones as ornamentation. The Croatian site of Krapina, dated to c.130,000 BP, included eight eagle talons with use-wear marks indicating they may have been displayed on the body (Radovčić et al., 2015; Fig. 4B). The site of Fumane Cave, in Italy, yielded the wing bones of large birds of prey bearing cut marks that indicated the feathers had been intentionally removed, c.44,000 BP (Peresani et al., 2014). Bird bones with markings have also been recovered from the Mousterian site of Zaskalnaya VI, in Crimea (Majkić et al., 2017), the Châtelperronian layers at Grotte du Renne, in France (Vanhaeren et al., 2019), Cueva Foradada, in Spain (Rodríguez-Hidalgo et al., 2019), and Gorham’s Cave, in Gibraltar (Finlayson et al., 2012). From this evidence, it is thought that Neanderthals used the extracted feathers in adornment, for example in headdresses, garment decorations, cloaks, or as jewellery (Finlayson et al., 2012).
Here, we refer specifically to the application of colour pigments prepared as a paste or liquid to hard surfaces, such as rocks and walls.
In recent years, a series of dates from various motifs found in the painted caves of La Pasiega, Maltravieso, and Ardales, in Spain, have yielded ages beyond 64,000 years (Hoffmann et al., 2018; Pike et al., 2012). They include schematic signs, a hand stencil, and coloured stalagmites. Because the obtained dates precede the earliest known occupation of modern humans in Europe, which so far is estimated c.45,000–50,000 BP (Hublin, 2012), the motifs have been attributed to Neanderthal activity (Hoffmann et al., 2018). Although both the dates and attribution of these paintings have been disputed (Pons-Branchu et al., 2020; White et al., 2020), a more detailed study of Cueva de Ardales has confirmed that red ochre pigment was recurrently applied to selected stalagmites during the Neanderthal occupation period, over thousands of years, between 45,000 and 65,000 BP (Pitarch-Martí et al., 2021; Ramos-Muñoz et al., 2022). Finally, the Mousterian site of San Lázaro, in Spain, has yielded a leucogranite pebble (dated c.43,000) that bears at its centre a single ochre-paint dot with a preserved a fingerprint, consistent with intentional application (Álvarez-Alonso et al., 2025). The pebble has a peculiar shape and presents natural features that the authors suggest might constitute a case of face pareidolia, which together with the symmetrical placement of the dot, and the fact that the pebble shows no signs of wear, indicates that the object may have had some special significance (Álvarez-Alonso et al., 2025).
The Neanderthal art record is proving to be older, richer, and more diverse than what we could have anticipated merely 20 years ago. It now comprises both parietal or wall art, as in Cueva de Ardales, as well as mobiliary or portable art, as in the deer phalanx from Einhornhöle and the San Lázaro pebble. It reaches as far back as 200,000 years for ochre use (Nielsen et al., 2012) and 130,000 years for eagle talon ornaments (Radovčić et al., 2015), and as recently as 37,000 BP for body ornament production (Caron et al., 2011). Thanks to the finds presented above, which are only a snippet of the whole of the evidence that has accumulated over recent years, it has become accepted that, opposite to traditional models, we can no longer purport art practices as unique to modern humans. In fact, the categories of ochre use and engravings may actually predate both Neanderthals and H. sapiens (Meneganzin & Killin, 2025). A review of ochre exploitation has recently revealed that hominins in Africa started collecting and processing red ochre minerals as early as 500,000 years ago, intensifying towards 300,000 years ago (Dapschauskas et al., 2022). As for the engraving of surfaces, possible examples have been reported for H. erectus in Indonesia half a million years ago (Joordens et al., 2015), for H. heidelbergensis in Germany 300,000–350,000 years ago (Mania & Mania, 1988), and for (likely) Denisovans in China 105,000–125,000 years ago (Li et al., 2019). We therefore do not have to resort to unobservables and false negatives logic to claim the following. Unless all these reported cases prove invalid, several categories coded as visual art today were likely present in multiple species outside of H. sapiens. The evidence is particularly strong for pigment use, mark-making and perhaps also modified ornament production as not being unique to our species (Rigaud & Doyon, 2025).
It then seems safe to say that we should expect more and older examples from various hominin contexts to come forth in the future, not least given that spontaneous, untaught mark-making has been observed even in contemporary non-human primates in the absence of human models (Tennie & Planer, 2025). A future challenge will involve the differentiation between and identification of cases that may not strictly derive from art or symbolic cognition (Tennie & Planer, 2025). Note, however, that these issues are not the focus of our current manuscript, where, for time and readability’s sake, we simply include all instances of all categories.
Our key point is that despite the similarities, there are some stark differences between the Neanderthal art record and its modern human counterpart. As an example, the Châtelperronian items from Grotte du Renne and the shells recovered from Spanish sites certainly are comparable in quality to early examples of personal ornaments made by H. sapiens in the African MSA and the Early Upper Palaeolithic. In both cases these entail natural objects, such as shells and animal teeth, that have been collected and slightly modified to fulfil their new function. However, they hardly compare in quantity, with modern human output being exceedingly higher (Floss & Hussain, 2015; White, 1993). Admittedly, there are many early modern human sites containing none, just one, or a few ornaments. For instance, in South Africa, Border Cave has yielded a single perforated shell possibly associated to a burial c.74,000 BP, and Sibhudu has only nine perforated shells from MSA layers (70,000–40,000 BP), whose use as beads remains uncertain (Vanhaeren et al., 2013, 2019b). But there are also several locations where such ornaments are abundant.
The site with so far the oldest shell beads attributed to H. sapiens is Bizmoune Cave, in Morocco, where excavations in a layer dated to 142,290 BP (+29,300/–22,060) have produced 32 marine shell beads of the species Tritia gibbosula and one of Columbella rustica (Sehasseh et al., 2021). Until now, the richest collection of MSA shell beads comes from Blombos Cave in South Africa, with a total of 68 Nassarius shells from stratigraphic layers dated to c.75,000 BP (Vanhaeren et al., 2013; Fig. 5). The contrast we describe here comes into sharp focus once we consider that the number of beads from only these two H. sapiens sites far surpasses the totality of known Neanderthal examples. The same may be said for ochre. As we have seen, pigment use is well documented in the Neanderthal archaeological record, especially between 60,000 and 40,000 BP (d’Errico, 2003; d’Errico et al., 2010; Soressi & D’Errico, 2007). Nevertheless, the frequency and amount of ochre exploitation across modern human sites in Africa and Eurasia is consistently higher (d’Errico et al., forthcoming; Dapschauskas et al., 2022; Velliky et al., 2018).Figure 5.Perforated shell beads from Blombos Cave, South Africa. Image by C. Foster. Courtesy of C. Henshilwood.
As for the practice of painting on rocks and walls, Cueva de Ardales seems to provide the best evidence that Neanderthals engaged in such activities long term, starting as early as 65,000 BP (Pitarch-Martí et al., 2021). The presence of painting practices is also supported by the recent find of the San Lázaro pebble, which demonstrates the use of ochre-based paint in different contexts (Álvarez-Alonso et al., 2025). Thus, the evidence until now suggests that Neanderthals could derive the notion of rock painting, even though they do not seem to have exploited it extensively. Granted, painting does not appear to have been a habitual behaviour for modern humans prior to 50,000 BP either. Up to now, the oldest dates of figurative rock art attributed to H. sapiens come from Southeast Asia, between 44,000 and51,000 BP (Aubert et al., 2014, 2017), and there are no dates for painting traditions in Africa earlier than 30,000 BP (Rifkin et al., 2015). In Europe, however, modern human rock paintings go back to the Aurignacian period 39,000–35,000 BP, and from their earliest inception they already include figurative motifs, such as animal representations (Clottes, 2003; González-Sainz et al., 2013).
To briefly sum up, the types of objects and behaviours that make up the Neanderthal art record so far include materials and techniques related to pigment use, engravings, body ornaments, and painting, and both mobiliary and parietal art modalities. These manifestations actually do not differ greatly in quality to those that constitute the earliest visual art forms attributed to modern humans. Perhaps both groups inherited a predisposition to produce pigments and mark-making from a common ancestor (d’Errico, 2024; Meneganzin & Killin, 2025) – and maybe basic versions of such behaviours go back to before the split from other primates (Tennie & Planer, 2025). Nevertheless, there is a pronounced difference between H. sapiens and Neanderthals in terms of the quantity of their artistic production (Breyl, 2021). While Neanderthal examples remain few and far between, sapiens cases (at least in some locations) are more frequent and abundant, especially after 100,000 BP. This indicates that both species’ artistic behaviours may have had a common baseline but subsequently developed along different paths, with modern humans engaging in it more consistently, and eventually developing a greater diversity of techniques, forms, and contents. Practices still absent from the Neanderthal record include stylized crafted ornaments made from scratch through reduction techniques (such as beads or pendants made, for example, from eggshells, bone, stone, antler, or ivory) as well as carved or sculpted objects (e.g. figurines), large-scale rock painting, and image-making. These are also largely absent from the early modern human record prior to 50,000 BP, but become increasingly common after (Fig. 6).Figure 6.Summary of art practices attributed to Neanderthals and H. sapiens.
Often, the above-mentioned similarities and differences between the Neanderthal and modern human art records have been explained through similarities and differences in cognition. For example, in ‘creative explosion’ models, the scarcity of Middle Palaeolithic art is attributed to Neanderthal’s diminished creative power (e.g. Klein & Edgar, 2002; Mithen, 1996). Others defocus from the quantity and highlight analogous qualities to defend equal cognitive status between both lineages (e.g. Bednarik, 2008). We find both approaches problematic as they carry with them implicit judgements about art as a sure-tell proxy of cognition and ‘humanity’ (see below). We argue that, from an archaeological perspective, art should rather be understood as a social technology, which is made for specific purposes, in particular contexts, and involves a socially supported production system (Conkey, 1993). This perspective allows us to reframe the evolutionary developments of art in terms of cultural evolution and explore its specific development within each hominin branch without making any strong pronouncements about cognition as an immobile target.
Reiterating, we are not arguing that the examples of Neanderthal art should not be labelled as such on some a priori grounds, or that they must lack any symbolic content, or be somehow cognitively less demanding than, say, image-making. These ideas are worthy of discussion perhaps – with unsure outcomes – but they are in any case not our focus here. What we aim to assess in this section is whether such behaviours and their products may constitute an actual ‘technology of art’.
As others before us have pointed out (Soffer & Conkey, 1997), there is a fundamental difference between displaying artistic (or aesthetic) behaviours and having artistic production, which lies not in cognitive capacity but in culture. Throughout human history there are many examples of populations having a capacity for, or knowledge of, the potential uses of certain materials and yet not developing a corresponding technology to fully exploit them. From the bow-and-arrow in lower California (Aschmann, 1959) to ceramic containers among pottery-familiar Gravettian hunter-gatherers (Jordan & Zvelebil, 2010), these examples show that even when both material and skill are accessible, their blending into a successful technology will often only happen in a culturally relevant context, and it is by inferring those contexts that we can understand why and how a technology occurs and persists (Soffer & Conkey, 1997). In our case, this means not just indicating whether the capacity for art is present but figuring out the processes by which art becomes sustainably expressed. One important factor is the idea that such expressions – where they are present – can influence the likelihoods (and even forms) of further expressions. They can do so in principle by affecting both those who produced them (feedback for the producer) and by affecting others – which creates, by definition, a downstream cultural effect.
Such cultural effects can range from the subtle to the (nearly) all-encompassing. In theory, they can be so subtle as to leave no trace – in which case we have no access to them. Those that may leave detectable patterns also show a range. They can go from ‘merely’ positively affecting and stabilizing frequencies of behaviours and artefacts (see culture definition in Neadle et al., 2017) all the way to domain-general, open-ended cultural co-evolution of both cultural products and cultural producers (Jeffares, 2010; Sterelny, 2017) – as seen in contemporary humans. Even if we only consider the weak version, the relative frequency of art between populations and lineages can come to depend fully or in part on culture. Where the art at time X reliably and robustly exerts a positive cultural effect on further expressions at time X, for instance on the forms of such expressions (Tylén et al., 2020). We should therefore expect more occurrences across both space and time; patterned in each case via cultural access.
The implication of considering art as a cultural practice (i.e. socially learned and shared in special ways within a group of culturally connected individuals) is that art objects should have a certain consistency and recurrence within a given chronological or geographical context. Minimally, art should be ‘a repeated, regular, systematic, consistent, successive, long-term behaviour’ to be considered a habitual practice (cf. Dapschauskas et al., 2022). But when we apply these criteria to the Neanderthal art record, most examples seem too scattered to be parsimoniously due to reliable and robust cultural effects. For example, the personal ornaments from Cueva de los Aviones are dated to c.115,000 BP (Zilhão, 2012), whereas the shell from Cueva Antón has a date of c.50,000 BP, and most portable art are single finds – possibly made by one individual in the entire absence of specific cultural influences – within an otherwise utilitarian assemblage (e.g. Majkić et al., 2017). Perhaps the best instance of a single site with a relative abundance and variation (close to a dozen) of personal ornaments that might point to a cultural tradition is Grotte du Renne, which is situated at the very end of Neanderthal existence, and could have been influenced by interaction with H. sapiens neighbours (Caron et al., 2011). Another possible case is the exploitation of birds of prey (raptors and corvids) presumably for feather extraction towards adornment purposes. If indeed the case, such use seems to have been sufficiently temporally and geographically expanded to constitute a shared cultural practice, although behavioural convergence of independent groups cannot be fully discarded (Finlayson et al., 2012). What exactly would have been socially learned and what type(s) of social learning could be inferred from these patterns is altogether another matter (Tennie et al., 2020), ranging from social learning of know-what-to-source (e.g. raptors) to social learning of know-how-to-hunt or -trap them. The use of avian fauna for feather extraction towards adornment is, of course, widely observed in ethnography and contemporary human populations. Although it has not yet been reported for early modern human sites, there are Upper Palaeolithic locations, such as the Gravettian sites of Moravia (c.27,000–25,000 BP), where birds (e.g. raptors, swans, and ravens) were intensively exploited mainly for feather use, as suggested by the abundance of wing bone remains (Bochenski et al., 2009; Wertz et al., 2015).
All in all, the evidence so far clearly suggests that Neanderthal individuals were capable of creating visual art of some kind and of comparable quality to that of early H. sapiens – as evidenced by the fact that several examples have been retrieved from clear Neanderthal contexts. But these objects seem to have influenced others’ tendencies to engage in such activities only to a low degree, indirectly (e.g. via social learning of know-what/know-where), or perhaps not at all. This might explain the above findings – that is, of occasional, sporadic, low-frequency occurrences of Neanderthal art. The observed patterns neatly fit the hypothesis that Neanderthal groups did not engage in art-making habitually due to the absence or low presence and frequency (low-power) of art-making and/or of art objects which constrained a downstream cultural effect. That is, Neanderthal A’s art production may have had a minimal impact on the likelihood of art production in other Neanderthals (B, C, etc.) because of a relative lack of cultural effects on frequencies of reinvention in others (and perhaps a relative lack of other, additional social learning processes). If true, the compounding effect of this would hinder the cultural ‘crystallization’ as well as the cultural cumulation of art across space and time; and with it, led to a reduced and patchy incidence of Neanderthal art.
One might see this scenario as supporting the hypothesis that early H. sapiens and Neanderthals differed greatly in cognitive abilities (e.g. Wynn et al., 2016). Yet other explanations for the observed patterns are possible, for example, environmental factors such as risks that may have differed (sensu Collard et al., 2013), or perhaps a lack of memetic ‘selfish art’ in Neanderthals (sensu Planer, 2025), among others. We focus on another alternative below. It is worth noting that the picture could shift entirely with new Neanderthals may have produced more art than current evidence suggests, perhaps in culturally variable frequencies or in forms that have left only faint traces or none at all (cf. Stibbard-Hawkes, 2025). Even so, the available record must be treated as meaningful – especially given that comparable evidence for H. sapiens, from similar time periods, is more abundant and, crucially, follows an opposite trend. Despite a similar ‘patchiness’ in the early modern human art record, when art does appear, it often does so in concentrated clusters consistent with cultural crystallization, and sometimes even with cultural evolution (Tylén et al., 2020). These contexts often show a distinct turning point where art becomes archaeologically common, followed by diversification and the emergence of locally unique traditions. By contrast, such a turning point remains elusive in the Neanderthal record. One might be tempted to explain this solely by positing a general cognitive difference – only H. sapiens, in this view, becoming increasingly adept at cultural learning. Possibly so. Yet, as we outline below, there are explanations that do not require assuming such cognitive differences as established fact.
To understand why art may either flourish in number or remain much more constrained, it pays dividends to look at what art does – at least in a general way. The much deeper issue of the functions of art are a staple debate in art scholarship and we do not intend to solve these here. Still, despite the diversity of proposals on art’s functions across different fields, a proposed common denominator is that art is capable of transmitting, encoding, storing, or recalling information – about oneself, the environment, society, one’s ideas, emotional states, and so on (Straffon, 2016). As such, art would be a mode of communication, perhaps one in which both the form (the object or medium) and content (the meaning or message) of the signals can vary, but invariably exploits aesthetic or affective stimuli to grab the perceivers’ attention. Although this need not have been the case for all art of prehistory, and need not be the case for all that humans may identify as art today, such a definition leaves enough room to include potentially detectable art in prehistoric archaeology. Namely, behavioural products with sensory (usually visual) accessible stimuli (e.g. markings, colouring) that did not necessarily or exclusively serve utilitarian purposes. Our focus lies on the possible cultural effects of such objects on others (e.g. the elicitation of an affective response, the recalling of information, etc.).
Formal variations in human material culture, such as the shapes, colours, configurations, sizes and textures of artefacts, make up what archaeologists usually call ‘styles’ (Wobst, 1977). When styles exist and are culturally transmitted (Buskell & Tennie, 2025), they bear some analogue to cultural differences in living populations (e.g. languages and dialects). They consist of variants that are, strictly speaking, still within individual reach – yet at least their relative frequencies at time 1 is affected by the absence or presence of similar styles at time 0. In this sense, they resemble contemporary ape cultures (Buskell & Tennie, 2025). When this is not the case, we cannot speak of cultural effects (e.g. when styles are reinvented from scratch by individuals in the absence of models, and when these instances do not affect others).
Therefore, regardless of cultural type, material culture styles can emerge and stabilize as a side effect of being in a community and doing things together, if and only if, sufficient numbers of these members can and are affected culturally in these ways. Observing, learning from, and copying each other’s styles in a causally dependent way (Buskell & Tennie, 2025) can generate patterned behaviour distinctive of a group (Sackett, 1986; Tomasello et al., 1993; Wobst, 1977), to the point of generating locally unique styles (Motes-Rodrigo & Tennie, 2021) – not present anywhere else, in any culturally unconnected population. Even where styles are not locally unique, but their occurrence is nevertheless patterned to some degree according to their shared cultural origin, one can use material culture styles as a strategy for individual and group or culture recognition. In contemporary human societies, styles of bodily adornments and modifications, from makeup and jewellery to clothing and tattoos, can be used in such ways, as they reflect social roles, beliefs, and identities in culturally patterned ways (d’Errico, 2024). Thus, in addition to ‘beautifying’ or enhancing the human body, personal ornamentation – where it is culturally transmitted in a causally copied way (at least partially) – can be a good medium for socially communicating group/culture membership, particularly to convey messages of identity to others, or as a reliable sign of it (d’Errico & Vanhaeren, 2007; Kuhn & Stiner, 2007; Rossano, 2010; Straffon, 2016; Vanhaeren, 2005; White, 1993; Wiessner, 1984; Wobst, 1977; Zilhão, 2007). That is, these items can serve as social markers.
In a closely knit small network, such as a family unit, the useful information contained in such social markers, for instance culturally transmitted personal ornaments, is minimal because everyone knows each other and each other’s identity and membership, thus the payoff for such displays is low – predicting, under behavioural ecology assumptions, that investment in identity signals will be minor (Gamble, 1998; Wobst, 1977). In contrast, when interactions are held frequently beyond this or other closely familiar groups, or when a group becomes too large, such social markers may gather more potential pay-off – culminating perhaps in situations where they may become necessary for a continued ability (which need not be absolute) to track who (individual) belongs to whom (group/culture) (Coward & Gamble, 2008; Coward & Grove, 2011; McElreath et al., 2003; Nettle & Dunbar, 1997).
This seems supported by empirical studies in living populations showing that people certainly rely on non-facial and extrasomatic visual cues to identify others and to infer social information. Among children and adults, clothing and paraphernalia are critical for person recognition when looking at strangers (Seitz, 2003), which is relevant when interacting with members of an out-group. But within the in-group, too, displaying membership-related paraphernalia reinforces identity and the creation of private and collective selves (Derbaix & Decrop, 2011). Even more simple features, such as facial ornamentation, for instance in the form of painting, jewellery, or hairstyles, can signal social status and group membership (Salagnon et al., 2024), which overall help to mediate and sustain social relationships with familiar and unfamiliar individuals. For example, body painting in some populations carries information about a person’s standing and affiliation (Fiore, 2008). But body painting is ephemeral, and is effective only in immediate, short-term, face-to-face (or anyways immediately visual) interactions. In contrast, culturally evolved aspects of beads, pendants, charms, and jewellery can perform these and other functions in a more permanent manner and even beyond direct interactions, as they can be transferred, exchanged, gifted, or inherited (Kuhn & Stiner, 2007) and their physical persistence makes them overall more reliably noticeable.
All this leads to questions about the evolution of these forms and of such information-carrying systems. It is possible that the emergence of body ornamentation made of persisting raw materials (e.g. shell, bone, ivory, stone) indirectly points to the passing of a threshold in human networks to a wider scale of social interaction, where the payoffs of such a system finally exceeded their cost. Perhaps they carried one or more of the mentioned (or unmentioned) types of information that enabled or smoothened the interactions of larger numbers of people or groups – maybe they were even used as means to transmit information beyond this context (Gärdenfors et al., 2012; Kuhn & Stiner, 2007; Straffon, 2016; Wiessner, 1983). These may not have been the only factors at play, the pay-off might have also derived from increased trade and reciprocal interactions with groups that did not otherwise meet very often.
An important aspect that may easily be overlooked is that in order to carry information in these ways, the ornaments needed to be recognizable as markers; that is, they had to be identified as information-carriers, relevant to the communication need they helped to fix. If no other group used such markers, any form at all could in principle take up this role. Meaning that any object, material, or behaviour could be used for marking purposes. Some markers (e.g. purely behaviour-based ones) would leave no archaeological trace at all. Even many material markers might not (e.g. attaching a feather or a stick to one’s hair). Importantly, we suspect many objects currently identified as ‘art’ in the archaeological record may have functioned as social markers. If so, they would have been part of a social technology. However, their effectiveness would not necessarily have depended on extensive cultural transmission – only on being widely recognized as markers. Perhaps their function was evident – especially if other markers had already been in use – or perhaps it posed a genuine obstacle to their evolution. In any case, the form of these early markers needed to be accessible to any individual. Consider, for example, a muddy finger trace on the body – likely a common occurrence for a long time (cf. Tennie & Planer, 2025). Only when and where a greater number of groups or more complex types of information needed to be encoded would there have been pressure to move beyond these simple, ‘natural’ forms – towards levels that ultimately required full causal copying (sensu Buskell & Tennie, 2025). At this point, the cultural evolution of such marker styles would kick off. Among early modern human populations, this appears to have first occurred around 140,000–130,000 years ago, when the earliest modified ornaments were produced.
Various scholars have suggested before that visual art first functioned as a means of expressing identity and marking social membership (e.g. Gamble, 1998; Gärdenfors et al., 2012; Kuhn & Stiner, 2007; White, 1993). However, the issue of why signalling identity mattered at all, and how material culture became a medium for it has not been fully addressed. This is relevant because all other primates manage complex social relations solely relying on aspects, such as facial and vocal recognition (Pokorny & de Waal, 2009), begging the question of why humans use artefacts to signal identity. We believe this is because hominin sociality created a context to incorporate visual displays to help mediate social relations, first within the familiar group and, eventually, with strangers at a distance. Something as simple as a bead, through its shape, size, placement, and so on can give away large amounts of information about a person at a glance, and can also be gifted, inherited, and traded, embodying histories of people’s connections. By linking visual art to individual and group recognition in a scale of social connectivity, our proposal predicts that ad hoc cultural practices directed at signalling personal identity will be the first to appear in the archaeological record, whereas the emergence of labour-intensive, collective modes of visual art would be linked to population growth and an increase in the frequency and intensity of interactions across extended networks (Straffon, 2016; Wiessner, 1983). This two-step functional model of visual art development (individual-collective) may explain why not all forms of art emerge in the record at once and why they appear, disappear, and reappear at different times and rates in different places among different groups, independently of cognitive factors.
What we see in both the Neanderthal and early H. sapiens art record (up to 50,000 BP), corresponds to instances of material culture that can be individually learned and produced, match displays of individual style, and work well as small-network markers, such as visible ornaments that could have been worn on the body or applied to personal utensils (Wiessner, 1983). That is, items whose variability is person-based, convey information about an individual’s identity (status, affiliation, membership, etc.), and are generally displayed in intragroup contexts. These types of personal ornamentation are ubiquitous among modern humans, even in small-scale hunter-gatherer societies where other types of visual art are not common, such as the Amazonian Pirahã (Everett, 2010).
Forms of collective identity that mediate intergroup relations, such as highly conventionalized artistic or material culture styles (e.g. crafted beads of different local forms, stylized image-making) have not been identified in Neanderthal contexts. Ethnographic studies indicate that those collective forms typically refer to group norms, values, or attributes, such as territoriality, authorship, ownership, and behavioural pre- and proscription (Wiessner, 1983). We suspect that this is because as more or larger groups come in regular contact, the relevance of information displays increases, driving patterns of regionalization of material culture styles (Stiner & Kuhn, 2006). However, it is crucial to distinguish whether these differences simply represent variation or whether the differences themselves arise through processes of causal copying (a distinction that is ripe for future exploration). It is also at this point that elaborate art practices that involve high labour investment and a certain level of specialization may occur (cf. Pradhan et al., 2012; Straffon, 2019). Note that the main factor here is not merely a matter of demography, but of social connectivity, organization, and the institutions and processes that regulate, restrict, or allow the transmission of knowledge (Gárate, 2025; Kuhn & Stiner, 2006; Riede et al., 2019; Romano et al., 2020; Straffon, 2016). If, indeed, increasingly differentiated scales of social interaction requiring the display of many distinguishable types of information acted as a key selective pressure for the evolution of increasingly diversified social markers, then these factors might have also influenced the cultural transmission abilities of their makers – overall driving the evolution of complexity and diversity of visual art forms. Having said all this, we now link it back to the social worlds of Neanderthals and early modern humans.
Research suggests that the main differences between these two human lineages might lie precisely in demography and social organization, rather than (and/or in addition to) cognitive capacity (Soressi, 2016). For one, Neanderthals probably lived in small foraging groups with overall low population density, which would have precluded repeated contact between unrelated groups, beyond the range of the family network (Hayden, 2012; Skov et al., 2022; Slimak et al., 2024; Snodgrass & Leonard, 2009). Data from raw material and artefact mobility also indicate that Neanderthals rarely engaged in long-distance exchange, meaning that they unlikely formed the sort of extensive cooperation networks observed among historical hunter-gatherers (Horan et al., 2005; Pearce & Moutsiou, 2014). These differences in group size and social organization would have acted as behavioural and cultural (i.e., not necessarily cognitive) constraints on the development of systematic art behaviours – as they would have lacked much pressure for group markings, let alone diversified group markings. In the absence of extended social networks, and of the need to specialize in social (and perhaps other) technology, there was little push and little pull for diverse visual art forms as markers to gain a reliable or widespread social role in Neanderthal society (Kuhn & Stiner, 2001). The same may have applied to early H. sapiens populations prior to 120,000–100,000 years ago (Zilhão, 2012). In both cases, either no such markers were produced or the use of ad hoc markers that left no archaeological trace sufficed. By ‘ad hoc’ we mean practices that were not formalized (either by cultural normativity or cumulative culture) and therefore could have been individually learned and/or reinvented by any member of the community, at least in principle.
For a time, the earliest forms of body ornamentation, such as pigment use, if applied in body painting, and the utilization of natural materials repurposed as pendants or beads (d’Errico, 2024), seem to have been enough for information marking usage within the small-scale communities of Pleistocene humans and in their densities. The practices of engraving and painting, while present, appear to have remained relatively constrained to punctuated events – better explainable as outcomes of individual behaviour, perhaps outside any aim of using them as such markers or outside the realisation that they might serve that function. In addition, as long as the range of more readily available things sufficed, any additional investments required in the production of such items might not (yet) have paid off. Assuming all this is true, among H. sapiens it was not until some 50,000 years ago (as far as the evidence currently suggests) that the necessity to display a sufficiently diverse set of markers seems to have arisen, allowing for and driving the development of highly stylized forms, such as ornaments distinguishable by specific cultural conventions on shape, size, and raw materials, and image-making on various media. Again, it is possible that this process was enabled or maybe even driven by the increased ability to reliably culturally transmit such specifics. The many possible factors here, and their many complex interactions and co-evolutions, outstrip the space of the manuscript, but are (and will be) explored in other works.
he proposal here presented, that the flourishing of art hinges on cultural effects and cultural abilities is amenable to testing. Its prediction that individual and collective modes of visual art are correlated with the incidence of connectivity and interaction within and across human groups, implies that there should be cases where changes in either demography or social organization caused collective forms of art to ‘revert’ to individual forms. One possible example may be the historical hunter-gatherers of Tasmania, Australia, and Baja California, Mexico. In both instances, it has been suggested that there was an isolation event that caused an interruption in the pattern of cultural transmission, triggering a marked quantitative and qualitative decline in material culture forms, including visual art practices (Aschmann, 1959; Henrich, 2004 – but see Andersson & Read, 2016). Identifying clear archaeological cases could provide an interesting manner to test our proposal. The Upper Palaeolithic of Europe, with its great variability of styles and forms of visual art across regions and periods, might provide other examples (e.g. following up on Barton et al., 1994). As for the more general proposal that art should be understood as a communication signal, current research on the evolution of animal communication should provide comparative material to better understand how visual art might have emerged and diversified (De Tiège et al., 2021).
We should note that our scenario is also not (fully) incompatible with cognitive and non-functional accounts for the evolution of art. For instance, it does not exclude that the forms and media of some art that we see in the record were selected by their reproducibility and fit with the hominin visual system (Planer, 2025; Tylén et al., 2020). In fact, it recognizes that such stimuli would perform better as signals, as they would be well equipped to draw attention by exploiting human sensorial biases and preferences (Verpooten & Nelissen, 2010). It also incorporates cognition to the extent that cultural effects (when present) can shape the cognitive mechanisms that underlie or are related to art-making, either constraining or allowing for the development of diverse forms. Cross-cultural studies in contemporary humans have shown that the developmental and behavioural paths of cognitive capacities can hinge largely on culture (Bender & Beller, 2013). Theory of mind, causal cognition, numerical reasoning, and conceptual systems, just to mention a few, all differ in ontogeny and expression across human cultures (Bender, 2020; Heyes, 2021). Some authors, for instance, have explored the possible implications that sociocultural factors may have had on different aspects of the hominin mind, such as attention and visuo-spatial cognition, and how these in turn may have impacted material culture outputs. For example, Neanderthal cognition may have been more proprioceptive and less dependent on visual stimuli than sapiens’ is (Langbroek, 2014), while their sociality likely supported individual styles of learning and self-directed attention, specialized for single tasks (García Capín, 2025; Lombard, 2025). This is in line with the (near-) exclusive presence of ad hoc, individually learned and produced visual art forms in Neanderthal contexts.
As mentioned in the introduction, the traditional narrative in cognitive archaeology has been to explain the absence of special expressions of visual art (e.g. elaborate, diversified ornaments and image-making) in the record of Neanderthals and early H. sapiens in terms of differences in cognitive abilities. Until recently, this supported the view that only H. sapiens eventually became endowed with the ‘capacity for creativity’, which led not only to extensive art-making, but also to technological sophistication and, ultimately, to the success of our species (Coolidge & Wynn, 2009; Deacon, 1997; Mithen, 1996). Such explanations implicitly suggested that modern humans, specifically those with image-making and complex technologies, reached a higher stage of (cognitive) evolution (Donald, 1991), an assumption that is likely misplaced (Currie et al., 2024) or at the very least, as we have shown, incomplete. On the other side, some researchers have argued that Neanderthals were cognitively, behaviourally, and culturally (archaeologically) indistinguishable from early modern humans (Bednarik, 2008). And art played a key role in both arguments.
The idea of art as an indicator of ingenuity and a marker of humanity goes back over five centuries. As the Age of Exploration flourished and the Renaissance took hold of Europe, the so-called ‘liberal arts’ (architecture, sculpture, and painting) came to be defined as intellectual products, more akin to thought than manual skill, and as expressions of the human experience (Ingold, 2001; Russo, 2015). When the European powers came into contact with native populations of faraway lands, the arts became a way to determine whether these newly encountered peoples were rational human beings. For example, in Spanish America, missionaries often referred to the natives’ ability to create beautiful objects as an argument to convince the authorities that they were worth Christianizing, and as a consequence they redefined art as essential to humanity (Russo, 2014). In this way, ‘beauty’ as perceived by the descriptors, rather than presence or absence of art, or its potential ability, became a central component of art-making and in turn, specific artistic practices and outcomes became fundamental to a definition of humanity. Today, the debate of whether Neanderthals (and other extinct hominins) had any/specific ability to make art largely echoes the fifteenth century Catholic priests’ plead to justify the full humanity of American indigenous peoples. Although the latter position is understandable as a reaction to long-held claims of modern human exceptionalism and ‘uniqueness’, it also blurs our understanding of potential Neanderthal ‘uniqueness’ in its own right (Moro-Abadía & Chase, 2021) and of diverse art as mainly or partly cultural rather than a purely acultural cognitive product.
By reframing (some) visual art in terms of cultural evolution and situating its emergence and evolution in the context social interactions and in co-evolution with cognition, we can potentially explain the similar qualitative properties (to our modern eyes) and low frequency of visual art behaviour among Neanderthals and the earliest members of Homo sapiens without having to invoke major cognitive differences between the two and without alluding to an essentialist concept of art behaviour. Instead, under this view it remains possible that Neanderthals, too, would have been able to create frequent and culturally evolving expressions of art, each according to the conditions of the groups that produced them. The key is that Neanderthals may not have had any real need to follow this path – in particular, their behavioural ecology and low population sizes might not have been conducive to it.
Cultural evolution of art certainly requires special types of cultural transmission with a sufficient power, but in the absence of a need to culturally evolve art, and with a sole focus on the domain of art alone, we cannot and therefore should not ascertain the presence or absence of these types of cultural transmission or their relative power.
As noted above, there are examples of contemporary human groups whose artistic production is considered by some as ‘minimal’ as those of Pleistocene hominins, but whose ‘modernity’ or cognitive ability cannot be put into question, as all human groups living today are excellent cultural copiers (Clay & Tennie, 2018), such as the mentioned Pirahã (Everett, 2010). Similarly, there is no basis to expect Neanderthal material culture to have followed a similar path as that of H. sapiens – or to ever have ‘caught on’ culturally (Sterelny & Hiscock, 2017), or that culturally evolving art should be a natural outcome of cognitive evolution in general, let alone a sinister demand that art must all evolve towards one gold standard style. Lastly, given that sociality and culture shape human cognition today as much as in the past (Bender & Beller, 2013; Bender et al., 2024; Heyes, 2018), we must be aware that a lack of a need for cultural differentiation in one domain (here, art) may mask the presence of abilities that would have expressed themselves whenever such a need existed.
The expressions of overall qualitatively similar ochre use, engraving, personal ornaments, and non-figurative painting that manifest in the archaeological record of Neanderthals and early H. sapiens seem to suggest that, for most of the Pleistocene, art-making remained near or at an ad-hoc level. Increasing frequencies in H. sapiens come together with an eventual differentiation of art, even to the degree of distinguishing single groups. We interpreted these findings with a different need to use such art as markers to communicate meanings. Initially, art remained mainly on levels of individual learnability. More frequent cases in time and space – as observed in H. sapiens – may indicate a socially catalysed and stabilized use of ad hoc art as personal meaning markers. Eventually a need arose for further differentiation – and collective meanings – which could be quenched by cultural evolution of art into distinctive forms.
The absence of a need for either increased use of ad hoc art or culturally evolved art by low-density Neanderthal populations, and their rare encounters with outside groups, would provide an explanation that need not assume that Neanderthals lacked the cognitive ability for either culturally increasing and stabilizing ad hoc art use or for culturally evolved art. In cases like Cueva de Ardales, art practice seems to have occurred across several Neanderthal generations, each individually recreating the same ochre-staining behaviour (Pitarch-Martí et al., 2021). This example of ad hoc art suggests that the focus was perhaps on performance, or just individual exploration. That is, the aim – if there was one – would have been the act of painting itself rather than to produce ‘a painting’ with meaning for others.
However, the differences between the material culture of Neanderthals and modern humans cannot all just be attributed to demography or scales of interaction, as much as they cannot be explained solely by genes, soma, brains, or anatomy, and so on. As with contemporary indigenous communities, to unravel Neanderthals’ own path we need to move past focusing on those traits that make them ‘like us’ and of arguments aimed mainly at proving or denying their humanity or creativity. Instead, we should embrace that they, along with other extinct hominins, represent different ways of being human (Stringer & Gamble, 1993) and try to learn from and about them via their more idiosyncratic behaviours (Breyl, 2021; Langbroek, 2014; Moro-Abadía & Chase, 2021). For example, Neanderthals were skilled woodworkers (Vaquero et al., 2001; Wragg Sykes, 2020) and we are yet to explore how this could have shaped their domestic and subsistence niches; it is even possible that they had some artistic output on that material, like the ethnographic examples of carved tree trunks from Australia (O’Connor et al., 2025). Their frequent use of manganese, presumably for black pigment, and their treatment of bird remains may be other distinct behaviours, without parallel in the early modern human record, which may reveal Neanderthal aesthetic systems (Meneganzin & Killin, 2025). Also, studying the creation and curation of what appear to be Neanderthal ritual spaces, such as Bruniquel Cave (Jaubert et al., 2016) and Cueva Des-Cubierta (Baquedano et al., 2023), may be key to understanding Neanderthal social cognition (Soressi, 2016). Aiming at reconstructing Neanderthals’ ways of knowing and learning may help us explain how cultural information was created and transmitted in Neanderthal society and how these abilities evolved in them, us and in other species (even outside the human lineage). In fact, exploring Neanderthal group dynamics and strategies of cultural transmission may turn out to be more informative than cognitive capacities to clarify why early art practice seems to have been narrowly shared and non-cumulative.
In closing, here we have focused on the use of art as meaning maker (such as group markers), although we note that there can be many other reasons – and many such reasons combined – that may have reduced push and/or pull factors for Neanderthal art.