Symbolic use of marine shells and mineral pigments by Iberian Neandertals 115,000 years ago

“…Behaviorally, the patterns of spatial structuration, raw material procurement, seasonality, mobility, and functional specificity of site usage revealed by the Cueva Antón living floors are indistinguishable from those observed in the archeology of the Upper Paleolithic of eastern, southern, and western Iberia, as documented by the well-preserved, hearth-focused activity areas of mid-Gravettian chronology excavated in the stratified sites of Lagar Velho, a rock-shelter (the EE15 occupation surface), and Olga Grande 4, a Côa Valley open-air site (layer 3 of the sequence) 66 – 68 . Consistent with the rapidly accumulating evidence that Middle Paleolithic Neandertals possessed a fully symbolic material culture 9 , 12 , 13 and, in comparable environments, exploited the same range of prey as the peoples of the African Middle Stone Age and the European Upper Paleolithic 69 , the settlement-system evidence reported here further contributes to the closing of the behavioral gap once thought to set them apart from recent humans. Our results provide strong support for the notion that models derived from ethnographically documented hunter-gatherers provide appropriate frameworks for the study of Middle Paleolithic/Middle Stone Age peoples, and this irrespective of their classification in terms of the taxonomic categories of Human Paleontology.…”