 Humans have long been credited with being the first real artists of the world, but recent findings suggest that may not be the case anymore. This is your Cypod. With cave paintings dating back to as far back as 40,000 years ago, artistic expression is something that's long been celebrated as one of the defining factors of what makes us humans, what separates us from the quote-unquote animals. However, recently published findings in the journal Nature on February 23, 2018 by an international team of researchers suggest that Neanderthals may have also partaken in aesthetic appreciation and may have very well been the first cave artists. The scientists, which include Dirk Hoffman of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Alastair Pike, an archaeologist from the University of Southampton in England, used uranium thorium dating to determine the age of something called calcium carbonate. What's that, you ask? This is a mineral formed when water containing calcium and uranium comes into contact with the cave surfaces and precipitates into a sort of crust on the paintings. Uranium thorium dating is nothing new, it's already been used for decades, but the mass spectrometry technology used to analyze it has actually vastly improved, making the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium a more precise method of measuring age than the former method of radiocarbon dating, and get this, it can offer an accuracy of up to 500,000 years. After analyzing over 60 samples of calcium carbonate collected from three different caves in Spain, researchers determined the age of these paintings to be about 64,000 years old, which get this is 20,000 years before the first Homo sapiens even arrived in Europe, thus indicating they were created by Neanderthals. The cave paintings are also 20,000 years older than the previously oldest known cave paintings in Indonesia and Spain. The paintings themselves made with red paint mixed from clay and water are not just random smears or doodles either, they depict different geometric shapes and patterns, hand stencils and even some animals. Additionally, the cave paintings indicate the need for actual planning and deliberation. They were located deeper inside the caves where light wasn't necessarily plentiful, so they had to think about location, light source and pink color. All of this points to Neanderthals having a much higher level of symbolic thinking than previously thought, not unlike modern humans are capable of. Despite the pervasive idea that Neanderthals are these knuckle-dragging, dim-witted, brutish characters, simply not the whole story, nor is it the accurate story anymore. There's mounting evidence to suggest that they were much more intelligent than we've ever given them credit for. This seemingly radical idea that Neanderthals may have thought similarly to Homo sapiens questioned strongly held beliefs that Neanderthals were behaviorally archaic and cognitively inferior. Although Neanderthals and humans coexisted in the same place as an even inner bread, whether or not they actually shared a culture is still not clear. Now, of course, this data is still subject to the scrutiny of the scientific community, but, if it holds true, Homo Neanderthalensis are much, much more than the dumb evolutionary cousins we once thought them to be. That's all for now. Don't forget to like and subscribe to the tomorrow YouTube channel and join us every first Saturday of the month at 20 UTC. Until next time, stay curious.