Theory that Neanderthals shopped at stone-age Tiffany’s debunked
A new study has disproved the existence of a stone-age Tiffany's claimed by archaeologists after a collection of ornaments and tools was found at a site in France in 1959.
In 1959 in the Grotte du Renne in central France, archaeologists found a wide range of ornaments and tools, indicating the existence of a stone-age Tiffany's, but a new study has disproved that theory.
University of Oxford researchers have shown that the artefacts were jumbled up with Neanderthal teeth, suggesting that the Neanderthals made them some time between 35,000 and 40,000 years ago, reported New Scientist.
Thomas Higham of the University of Oxford used radiocarbon dating to nail down the ages of the remains. As one digs down, the age of the remains should increase, but it didn't.
Instead, the ages of the different objects were all over the place, suggesting that remains from different eras had got mixed up.
"One-third of the dated samples were statistical outliers, and this must tell us something about the confidence with which we ought to be associating the remains with one another," the researchers wrote.
"We believe the most likely explanation for the results is that our dates are reliable, but that we are dating materials that have moved after their original deposition," said Higham.
The tools and ornaments in the Grotte du Renne looked like those made by anatomically modern humans, so we might expect that they — not Neanderthals — were the artistes, he said.
The evidence from the Grotte du Renne constituted by far the most comprehensive set of evidence in support of the use of ornaments by Neanderthals, and therefore is the most important dataset concerning Neanderthal cognitive abilities with respect to ornamentation and symbolism.
But Francesco D'Errico of the University of Bordeaux, France, who has studied Neanderthal artefacts for many years, is still convinced by the evidence for Neanderthal jewellery from other sites.
"In my view many of the results, in particular those from the lower layers of the site, did not represent the true ages of the dated objects, but were just minimum aged," he said. "So the findings cannot be interpreted as proof that a significant reworking took place at the site.
"This means either the samples are contaminated and we can't trust the dates, or the later inhabitants of the cave jumbled them up for us."
The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.