Fingerprint made by Neanderthal 43,000 years ago could be world’s oldest portrait

A fingerprint left by a Neanderthal on a rock 43,000 years ago could be the oldest known figurative representation of a human face, scientists have suggested.

The discovery of the pebble marked in pigment may be evidence that our close evolutionary cousins – who died out 40,000 years ago – displayed “symbolic” behaviour and had an ability to think in an abstract way, according to a new study.

The study posits that a Neanderthal may have discovered the rock and, after being struck by its likeness to a face, felt compelled to place a single ochre mark in its centre marking where its nose would be.

Researchers said they “couldn’t believe” what they were looking at when they first discovered the stone during an excavation in July 2022 at the the San Lazaro rock shelter, a Neanderthal site near the Spanish city of Segovia.

At more than 20cm in length, the stone was twice the size of any others found in that part of the site, did not resemble anything that had been used as a hammer or another tool, and was marked with a single, eye-catching red dot.

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“The stone was oddly shaped and had a red ochre dot, which really caught our eye,” said archaeologist David Alvarez Alonso, of Complutense University in Madrid.

“We were all thinking the same thing and looking at each other because of its shape: we were all thinking, ‘This looks like a face’. But obviously that wasn’t enough,” Professor Alonso told The Guardian.

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“As we carried on our research, we knew we needed information to be able to advance the hypothesis that there was some purposefulness here, this was a symbolic object and that one possible explanation – although we’ll never know for sure – is that this was the symbolisation of a face.”

After initial research proved that the red dot had indeed been created using a pigment, which was not found anywhere else at the site, the team contacted Spain’s scientific police to inform them of their discovery.

Further analysis confirmed that the dot was in fact a fingerprint, likely to belong to an adult male Neanderthal.

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The researchers believe that one of the Neanderthals found the quartz-rich granite stone, “which caught his attention because of its fissures, and he intentionally made his mark with an ochre stain in the middle of the object,” Europa Press quoted Prof Alonso as saying.

According to their research, the stone was carried at least 5km from the nearby Eresma River, suggesting it was deliberately selected and intentionally brought to the shelter, where no other pigments were found.

In a study published in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, the authors wrote: “The fact that the pebble was selected because of its appearance and then marked with ocher shows that there was a human mind capable of symbolising, imagining, idealising and projecting his or her thoughts on an object.

“Furthermore, in this case, we can propose that three fundamental cognitive processes are involved in creating art: the mental conception of an image, deliberate communication, and the attribution of meaning.”

They added: “This pebble could thus represent one of the oldest known abstractions of a human face in the prehistoric record.”