jan 1, 37000 BC - 37,000 - Gorham's Cave Art Rock art Engravings (Lines) Neanderthal or Homo Sapien??? Gorham's Cave, Gibraltar (Spain/Morocco)

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Quote from Cork Uni (link below)

Who created a piece of prehistoric art at Gorham's Cave, Gibraltar - was it Neanderthal man or Modern man? This has become a key question for scholars involved in Franco-Cantabrian cave art of the Upper Paleolithic. The cave art in question consists of eight tiny rock engravings which were discovered by a team of scientists in July 2012 on a ledge at the rear of the shelter. The cave is known to have been occupied by Neanderthal man, and the parietal art is believed to date to about 37,000 BCE - some time before modern man is thought to have arrived in the area. Therefore the engravings were created by Neanderthals, says the team leader, Gibraltar Museum director Clive Finlayson, whose study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Nature. This conclusion supports similar claims concerning the authorship of abstract symbols found among the El Castillo Cave paintings (c.39,000 BCE) in Cantabria, Northern Spain. Sceptics, however, disagree, claiming that credit for the petroglyphs should go to modern man, whose track record for creating Paleolithic art is well documented, instead of Neanderthals whose capability for artistic expression remains in doubt. The debate is of some significance, since cave art has long been accepted as a major cognitive step in human evolution. Furthermore, until the recent finds at Gibraltar and El Castillo, art was considered to be a distinctive feature of modern man, who supplanted the indigenous Neanderthals across Europe from about 40,000 BCE onwards, causing their extinction by around 28,000 BCE. If it can be proved that the engraving at Gorham's Cave was indeed the work of Neanderthals, the capacity for abstract thought would no longer be the preserve of the moderns, opening up the possibility that Neanderthals might have been the creators of many other works of rock art, mistakenly attributed to modern man. See also the abstract markings at La Pileta Cave (18,000 BCE), a little further east in Andalucia. To see how the Neanderthal art at Gorham's Cave fits into the evolution of engraving, see: Prehistoric Art Timeline (from 2.5 million BCE).

Rock Engravings

Gorham's ancient art hardly appears impressive. Etched into a flat surface of fine-grained lime-dolostone, the engraving covers a total area of 15 cm by 20 cm (less than one square foot), and consists of eight deep grooves or furrows forming an incomplete cross-hatched (or criss-cross) geometric pattern, intersected by two groups of short, thin lines.

Even so, despite being a great deal less impressive than the contemporaneous Sulawesi Cave Art (37,900 BCE), or the slightly later Chauvet Cave paintings (c.30,000 BCE), both created by modern man at opposite ends of the earth, Gorham's cave etchings might cause us to change our entire understanding of our Neanderthal ancestors.

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