By Bruce Bower
Neandertals may not have painted pictures on cave walls, but a new study proposes they had an artistic sensibility. These close Stone Age relatives of people regularly made personal and possibly ritual ornaments that included bird feathers.
Big-boned, slope-faced Neandertals shared with ancient humans a mental talent for using concrete objects — whether rock drawings or decorative feathers — to represent abstract ideas and beliefs, say evolutionary ecologist Clive Finlayson of the Gibraltar Museum and his colleagues.
Neandertals took a fancy to feathers on their own, several thousand years before encountering Stone Age people who also adorned themselves with plumage, the researchers contend in a paper published online September 17 in PLoS ONE.
That conclusion is questionable, and the new study won’t resolve a long-standing scientific debate about whether Neandertals’ mental faculties matched those of Homo sapiens, remarks anthropologist Mary Stiner of the University of Arizona in Tucson. “It’s difficult on the basis of the information presented to float the claim that birds were a central and widespread prop in Neandertal ritual,” Stiner says.