If they did, that’ll be even less reason to think of them as some kind of “missing link”:
What if, long before Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, the Neanderthals were humanity’s first artists? At any rate, this is the hypothesis raised by new dating of Spanish rock paintings published in February 2018 in the journal Science (link is external)
,indicating that the hands and animals depicted on the walls of three caves date back 65,000 years. This would mean that they were painted 25,000 years before the arrival of the first Homo sapiens in the Iberian peninsula. The estimated ages are based on uranium-thorium dating of the calcite layer that coats the frescoes. Could these be the work of Neanderthals? A certain amount of additional data supports this view. For example, traces of pigments in a shell have been dated to 115,000 years ago, while drawings of cats and handprints in the Grotte des Merveilles, Rocamadour (southwestern France) are believed to be between 50,000 and 70,000 years old. In light of this evidence, it is not difficult to imagine that the Neanderthals were endowed with artistic ability.
The interpretation of this research, however, is purely speculative at present. Firstly, the estimated ages will have to be confirmed by other dating methods, especially since no Neanderthal bones were found in these caves. Léa
Galanopoulo , “Who Was the First Artist?” at CNRS News
Drawings of cats 50,000 to 70,000 years ago? The ultimate ancestor of the now saturation-point funny cat vids at YouTube?
See also: Neanderthal art found.
Was Neanderthal man fully human? The role racism played in assessing the evidence
and
A deep and abiding need for Neanderthals to be stupid. Why?
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They were among, or closely related to those who did as during The ice ages we were a fairly close knit community. Also keep in mind those caves were not even formed prior to the 1656 anno mundi ‘Mabul’ impacts year mass extinction event. So for the most accurate context consider not 50k-115k YA during a 25M year The ice ages span but about 3800-4000 YA during the approx. 340 year span from 1656 – 1996 based on this being 5779 anno mundi. With the original single continent still in place by the start of the Mabul and The ice ages setting in cause and effect as a result. Neanderthal having their features in part due to longer life spans, and greater genetic diversity, think ‘founder effect’, being w/in several generations of those 8 who boarded the ark of Noach, by that early genetic bottleneck reference: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B077Q4KB9V
Of note:
And this would be the last shoe to drop against the thesis that Neanderthals were some type of missing link.
A few more notes:
Given the tendency of Darwinists to associate intelligence with brain size, I would think the fact that Neanderthals had bigger brains than humans, and that humans have been steadily losing brain size over the past several thousand years, should be rather disconcerting for Darwinists.
One final note on just how devastating it is for Darwinian storytelling to find symbolic capacity in Neanderthals:
OK, so the NFL breeding experiments included support for Fine Arts majors. I don’t have a problem with that. Ann Gauger says in her book that the simple fact is that there are only 2 classes of primate fossils: 1. things that look like chimps or gorillas, and 2. people that look like humans (with the distinctive changes in pelvis shape and rib cages).
So, yeah, Humans appeared POOF! without ancestors. Live with it.