Soumya Sagar holds a degree in medicine and used to do research in neurosurgery at the University of California, San Francisco. His work has appeared in New Scientist, Science, Discover, and Mental Floss. He is a passionate science writer and a voracious consumer of knowledge, especially trivia.
A nearly 130,000-year-old bear bone was deliberately marked with cuts and might be one of the oldest art pieces in Eurasia crafted by the Neanderthals, researchers say.
"It is one of the quite rare Neanderthal objects of symbolic nature," Tomasz Płonka, professor of archaeology at the University of Wrocław, told Live Science."These incisions have no utilitarian reason." For instance, the bone does not appear to be a tool or an object of ritual importance, the study found.
These consistencies suggest that the prehistoric artist wasn't just doodling and may have had advanced cognitive abilities, the researchers wrote in the study, which was published April 17 in the Journal of Archaeological Science. To figure out how the incisions were made, the team made experimental marks on fresh cattle bones with replica flint blades and Middle Paleolithic knives using seven incision techniques, including to and fro movements and vigorous sawing movements.
RELATED STORIES—'Simply did not work': Mating between Neanderthals and modern humans may have been a product of failed alliances, says archaeologist Ludovic Slimak—Scientists finally solve mystery of why Europeans have less Neanderthal DNA than East Asians
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