One day around 43,000 years ago, a Neanderthal man in what is now central Spain came across a large granite pebble whose pleasing contours and indentations snagged his eye.
Something in the shape of that quartz-rich stone – perhaps its odd resemblance to an elongated face – may have compelled him to pick it up, study it and, eventually, to dip one of his fingers in red pigment and press it against the pebble’s edge, exactly where the nose on that face would have been.
In doing so, he left behind what is thought to be the world’s oldest complete human fingerprint, on what would appear to be the oldest piece of European portable art.
The discovery, which could enrich our understanding of how Neanderthals saw and interpreted the world, has come to light after almost three years of research by a team of Spanish archaeologists, geologists and police forensic experts.
The dig team noticed there was something odd about the stone – which is just over 20cm in length – as soon as they found it while excavating the San Lázaro rock shelter on the outskirts of Segovia in July 2022. It did not look like something that had been used as a hammer or an anvil; it didn’t look like a tool at all.
“The stone was oddly shaped and had a red ochre dot, which really caught our eye,” said David Álvarez Alonso, an archaeologist at Complutense University in Madrid.
“We were all thinking the same thing and looking at each other because of its shape: we were all thinking, ‘This looks like a face’. But obviously that wasn’t enough. As we carried on our research, we knew we needed information to be able to advance the hypothesis that there was some purposefulness here, this was a symbolic object and that one possible explanation – although we’ll never know for sure – is that this was the symbolisation of a face.”
Determined to test their conviction that the red mark was a human fingerprint placed deliberately between the indentations that could have been the eyes and mouth of a face, the team enlisted the help of other experts. Further investigations confirmed that the pigment, which contained iron oxides and clay minerals, was not found elsewhere in or around the cave.
“We then got in touch with the scientific police to determine whether we were right that the dot had been applied using a fingertip,” said Álvarez Alonso. “They confirmed that it had.” The print, they concluded, was human and could be that of an adult male.
“Once we had that and all the other pieces, context and information, we advanced the theory that this could be a pareidolia [catching sight of a face in an ordinary, inanimate object] which then led to a human intervention in the form of the red dot,” said the archaeologist. “Without that red dot, you can’t make any claims about the object.”
Álvarez Alonso argues that the dot’s existence raises questions that all point in the same direction.
“It couldn’t have been a coincidence that the dot is where it is – and there are no markings to indicate any other use,” he said. “So why did they bring this pebble from the river to the inside of the cave? And, what’s more, there’s no ochre inside the cave or outside it. So they must have had to bring pigment from elsewhere.”
The team’s findings, reported in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, reinforce the idea that Neanderthals – who died out some 40,000 years ago – were capable of acts of artistic and symbolic creation, meaning modern humans were not the first to use art as a means of expression.
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“The fact that the pebble was selected because of its appearance and then marked with ochre shows that there was a human mind capable of symbolising, imagining, idealising and projecting his or her thoughts on an object,” the authors write.
“Furthermore, in this case, we can propose that three fundamental cognitive processes are involved in creating art: the mental conception of an image, deliberate communication, and the attribution of meaning. These are the basic elements characterising symbolism and, also prehistoric – non-figurative – art. Furthermore, this pebble could thus represent one of the oldest known abstractions of a human face in the prehistoric record.”
Álvarez Alonso and his colleagues are looking forward to the debate that their discovery will reignite over whether modern humans were the first artists.
“We’ve set out our interpretation in the article, but the debate goes on,” he said. “And anything to do with Neanderthals always prompts a massive debate. If we had a pebble with a red dot on it that was done 5,000 years ago by Homo sapiens, no one would hesitate to call it portable art. But associating Neanderthals with art generates a lot of debate. I think there’s sometimes an unintentional prejudice.”
Still, said the archaeologist, he and the rest of the team believed the most logical explanation was that someone, a very long time ago, “saw something special in this pebble”, picked it up and set about imbuing it with meaning.
“Why would a Neanderthal have seen it differently from the way we see it today?” he asked. “They were human, too. The thing here is that we’re dealing with an unparalleled object; there’s nothing similar. It’s not like art where, if you discover a cave painting, there are hundreds more you can use for context. But our assertion is that the Neanderthals had a similar capacity for symbolic thought to Homo sapiens – and we think this object reinforces that notion.”
