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Dating questions challenge whether Neandertals drew Spanish cave art

The dating method may have overestimated ages of the rock drawings by thousands of years

hand stencils

Spanish cave paintings, including these hand stencils (center), may not date to Neandertal times due to complications with a technique for dating mineral deposits, researchers argue. But the claim is controversial.

H. Collado

By Bruce Bower

Ancient European cave paintings recently attributed to Neandertals have ignited an ongoing controversy over the actual age of those designs and, as a result, who made them.

The latest volley in this debate, published October 21 in the Journal of Human Evolution, contends that rock art in three Spanish caves that had been dated to at least roughly 65,000 years ago may actually be  tens of thousands of years younger.