At the beginning of "Becoming Us", Alan Alda shows us the spectacular paintings and carvings in the caves and rock shelters of the Dordogne region of France that date back 30,000 years. Who produced this artwork? Was it produced by the Neandertals that lived in this area 30,000 years ago, or someone else?

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History

Aurora Ponce

19 August, 10:57

At the beginning of "Becoming Us", Alan Alda shows us the spectacular paintings and carvings in the caves and rock shelters of the Dordogne region of France that date back 30,000 years. Who produced this artwork? Was it produced by the Neandertals that lived in this area 30,000 years ago, or someone else?

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Deangelo Rasmussen · Answer 1

The spectacular paintings and carvings in the caves and rock shelters of the Dordogne region of France that date back 30,000 years were not produced by the Neandertals that lived in this area 30,000 years ago. They were made by relative newcomers to the region.

Explanation:

Alan discovers that the Neandertals certainly produced no art, and employed a stone tool technology that changed little over millennia. The people who painted the caves were strikingly different, possessed of what we are calling the Human Spark, capable not only of art but of innovative technology and symbolic communication.