Neanderthals were also keenly concerned with the characteristics of materials—most obviously rock. Stone tools connected every aspect of life. They sliced, chopped and scraped the food they ate, the clothing they wore, the fuel that kept the darkness at bay. Patterns from many hundreds of archaeological sites show they understood how different rock types required varying approaches for knapping, and were flexible enough to alter and combine techniques for acquiring the sorts of flakes—and sometimes blades and points—they were after. Study of other materials, such as wood, reveals the same impression of knowledgeable craft. Nor did they use that knowledge for tools alone. While standards of proof are justifiably high (although often more stringent than we demand from early H. sapiens contexts), there do seem to be some striking hints that their material engagements went beyond the functional. For example, a fossil shell from an Italian site dating around 55,000 years ago must have been originally found by a Neanderthal some 60 miles away from the site, and its outer surface bears red pigment, itself sourced from 25 miles away.
From the Cape of Good Hope to the Blue Mountains of Australia, our H. sapiens ancestors were alone on Earth. This point has typically been framed as a victory of our species, a vision in which we are the successful explorers or conquerors, but maybe it was the opposite.
Yet those early explorers of Eurasia vanished into evolutionary oblivion, leaving virtually no surviving DNA lineages visible in people today, and were replaced themselves by multiple waves of later populations. Early Homo sapiens, in other words, weren’t fundamentally better at surviving than Neanderthals were.
Prior to their extinction, Neanderthals had been widespread in Europe for 100,000 years. Then 50,000 years ago, modern humans moved into Europe from Africa. Twenty-six thousand years after that the last Neanderthal died.
Neanderthal DNA is rarely found in prehistoric caves, even when considering the vast area ranging from modern day Spain to modern day Russia. This lack of genetic material seems to suggest that Neanderthals could not have taken part in the creation of prehistoric cave art.