• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

A Neanderthal Left A Fingerprint On This Rock, Possibly While Painting A Face On It

May 26, 2025 by Deborah Bloomfield

The most complete Neanderthal fingerprint ever discovered may have been left behind by a prehistoric artist while painting a face on a pebble using red ocher. Found at the San Lázaro rock shelter in central Spain, the rouge dactylogram provides new evidence for the cognitive abilities of Neanderthals, implying that they shared our tendency to see faces in inanimate objects – a phenomenon known as pareidolia.

“This object contributes to our understanding of Neanderthals’ capacity for abstraction, suggesting that it could represent one of the earliest human facial symbolizations in Prehistory,” write the authors of a new study about the stained pebble. Retrieved from a layer of sediment dated to around 43,000 years ago, the stone is associated with an assemblage of Neanderthal tools and was deposited long before modern humans reached this part of the Iberian peninsula.

And while a partial Neanderthal fingerprint was previously found in ancient resin at a site in Königsaue, Germany, the newly discovered artifact stands out for its completeness as well as the fact that it appears to have been made deliberately. “The ocher dot does not appear as a shapeless addition or a mere stain,” write the researchers. “Rather, it contains a fingerprint that implies the pigment has been applied specifically with the tip of a finger soaked in pigment.”

Analyzing the pebble, the study authors determine that it was brought to the rock shelter from the nearby Eresma river. Importantly, the stone shows no signs of having been used as a tool, suggesting that it was seen as a non-utilitarian item with symbolic rather than functional value.

Noting how the finger-painted red dot combines with a series of natural depressions in the pebble to form an image, the researchers say that the object “could resemble a human face, with eyes, a mouth, and a ridge shaped like a nose.”

Pebble with Neanderthal fingerprint

The pebble, before and after being fully excavated, looking a bit like a face. 

Image credit: Álvarez-Alonso et al./Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 2025 (CC BY 4.0)

“This pebble could thus represent one of the oldest known abstractions of a human face in the prehistoric record, according to the hypothesis of Face Pareidolia,” they write. 

In general, pareidolia refers to a psychological process whereby the human mind is naturally primed to identify familiar patterns in everyday objects. The more specific phenomenon of face pareidolia, meanwhile, concerns our tendency to recognize faces any time we see a couple of blobs or lines arranged like eyes and a mouth.

Pondering their finger-painted Spanish pebble, the study authors muse: “Does the piece under study correspond to the phenomenon of Face Pareidolia? Is it a representation of a face? There are grounds to suspect so.” 

Thus, while they stop short of making any definitive claims about the nature of the red dot or the intentions of its prehistoric creator, the researchers conclude that, based on their findings, “we cannot exclude the possibility that both Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis possessed similar capacities for interpreting Face Pareidolia.”

The study is published in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. iPad Air 5 might get close competition from Realme’s upcoming Android tablet
  2. Matillion raises $150M at a $1.5B valuation for its low-code approach to integrating disparate data sources
  3. EU warns of security risks linked to migration from Afghanistan
  4. China Could Face A Catastrophic COVID Surge As It Lifts Restrictions – Here’s How It Might Play Out

Source Link: A Neanderthal Left A Fingerprint On This Rock, Possibly While Painting A Face On It

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Analemmas And The Equation Of Time: Why The Path Of The Sun Traces Out An 8 On Earth
  • Positive Nihilism: Is Meaninglessness The Key To Happiness?
  • Feast Your Eyes On The Most Detailed 1,000-Color Image Of A Nearby Galaxy
  • Engineering YouTuber Weighs An Airbus A320 Plane Whilst It Is Still Flying
  • Australian Moth Is First-Known Invertebrate To Navigate By Stars On Epic 1,000-Kilometer Migration
  • Losing Two Legs Doesn’t Slow Tarantulas Down Or Make Them More Unstable
  • Who Dislikes The Other More, Democrats Or Republicans? This Study Found Out
  • Thar Desert: A Biodiversity Hotspot That’s Also The Most Densely Populated Desert In The World
  • Oldest Footprints In North America Really Are Over 20,000 Years Old, New Analysis Confirms
  • Why Homo Sapiens Failed To Migrate Out Of Africa Until 60,000 Years Ago
  • An Unexpected Organ May Help Sharks Fight Disease
  • The World’s Largest Sand Battery Was Just Switched On In Finland
  • First-Known Species Of “Methane-Powered” Sea Spiders Have Been Discovered In The Deep Sea
  • In 2010, The US Made Guns Easier To Get. The Result? Thousands Of Dead Kids
  • The 13th Century “Codex Gigas” Or “The Devil’s Bible” Is The Subject Of An Unsettling Legend
  • The Hottest Thing Ever Created By Humans Was Over 300,000 Times Hotter Than The Sun
  • Defying Logic: Symmetrical Crystals Can Interact With Light Asymmetrically
  • Alaska Issues Its First-Ever Heat Advisory As Temperatures Soar To 30°C
  • Simulation Captures The Most Complex 1.5 Seconds In A Neutron Star Collision – And You Can Watch It Here
  • These Spiders Vomit Their Victims To Death, Regurgitating Toxic Goo Until It’s Dinner
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version