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Neanderthals in the News

Started by Recusant, November 10, 2015, 04:47:35 PM

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xSilverPhinx

I am what survives if it's slain - Zack Hemsey


Recusant

#46
Thank you, xSilverPhinx. I liked the ideas and analysis, but the demonstration of them left much to be desired.  ;D



"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


xSilverPhinx

Quote from: Recusant on November 04, 2019, 01:18:22 PM
...but the demonstration of them left a much to be desired.  ;D

:lol:

Could almost be worthy of a Monty Python sketch, no?  ;D
I am what survives if it's slain - Zack Hemsey


billy rubin

whoever said that science had to be serious?


"I cannot understand the popularity of that kind of music, which is based on repetition. In a civilized society, things don't need to be said more than three times."

Recusant

Two recent articles here. First, Neanderthal footprints on the shore in France. (The Ars Technica site limits the number of free articles available per month, but most likely if you regularly visit there, you already have a subscription.)

"80,000-year-old footprints reveal Neanderthal social life" | Ars Technica

QuoteA rapidly growing set of archaeological evidence tells us that Neanderthals thought symbolically, made art and jewelry, buried their dead, and probably tended to their sick and wounded. We have direct evidence of what they ate, what kinds of tools they used, and how they made those tools. But when it comes to what kinds of groups they lived in and how those groups were organized, the best anthropologists can do is look at how modern hunter-gatherers live in similar conditions. If Neanderthals lived like hunter-gatherers live today, they probably spent most of their time in groups of between 10 and 30 people, mostly relatives, made up of a mixture of adults and children.

That lines up well with estimates of how many people could have lived in some of the Neanderthal living areas archaeologists have excavated. Those are good ways to develop ideas about Neanderthal social groups, but they're still indirect. On the other hand (ha!), archaeological evidence doesn't get much more direct than footprints.

[. . .]

Most of the prints are just single steps preserved here and there, not lengthy sets of tracks. But they give archaeologists an idea of how many Neanderthals lived at Le Rozel at one time. In the Pleistocene dunes at Le Rozel, muddy sand would have held tracks well, and windblown sand would have quickly filled and covered them. As a result, archaeologists can be reasonably sure that all the Neanderthals whose prints show up in the same sediment layer were walking around Le Rozel at the same time.

Duveau and his colleagues say the prints record the presence of between 10 and 13 Neanderthals. That lines up with anthropologists' other estimates for the size of Neanderthal groups; the Le Rozel group seems to have been relatively small by the standards of modern hunter-gatherers, but not small enough to be unusual.

[. . .]

At least one of the Le Rozel Neanderthals seems to have been unusually tall, standing at around 175cm (5 foot 9). That's a bit above the 168cm (5 foot 6) average for a Neanderthal male. But based on the size of the prints, the group seems to have been mostly children and teenagers, who outnumbered the adults by at least four to one. The smallest prints at the site were just 11.2cm (4.4 inches) long, about the size of a 2-year-old child.

[Continues . . .]





Next, a flint tool with glue refined from birch bark shows that Neanderthals were technically proficient and spent time to plan and make such an item.

"50,000-year-old, tar-smeared tool shows Neanderthal smarts" | Science

QuoteOld-school scholars considered Neanderthals brutish and simple, but recent research shows they made jewelry, had a precision grip, and may have even painted cave art. Now, a tar-caked tool found on a Dutch beach supports the idea that Neanderthals could accomplish complex, multistep tasks that took planning ahead over several days.

In 2016, an amateur collector named Willy van Wingerden found a flint flake partly covered in thick black tar on the Zandmotor, an artificial beach in the Netherlands. The beach, made from sand dredged from the bottom of the North Sea, is a treasure trove of prehistoric artifacts. That's because the sand used to be part of a wide expanse of dry, cold steppe, connecting the United Kingdom and the Netherlands during the last ice age, when sea levels were much lower than they are today.

At first glance, the tool doesn't look like much—a small, sharp-edged flint flake with a gob of tar on the end. Once it hardened, the tar provided enough of a handhold for someone to use the flake's sharp edge as a scraper or blade. "It looks quite simple, but it's quite a complex tool," says lead author Marcel Niekus, an independent archaeologist in the Netherlands who analyzed the find. "It took a lot of steps to make and haft the piece."

When Niekus and his colleagues used radiocarbon dating to analyze the tar on the flake, they found it was 50,000 years old, dating back to a time before modern humans arrived, they write today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The tar, preserved by the cold, oxygen-free conditions in sediments several meters beneath the sea floor, might have been an essential element of Stone Age tool kits, says co-author Geeske Langejans, an archaeologist at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. She and her colleagues tried to recreate tool's manufacture, collecting strips of birch bark, mounding clay over them, and building a fire on top to heat the bark inside to 300°C–400°C for hours. The procedure was hot enough to produce thick tar, as the resinous bark disintegrated. By comparing the chemical composition of the modern tar and its impurities to the ancient tar, Langejans and her team found that the Neanderthals likely used the same procedure.

[Continues . . .]
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Recusant

A good (though somewhat long) article about recent finds at the Shanidar cave. This is the site where, many decades ago, Neanderthals remains were found closely associated with pollen, which suggested possible burial rites, or at least leaving flowers with the dead. The site had been unavailable to paleontologists for a long time due to its proximity to ongoing conflicts in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq.

"Shanidar Z" | University of Cambridge

Quote

The Neanderthal skull, flattened by thousands of years of sediment and rock fall,
in situ in Shanidar Cave, Iraqi Kurdistan.
Image credit: University of Cambridge




A graveyard of 35 people lain to rest over 10,000 years ago was uncovered in Shanidar Cave by archaeologist Ralph Solecki in 1960.

This cemetery was found at the end of four seasons of excavation, during which time Solecki discovered something more extraordinary: the partial remains of ten Neanderthal men, women and children. Mid-20th century techniques could only date them to over 45,000 years ago.

Stockier than us, with heavy brows and sloping foreheads, it had long been assumed that Neanderthals were primitive and animalistic: subhuman. Evolutionary losers ultimately rendered extinct by their own deficiencies.

However, Shanidar Cave suggested a far more sophisticated creature. One male had a disabled arm, deafness and head trauma that likely rendered him partially blind. Yet he had lived a long time, so must have been cared for. Signs of compassion. 

Four individuals were found clustered together in a "unique assemblage", with ancient pollen clumped in the sediment around one of the bodies. Solecki claimed this as evidence of Neanderthal burial rites: repeated interments; the laying of flowers on the deceased. Human-like ritual behaviour.

Controversy ensued, and still lingers. Does Shanidar Cave show that Neanderthals mourned for and buried their dead? Were they far closer to us in thought and action? What does this mean for the evolution of our lineage?

"Undergraduates across the world studying pre-history get asked a version of: Neanderthals were nasty, brutish and short – discuss. The Shanidar flower burial always comes up," says Prof Graeme Barker, Fellow of St John's College and former Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

One such student essayist at Cambridge would eventually be among the first archaeologists allowed back into Shanidar Cave for more than fifty years. "I stood at the bottom of the hill leading up to the cave and thought: how am I getting to do this?" says Dr Emma Pomeroy, now a lecturer at the University. 

[. . .]

"We thought with luck we'd be able to find the locations where Solecki had discovered the Neanderthals, and see if we could date sediments with techniques they didn't have back in the fifties," says Barker. "We didn't think we'd be lucky enough to find more Neanderthal bones." 

In 2016, down in the "Deep Sounding" of the Solecki trench, while working on the eastern face, a rib emerged from the wall, followed by the arch of a lumbar vertebra, then the bones of a clenched right hand. Archaeologists would have to wait until the following year to begin excavating the delicate remains from beneath metres of rock and soil.

During 2018 and 2019, the team uncovered a seemingly complete skull, flattened by thousands of years of sediment, and upper body bones almost to the waist – with the left hand curled under the head like a small cushion.

[Continues . . .]


The full paper is available for free:

"New Neanderthal remains associated with the 'flower burial' at Shanidar Cave" | Antiquity

QuoteAbstract:

Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan became an iconic Palaeolithic site following Ralph Solecki's mid twentieth-century discovery of Neanderthal remains. Solecki argued that some of these individuals had died in rockfalls and controversially—that others were interred with formal burial rites, including one with flowers.

Recent excavations have revealed the articulated upper body of an adult Neanderthal located close to the 'flower burial' location—the first articulated Neanderthal discovered in over 25 years. Stratigraphic evidence suggests that the individual was intentionally buried. This new find offers the rare opportunity to investigate Neanderthal mortuary practices utilising modern archaeological techniques.
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Recusant

Living on the seaside; there are worse things.

This may comfort the aquatic ape crowd a bit.   :evilgrin:

"Neandertals went underwater for their tools" | EurekAlert!

QuoteNeandertals collected clam shells and volcanic rock from the beach and coastal waters of Italy during the Middle Paleolithic, according to a study published January 15, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Paola Villa of the University of Colorado and colleagues.

Neandertals are known to have used tools, but the extent to which they were able to exploit coastal resources has been questioned. In this study, Villa and colleagues explored artifacts from the Neandertal archaeological cave site of Grotta dei Moscerini in Italy, one of two Neandertal sites in the country with an abundance of hand-modified clam shells, dating back to around 100,000 years ago.

The authors examined 171 modified shells, most of which had be retouched to be used as scrapers. All of these shells belonged to the Mediterranean smooth clam species Callista chione. Based on the state of preservation of the shells, including shell damage and encrustation on the shells by marine organisms, the authors inferred that nearly a quarter of the shells had been collected underwater from the sea floor, as live animals, as opposed to being washed up on the beach. In the same cave sediments, the authors also found abundant pumice stones likely used as abrading tools, which apparently drifted via sea currents from erupting volcanoes in the Gulf of Naples (70km south) onto the Moscerini beach, where they were collected by Neandertals.

These findings join a growing list of evidence that Neandertals in Western Europe were in the practice of wading or diving into coastal waters to collect resources long before Homo sapiens brought these habits to the region.

[Continues . . .]

Full paper available: "Neandertals on the beach: Use of marine resources at Grotta dei Moscerini (Latium, Italy)" | PLOS ONE

"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Recusant

#52
This one confused me for a while. The words Neanderthal and string struck a chord with me, so to speak. I looked back, and yes there it was, in 2013; a report about what appeared to be a piece of string made by Neanderthals approximately 90,000 years ago ("World's oldest string found at French Neanderthal site" | New Scientist). 

Now the news tells us that they've found the oldest string made by Neanderthals, and it's about 50,000 years old, found in the same cave system (Abri du Maras) as the earlier find. Further, they tell us the oldest string found previously was only 19,000 years old, from Israel, and made by Homo sapiens.

No mention of the previous find from Abri du Maras, even though it appeared in the same publication. I suppose there's some subtext here, in which "that sure looks like string" is in a different class of find from "hey, I found some string here."   :shrug:

"Oldest ever piece of string was made by Neanderthals 50,000 years ago" | New Scientist

Quote

Enlarged Hirox [digital microscope] photo with cord structure highlighted [false color image].
Image Credit: N. Mélard




QuoteA piece of 50,000-year-old string found in a cave in France is the oldest ever discovered. It suggests that Neanderthals knew how to twist fibres together to make cords – and, if so, they might have been able to craft ropes, clothes, bags and nets.

"None can be done without that initial step," says Bruce Hardy at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. "Twisted fibres are a foundational technology."

His team has been excavating the Abri du Maras caves in south-east France where Neanderthals lived for long periods. Three metres below today's surface, in a layer that is between 52,000 and 41,000 years old, it found a stone flake, a sharp piece of rock used as an early stone tool.

Examining the flake under a microscope revealed that a tiny piece of string (pictured top right), just 6 millimetres long and 0.5 millimetres wide, was stuck to its underside. It was made by twisting a bundle of fibres in an anticlockwise direction, known as an S-twist. Three bundles were twisted together in a clockwise direction – a Z-twist – to make a 3-ply cord.

"It is exactly what you would see if you picked up a piece of string today," says Hardy. The string wasn't necessarily used to attach the stone tool to a handle. It could have been part of a bag or net, the team speculates.

The string appears to be made of bast fibres from the bark of conifer trees, which helps establish that it isn't a stray bit of modern string, because "nobody at the site was wearing their conifer pants at the time", says Hardy.

"It's so fine. That's really surprising," says Rebecca Wragg Sykes at the University of Bordeaux in France. This suggests the string wasn't used for heavy-duty tasks, but instead as some kind of thread,  she says.

[Continues . . .]

NPR article with audio version available: "The Oldest String Ever Found May Have Been Made By Neanderthals" | NPR

The full paper is open access:

"Direct evidence of Neanderthal fibre technology and its cognitive and behavioral implications" | Scientific Reports

Just for the hell of it, I found a PDF of the paper from 2013 online for free as well:

"Impossible Neanderthals? Making string, throwing projectiles and catching small game during Marine Isotope Stage 4 (Abri du Maras, France)" | Quaternary Science Reviews

"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Ecurb Noselrub

So, Neanderthals came up with "String Theory".  Nice.

Recusant

Quote from: Ecurb Noselrub on April 15, 2020, 06:33:38 PM
So, Neanderthals came up with "String Theory".  Nice.

:doh:

Yeah, OK, fair enough.  :lol:
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Recusant

I don't know if it's in this thread or its missing predecessor, but you may recall that there has been some discussion of the deleterious effects of some of the Neanderthal genes that non-African populations carry. Predisposition to some genetic diseases was the primary one mentioned as I recall. The paper described in the article below reports on evidence of a positive effect produced by Neanderthal genes.

"Increased fertility for women with Neanderthal gene, study suggests" | ScienceDaily

QuoteOne in three women in Europe inherited the receptor for progesterone from Neandertals -- a gene variant associated with increased fertility, fewer bleedings during early pregnancy and fewer miscarriages. This is according to a study published in Molecular Biology and Evolution by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

"The progesterone receptor is an example of how favourable genetic variants that were introduced into modern humans by mixing with Neandertals can have effects in people living today," says Hugo Zeberg, researcher at the Department of Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, who performed the study with colleagues Janet Kelso and Svante Pääbo.

Progesterone is a hormone, which plays an important role in the menstrual cycle and in pregnancy. Analyses of biobank data from more than 450,000 participants -- among them 244,000 women -- show that almost one in three women in Europe have inherited the progesterone receptor from Neandertals. Twenty-nine percent carry one copy of the Neandertal receptor and three percent have two copies.

[Continues . . .]

The full paper is open access:

"The Neandertal Progesterone Receptor" | Molecular Biology and Evolution

Paragraph breaks added below.

QuoteAbstract:

The hormone progesterone is important for preparing the uterine lining for egg implantation and in maintaining the early stages of pregnancy. The gene encoding the progesterone receptor (PGR) carries introgressed Neandertal haplotypes with two non-synonymous substitutions and a mobile Alu element. They have reached nearly 20% frequency in non-Africans and have been associated with preterm birth.

Here we show that whereas one of the missense substitutions appears fixed among Neandertals, the other substitution as well as the Alu insertion were polymorphic among Neandertals. We show that two Neandertal haplotypes carrying the PGR gene entered the modern human population and that present-day carriers of the Neandertal haplotypes express higher levels of the receptor.

In a cohort of present-day Britons, these carriers have more siblings, fewer miscarriages and less bleeding during early pregnancy suggesting that it promotes fertility. This may explain the high frequency of the Neandertal progesterone receptor alleles in modern human populations.
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Recusant

A couple of stories for this post. First--some genetic vulnerability to effects of COVID-19 appears to be inherited from Neanderthals.

"Study: Neanderthal genes are a liability for COVID patients" | Medical Xpress

QuoteScientists say genes that some people have inherited from their Neanderthal ancestors may increase their likelihood of suffering severe forms of COVID-19.

A study by European scientists published Wednesday by the journal Nature examined a cluster of genes that have been linked to a higher risk of hospitalization and respiratory failure in patients who are infected with the new coronavirus.

Researchers Hugo Zeberg and Svante Paabo determined that the genes belong to a group, or haplotype, which likely came from Neanderthals. The haplotype is found in about 16% of the population in Europe and half the population in South Asia, while in Africa and East Asia it is non-existent.

Modern humans and Neanderthals are known to have interbred at various points in history, resulting in an exchange of genes than can still be found today.

The genes are one of several risk factors for COVID-19, including age, sex and pre-existing conditions like obesity, diabetes and heart problems.

[Continues . . .]

A preprint version of the paper (PDF download) is currently available:

"The major genetic risk factor for severe COVID-19 is inherited from Neanderthals" | Nature

QuoteAbstract:

A recent genetic association study identified a gene cluster on chromosome 3 as a risk locus for respiratory failure upon SARS-CoV-2 infection. A new study comprising 3,199 hospitalized COVID-19 patients and controls finds that this is the major genetic risk factor for severe SARS-CoV-2 infection and hospitalization (COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative). Here, we show that the risk is conferred by a genomic segment of ~50 kb that is inherited from Neanderthals and is carried by ~50% of people in South Asia and ~16% of people in Europe today.

* * *

Second--an intriguing finding about the Neanderthal Y chromosome.

"Y chromosomes of Neandertals and Denisovans now sequenced" | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

QuoteAn international research team led by Martin Petr and Janet Kelso of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has determined Y chromosome sequences of three Neandertals and two Denisovans. These Y chromosomes provide new insights into the relationships and population histories of archaic and modern humans, including new evidence for ancient gene flow from early modern humans into Neandertals. The data show that Neandertals may have benefited from these interactions as the gene flow resulted in the complete replacement of the original Neandertal Y chromosomes by their early modern human counterparts.

[. . .]

In this study, the researchers identified three male Neandertals and two Denisovans that were potentially suitable for DNA analysis, and developed an approach to fish out human Y chromosome molecules from the large amounts of microbial DNA that typically contaminate ancient bones and teeth. This allowed them to reconstruct the Y chromosome sequences of these individuals, which would not have been possible using conventional approaches.

By comparing the archaic human Y chromosomes to each other and to the Y chromosomes of people living today, the team found that Neandertal and modern human Y chromosomes are more similar to one another than they are to Denisovan Y chromosomes. "This was quite a surprise to us. We know from studying their autosomal DNA that Neandertals and Denisovans were closely related and that humans living today are their more distant evolutionary cousins. Before we first looked at the data, we expected that their Y chromosomes would show a similar picture," says Martin Petr, the lead author of the study. The researchers also calculated that the most recent common ancestor of Neandertal and modern human Y chromosomes lived around 370,000 years ago, much more recently than previously thought.

[Continues . . .]

The paper is behind a paywall.

QuoteAbstract:

Ancient DNA has provided new insights into many aspects of human history. However, we lack comprehensive studies of the Y chromosomes of Denisovans and Neanderthals because the majority of specimens that have been sequenced to sufficient coverage are female. Sequencing Y chromosomes from two Denisovans and three Neanderthals shows that the Y chromosomes of Denisovans split around 700 thousand years ago from a lineage shared by Neanderthals and modern human Y chromosomes, which diverged from each other around 370 thousand years ago. The phylogenetic relationships of archaic and modern human Y chromosomes differ from the population relationships inferred from the autosomal genomes and mirror mitochondrial DNA phylogenies, indicating replacement of both the mitochondrial and Y chromosomal gene pools in late Neanderthals. This replacement is plausible if the low effective population size of Neanderthals resulted in an increased genetic load in Neanderthals relative to modern humans.
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Dark Lightning

DOH! You beat me to it! I posted this in another thread, but should have read through the new threads first.

Recusant

Genetic analysis is changing ideas about migrations and degree of Neanderthal ancestry:

"Genome analysis reveals unknown ancient human migration in Europe" | Phys.org

QuoteGenetic sequencing of human remains dating back 45,000 years has revealed a previously unknown migration into Europe and showed intermixing with Neanderthals in that period was more common than previously thought.

The research is based on the analysis of several ancient human remains—including a whole tooth and bone fragments—found in a cave in Bulgaria last year.

Genetic sequencing found the remains came from individuals who were more closely linked to present-day populations in East Asia and the Americas than populations in Europe.

"This indicates that they belonged to a modern human migration into Europe that was not previously known from the genetic record," the research, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, said.

It also "provides evidence that there was at least some continuity between the earliest modern humans in Europe and later people in Eurasia", the study added.

[. . .]

The findings were accompanied by separate research published Wednesday in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution involving genome sequencing of samples from a skull found in the Czech Republic.

The skull was found in the Zlaty kun area in 1950, but its age has been the subject of debate and contradictory findings in the decades since.

Initial analysis suggested it was older than 30,000 years old, but radiocarbon dating gave an age closer to 15,000 years.

Genetic analysis now appears to have resolved the matter, suggesting an age of at least 45,000 years old, said Kay Prufer of the Max Planck Institute's department of archaeogenetics, who led the research.

"We make use of the fact that everyone who traces their ancestry back to the individuals that left Africa more than 50,000 years ago carries a bit of Neanderthal ancestry in their genomes," he told AFP.

These Neanderthal traces appear in short blocks in modern human genomes, and increasingly longer ones further back in human history.

"In older individuals, such as the 45,000-year-old Ust'-Ishim man from Siberia, these blocks are much longer," Prufer said.

"We find that the genome of the Zlaty kun woman has even longer blocks than those of the Ust'-Ishim man. This makes us confident that she lived at the same time, or even earlier."

It seems to me that Prufer is dismissing the radiocarbon dating result rather breezily, but perhaps the paper provides something more substantial. Speaking of which, both papers appear to be open access.

"Initial Upper Palaeolithic humans in Europe had recent Neanderthal ancestry" | Nature

"A genome sequence from a modern human skull over 45,000 years old from Zlatý kůň in Czechia" | Nature Ecology and Evolution
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Recusant

According to a new paper, about 65,000 years ago our cousins ventured into a cave in Spain to decorate a stalagmite with ochre. They came back about ten thousand years later to do it again.

"Neanderthals painted stalagmites red" | Cosmos

QuoteDeep in Cueva de Ardales (Cave of Ardales) in Spain, stalagmites have been painted red by artistic Neanderthals, according to a study published in PNAS.

Stalagmites, or flowstones, are long, hanging spikes made from calcite and other carbonate materials that form where water flows down cave walls and floors. The stalagmites in Cueva de Ardales, near Málaga on Spain's south coast, are stained red in places, but it had previously been unclear whether the colouring was natural or painted.

Now, an international team of researchers, led by Africa Pitarch Martí from the University of Barcelona, Spain, has used different forms of microscopy and spectroscopy – studying how light is absorbed – to determine that the red pigment is made of ochre and not the iron-oxide-rich deposits of the cave.

This means they couldn't have been stained naturally as the stalagmites formed, and so must have been painted.

The team found that the ochre-based pigment was applied twice – once more than 65,000 years ago and again between 45,000 and 49,000 years ago. This is when Neanderthals occupied the area, before early humans came to Europe.

[Continues . . .]

The paper is behind a paywall, but here's the --

QuoteAbstract:

Cueva de Ardales in Málaga, Spain, is one of the richest and best-preserved Paleolithic painted caves of southwestern Europe, containing over a thousand graphic representations. Here, we study the red pigment in panel II.A.3 of "Sala de las Estrellas," dated by U-Th to the Middle Paleolithic, to determine its composition, verify its anthropogenic nature, infer the associated behaviors, and discuss their implications. Using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy coupled with energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, micro-Raman spectroscopy, and X-ray diffraction, we analyzed a set of samples from the panel and compared them to natural coloring materials collected from the floor and walls of the cave. The conspicuously different texture and composition of the geological samples indicates that the pigments used in the paintings do not come from the outcrops of colorant material known in the cave. We confirm that the paintings are not the result of natural processes and show that the composition of the paint is consistent with the artistic activity being recurrent. Our results strengthen the hypothesis that Neanderthals symbolically used these paintings and the large stalagmitic dome harboring them over an extended time span.
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken