Were Neanderthals more artistic than previously thought?

A 51,000-year-old bone found inside a cave in the Harz Mountains of central Germany is changing our perception of the Neanderthal. The lines purposefully carved into the toe bone belonging to a prehistoric deer quite possibly had a symbolic meaning. The artifact shows that the Stone Age hominids were capable of artistic expression. It could be the world's oldest art, researchers say.

Pop culture has portrayed the Neanderthals as hunched-over brutes bearing wooden clubs, inspired by superficial older studies based on a skeleton discovered in 1908 that had spinal deformations and bent knees. That version of Nenaderthal even has an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary: "a primitive, uncivilized, or loutish person," "politically or socially reactionary" or "a male chauvinist."

Fast forward to the 21st century, and we now know that the Neanderthals used advanced methods in toolmaking, used materials in their environment to start fires faster, hunted large animals and even interbred with modern humans.

Researchers also revealed at the end of June that a previously unknown type of human had been unearthed during the excavation of a sinkhole in Israel. The hominids lived alongside our species over 100,000 years ago. The finds consist of a partial skull and jaw from a person who lived 120,000 to 140,000 years ago.

Researchers believe that the remains of the "Nesher Ramla Homo type," found at the Nesher Ramla site, belong to one of the "last survivors" of ancient human species, which could be closely related to European Neanderthals. They also believe that some may have traveled east to India and China, as some fossils found in East Asia share similarities in features with the newly found bones.

"Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" was played repeatedly at a celebratory party on the day a female skeleton was discovered. Thus, Australopithecus afarensis was christened after The Beatles' hit. One of the 20th century's most iconic fossils, Lucy was discovered in 1974 by paleontologist Donald C. Johanson in Hadar, Ethiopia, and was one of the world's earliest known human ancestor species.

The Hobbit, better known as Flo, named after the Indonesian island of Flores, where she was found, belongs to the species Homo floresiensis. Thought to be 12,000 years old, the archaic human was only 3 feet, 7 inches (1.1 meter) tall. Hence, she was nicknamed the Hobbit, as a nod to the Lord of the Rings craze during the time of her discovery in 2004.

In 1924, quarry workers near Taung, South Africa, brought an unusual skull to anatomist Raymond Dart, who examined it and found that it belonged to a 3-year-old hominin. He named it Australopithecus africanus. Aged about 2.8 million years, it was one of the first fossils indicating early bipedalism, and that supported the then-new theory that humans evolved in Africa, rather than Asia or Europe.

In 2008, archaeologist Michael Shunkov discovered fossils of an unknown hominin in a cave deep within the Altai mountains near the Russia-Kazakhstan border. Geneticists traced their mitochondrial DNA to a previously unknown human ancestor. Named after the cave, the Denisovans are said to have migrated out of Africa separately from early Neanderthals and Homo sapiens.

More than 1,500 fossil bones belonging to at least 15 individuals — ranging from infants to elderly adults of the Homo naledi group — were discovered by cavers in a remote, almost inaccessible chamber deep within the Rising Star cave system in South Africa in 2015. Experts, however, were split about the find: Was this an ancient human or an early homo erectus?

Art left behind by ancient humans also give us clues to our past. These cave paintings in Chiribiquete National Park, Colombia, are estimated to be more than 22,000 years old. This points to some theories, based on other archaeological evidence, that humans occupied the Americas about 20,000 to 30,000 years ago.

In 2021, Australian and Indonesian archaeologists found even older cave paintings in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Depicting prehistoric Indonesian pigs, they were done using ochre, an inorganic mineral that cannot be carbon-dated. So researchers dated the calcium stalagmites and stalactites surrounding the paintings instead, and found that the oldest painting was created at least 45,500 years ago.