In his novel Entangled, Graham Hancock spun a tale suggesting
that Neanderthals were way more creative than the violent homo
sapiens who wiped them out. New research suggests that Hancock
may have been right, reported by James Noble Wilford in the New
York Times: Stone Age artists were painting red disks,
handprints, clublike symbols and geometric patterns on European
cave walls long before previously thought, in some cases more
than 40,000 years ago, scientists reported on Thursday, after
completing more reliable dating tests that raised a possibility
that Neanderthals were the artists. A more likely situation, the
researchers said, is that the art — 50 samples from 11 caves in
northwestern Spain — was created by anatomically modern humans
fairly soon after their arrival in Europe. The findings seem to
put an exclamation point to a run of recent discoveries: direct
evidence from fossils that Homo sapiens populations were living
in England 41,500 to 44,200 years ago and in Italy 43,000 to
45,000 years ago, an