Neanderthals were the world's first artists, research reveals

Recent research has shown that engravings in a cave in La Roche-Cotard (France), which has been sealed for thousands of years, were actually made by Neanderthals. This research was performed by Basel archaeologist Dorota Wojtczak together with a team of researchers from France and Denmark, whose findings reveal that the Neanderthals were in fact the first humans with an appreciation of art.

When the French archaeologist Jean-Claude Marquet entered the La Roche-Cotard cave in the Loire Valley for the first time back in 1974, he suspected that the fine lines on the wall could be of human origin.

He also found scrapers and other retouched pieces known as Mousterian stone artifacts that suggested the cave had been used by Neanderthals.

Were the marks on the wall evidence of early Neanderthal artistic activity?

Posing this question raised the possibility of breaking with the consensus of the time, which largely assumed that Homo neanderthalensis lacked any higher cognitive abilities.

Fearing he would be unable to provide sufficient scientific evidence to prove his hypothesis, Marquet left the cave untouched for almost 40 years.

Marks on the wall produced by human hands

Together with an international team, he made another attempt in 2016.

This time he was accompanied by Dr. Dorota Wojtczak from Integrative Prehistoric and Archaeological Science (IPAS) at the Department of Environmental Sciences of the University of Basel, who specializes in archaeological use-wear analysis.

"Our task was to use modern methods to prove the human origin of these wall engravings," explains Wojtczak in her office at IPAS.

The researchers recently published their findings in the journal PLoS ONE.

First with photos and drawings and later with a 3D scanner, the marks in the tuff rock of the cave wall were meticulously recorded.

In her laboratory in Basel, Wojtczak compared these samples from the cave with tuff she had worked on experimentally with wood, bone and stone tools, as well as with her hands.

"This research clearly showed that the cave marks were not made with tools, but by scratching with human fingers," says Wojtczak.

Cave sealed for over 50,000 years

At the same time, examination of cave sediment by researchers from Denmark showed that the cave must have been sealed off by mud residues from the Loire and soil sediments for over 50,000 years before being rediscovered.

This makes the La Roche-Cotard cave system a very special location -- a veritable "time capsule." "At this time, 50,000 years ago, there were no modern humans in Europe, only Neanderthals," says Wojtczak.

The wall marks and artifacts can therefore only come from these early humans.

While the clear geometric shapes with parallel and triangular lines suggest that these marks were not scribbled on the wall by chance, the researcher does not know what they represent.

"But they could only have been made by someone who proceeded with planning and understanding," she says.

And whether it was "art" as such, or a form of recording-keeping, is a matter of interpretation.

La Roche-Cotard promises further findings

The cave holds many other archaeological secrets. Jean-Claude Marquet also found an object that resembles the face of a human or animal back in 1976, and Wojtczak's use-wear analysis suggests that this object is also man-made.

Another object from the cave appears to be a small oil lamp.

"Specialists are currently investigating whether the object bears any pigments or soot substances that could help to identify the type of fuel used at the time," explains Wojtczak.

The chamber of La Roche-Cotard that has been explored so far is just one part of an entire cave system.

The researcher hopes to gain further insight into the Neanderthals' activities, particularly from Chamber 4, which is still largely covered by sediment.

Wojtczak is convinced that every investigation will help to further the dismantle traditional consensus of Neanderthals as mentally inferior humans, and reinforce the perception of them as more like the cousins of modern humans.

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Anyone can be trained to be creative

Researchers have developed a new method for training people to be creative, one that shows promise of succeeding far better than current ways of sparking innovation.

This new method, based on narrative theory, helps people be creative in the way children and artists are: By making up stories that imagine alternative worlds, shift perspective and generate unexpected actions.

The narrative method works by recognizing that we're all creative, said Angus Fletcher, who developed the method and is a professor of English and a member of The Ohio State University's Project Narrative.

"We as a society radically undervalue the creativity of kids and many others because we are obsessed with the idea that some people are more creative than others," Fletcher said.

"But the reality is that we're just not training creativity in the right way."

Fletcher and Mike Benveniste, also of Project Narrative, discussed the narrative method of training creativity in a just-published article in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

The two researchers successfully used the narrative approach to train members of the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College. Fletcher wrote a publicly available training guide based on his methods that was tailored to officers and advanced enlisted personnel.

They have also worked with the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, the Ohio State College of Engineering and several Fortune 50 companies to teach creativity to their staffs and students.

The current foundation of creativity training is the technique known as divergent thinking, which has been in use since the 1950s. It is a "computational approach" to creativity that treats the brain as a logic machine, Fletcher said.

It works through exercises designed to, among other things, expand working memory, foster analogical thinking and promote problem-solving.

But divergent thinking hasn't delivered the results that many hoped for, Fletcher said. A major issue is that its computational approach relies on data and information about the problems and successes of the past.

"What it can't do is help prepare people for new challenges that we know little about today. It can't come up with truly original actions," Fletcher said. "But the human brain's narrative machinery can."

The narrative method of training for creativity uses many of the techniques that writers use to create stories. One is to develop new worlds in your mind. For example, employees at a company might be asked to think about their most unusual customer -- then imagine a world in which all their customers were like that. How would that change their business? What would they have to do to survive?

Another technique is perspective-shifting. An executive at a company might be asked to answer a problem by thinking like another member of their team.

The point of using these techniques and others like them is not that the scenarios you dream up will actually happen, Fletcher said.

"Creativity isn't about guessing the future correctly. It's about making yourself open to imagining radically different possibilities," he said.

"When you do that, you can respond more quickly and nimbly to the changes that do occur."

Fletcher noted that the narrative approach of training creativity through telling stories resembles how young children are creative -- and research shows that young children are more imaginatively creative than adults.

But the ability of children to perform creative tasks drops after four or five years of schooling, according to studies. That's when children begin intensive logical, semantic and memory training.

The narrative approach to creativity can help people unlock the creativity they may have stopped using as they progressed through school, Fletcher said.

One advantage for organizations that train employees to be creative is that they no longer need to strive to hire "creative people," he said.

"Trying to hire creative people causes problems because the people that leaders identify as creative are almost always people just like themselves. So it promotes conformity instead of originality," Fletcher said.

"It's better to hire a diverse group of people and then train them to be creative. That creates a culture that recognizes that there are already creative people in your organization that you aren't taking advantage of."

While this narrative method of creativity training has already been received positively, Fletcher and his colleagues have started a more formal evaluation. They are conducting randomized controlled trials of the creativity curriculum on more than 600 U.S. Army majors who are part of the Command and General Staff College.

They are also continuing to work with new organizations, such as the Worthington Local School District in Ohio.

"Teaching creativity is one of the most useful things you can do in the world, because it is just coming up with new solutions to solve problems," he said.

Fletcher said this new method of training creativity "could only have come from Ohio State's Project Narrative.

"Project Narrative is all about how stories work in the brain. It is the foundation that helped us put together this new way of thinking about and training for creativity," he said.

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