This may not be Neanderthals after all...

This is cave art from La Pasiega, Spain, dated to around 64,000 years ago. There's debate on that dating itself, but even if we accept that date, I want to argue that this does not mean it was Neanderthals. The mainstream science from all the different archaeological and anthropological fields all agree with everything I'm going to present in this video. It just seems that in a lot of the popular publications, they just haven't put it all together. This is thought to be Neanderthals just because of the date. It's about 20,000 years before the Out of Africa group made it into Europe. There's no other data, nothing about the context in which it was found, which also points to it being Neanderthals, it's simply the dating. And yet there's this series of all these other facts which I'm going to get into, which mainstream science also agrees on. Let's start with Apodema I, the skull from Greece, which a 2019 study identified as an anatomically modern human, dating to about 210,000 years ago. That's by far the oldest Homo sapien fossils in Europe, older than the next oldest by about 160,000 years. Everyone agrees that there were multiple dispersals of humans out of Africa, it's just that everyone around the entire world today is descended from that Out of Africa group around 60,000 years ago. But of course there were populations of anatomically modern Homo sapiens all over the old world at least, for around 200,000 years. And you combine that with the fact that the oldest Homo sapien fossils we have are 300,000 years old, found at Jebel Arud in Morocco. This is about as close as you can get to Europe, and it's about 240,000 years older than this artwork at La Paciega. These fossils come from Morocco, just a few kilometers across the Strait of Gibraltar from Spain. Modern humans could literally see Europe from Africa, and we know that the Strait of Gibraltar had been crossed by other hominins. It's the easiest way to get from Africa to Spain, and again by far the oldest fossils we have are right there in Morocco. We know that other hominins crossed these open waters into Europe from Gibraltar. We have stone tools and fossils from sites in southeastern Spain and Granada, and these are dated to about 1.3 million years old, far older than any hominin remains elsewhere in Europe. This suggests that the very first humans to reach Europe did so by crossing the Mediterranean at Gibraltar. Rather than that long land route all across North Africa, up into the Levant, and then across the entirety of Europe. The researchers conclude that it's much more plausible that early humans floated or boated across the 14 kilometer strait, rather than completing this long horseshoe route. And the stone tools in Spain closely resemble those in North Africa around this same time, which all strengthens the case for a North Africa to Iberia migration. If hominins over a million years ago could cross the strait, then later homo sapiens certainly could as well. Now the strait has never been just dry land, at least not within the human era, but during ice ages sea levels were even lower, making the passage shorter, even if still a few kilometers of water. At this time when the sea levels were lower, it is believed that there were stronger currents, so scientists argue they may have used rafts or simple boats, something I covered in the earliest seafarers video. By the late Pleistocene, anatomically modern humans definitely had the cognitive ability to build watercraft, and we know they did so to reach Australia by about 65 to 50,000 years ago. Going from Morocco to Spain, when you can literally see where you're going, would have been one of the easiest sea crossings we've seen all hominins accomplish. Also in southern Spain, at the Bohondio cave near Malaga, they have stone tools and layers that point to a modern human presence around 45 to 43,000 years ago, and researchers think this is earlier than the out of Africa migration group should have reached Iberia, which also points to a coastal dispersal, either along the southern Mediterranean coast, or like I'm saying, just crossing the strait of Gibraltar. Point is, researchers think that homo sapiens were definitely using boats, whether it's getting to Australia or rapidly spreading across Europe. Now as to the capacity for cave art, nearly all known paleolithic cave paintings, those found in Spain, France, and elsewhere in Europe, they're all believed to be created by homo sapiens. From the famous Chauvet cave in France, the painting's over 30,000 years old, to Spain's own Altamira, which is about 36,000 years old, this rich cave art heritage of Europe is all attributed to modern homo sapiens. It's just this relatively new finding that's the outlier, these 64,000 year old Spanish examples, but none of them, including these, can be unquestionably attributed to Neanderthals. It's just the dating, seeming to be tens of thousands of years older than the time the out of Africa group should have reached this region. But again, it's homo sapiens doing all the other art here. Now that isn't to say that Neanderthals couldn't. Everything from the carved shells of homo erectus, to the pigment stained shells and other jewelry that's attributed to Neanderthals, I think the best case against my point is that I do think all of these hominins could basically make artistic creations. I don't really put the fact that it is art as leaning towards it being homo sapiens. I think many other hominins were capable of this, but that's just the totality of all this other data. And the fact that I just see it being repeated, that homo sapiens were not in Europe at this time, when that isn't even the mainstream archaeological stance. Everyone knows that there were homo sapiens at least 210,000 years ago, and that all this other cave art is also from homo sapiens. I'm not arguing that there was a permanent homo sapien civilization all throughout Europe at this time, but we know from sites in the Levant that even if we're saying that it was not a successful population, it could still be there for thousands of years, even tens of thousands of years. Before these isolated pockets of those humans who migrated out before OOA, they do seem to eventually die out and leave no genetic trace, but obviously they could have left these artistic traces behind. The Levant is full of sites around 177,000 years ago, which have overlapping homo sapien and Neanderthal sites, and that skull at Apodema is actually fused to a Neanderthal skull, though dated to be tens of thousands of years later. Again, we're working with enormous spans of time here, and even to the most conventional version of out of Africa, everyone agrees that humans can spread across entire continents in just a few thousand years, definitely tens of thousands of years. So to me it just feels like the site at Jebel Arud, the sites around the skull in Capsa Cave, and just the Levant in general, and of course the most impactful at Apodema, it's like these sets of facts are just separated from each other. On the one hand, acknowledging all of this is true, but then when it comes to the art, for some reason they're stuck to the idea that homo sapiens only made it into Europe around 40,000 years ago. Now there are a lot of researchers that push back on the dating of these paintings themselves. This isn't really necessary for my point, even if they were a hundred thousand years old, it would still be possible that they were homo sapiens. But I do think it's worth mentioning that the age of the 64,000 years for the Spanish cave art comes from uranium-thorium dating of the mineral crusts that flowed over and solidified on top of the paint. Now on the one hand, you could argue that these are the minimum ages because the calcite crust could have formed long after the art was made, but there are many researchers that have argued that the true range of these results could be all the way down to 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, and that perfectly fits within the standard out of Africa timeline. The view forever has been that they reached Western Europe by around 45,000 years ago. So even that 64,000 year old time has received a lot of pushback from experts in this uranium-thorium dating method. And it's not like that's so far off from the timeline where homo sapiens reached this area around 45,000 years ago. It's not like it's say 400,000 years ago, where it would be far older than any other modern human remains here. So it's not that far off, and we know that homo sapiens had been in Europe for around 150,000 years at this time. There's no reason to think that it could not be modern humans. So in conclusion, I think all this excitement about these Neanderthals being the first artists in Europe making these paintings specifically only makes sense on this very narrow view of this out of Africa timeline. And it ignores all those earlier migrations, even if they were failed, like the Levant, we know humans could occupy these areas for thousands of years. Other hominins made it across the Strait of Gibraltar, and now the oldest homo sapien fossils we have are in Morocco, within viewing distance of Europe. And we know homo sapiens made it to Greece around 210,000 years ago. But homo sapiens are believed to have done just about all the other cave art in Europe. But let me know what you guys think down in the comments. Hitting that like button is the best way to help me out, but I'll see you in the next one.