Neandertals may not have painted pictures on cave walls, but a new study proposes they had an artistic sensibility. These close Stone Age relatives of people regularly made personal and possibly ritual ornaments that included bird feathers.
Big-boned, slope-faced Neandertals shared with ancient humans a mental talent for using concrete objects — whether rock drawings or decorative feathers — to represent abstract ideas and beliefs, say evolutionary ecologist Clive Finlayson of the Gibraltar Museum and his colleagues.
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