Sep 02 - Groundbreaking Gorham’s Cave Discovery of Neanderthal Engraving
Yesterday evening a paper was released by the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, detailing a recent discovery in Gibraltar Gorham’s Cave of the first ever-Neanderthal engraving.
The discovery, made by Franchesco d’Errico of the University of Bordeaux, during a long-term excavation of Gorham’s Cave, was almost unfathomable. The team, also including the Gibraltar Museum’s Professor Clive Finlayson, Dr. Geraldine Finlayson, Francisco Giles Pachaco and Rodrigues Vidal, carried out extensive experiments to prove their belief that the engraving was over 44,000 years old.
The engraving was initially discovered by accident, hiding under three layers of sediment that dated back 39,000 years, at the back of the cave. Professor Finlayson insisted that this was the first time engravings have been discovered on a cave wall, done by anything other than a modern human.
During their experiments, the team found that in order to replicate the engraving, they had to make over 200 strokes in the bedrock, suggesting that the image was carried out deliberately. They also tested whether the engraving could have been made as a result of butchering of other work carried out by Neanderthals, but the group concluded that with the number of strokes taken to form the marking, it was certainly no accident.
The discovery no opens a door for many to speculate what the series of lines could mean. Professor Finlayson noted that it could possibly be a map, as that area of the cave opens to a number of intersections, but there is no way they could not be certain.
At a press call announcing the discovery Professor Finlayson yesterday said that it brings the Neanderthals even closer to humans. It has always been thought that they never had the capacity to be abstract, but the markings proved that they did.
