you know what people say you never have a second chance to make a first impression and the this is the problem the Nieto's have had for more than 150 years [Music] ever since the discovery of the avatars in the 19th century Neanderthals have had rather bad press in fact the original name for the other towers was proposed as Homo stupidest the stupid human and people have variously portrayed them rather gorillas like and incapable of belief systems and sinned by the thought what we find here is evidence of Neanderthal painting not only just smearing pigments on the wall but actually painting something that is symbolic that represents something this panel comprises of various components so you can see red lines that form squares inside these rectangles that formed by these lines you can actually see animal paintings so here's their back half of an animal we don't know what type of animal it is and here very fading the front part here's a hand of an animal the legs years on top of the squares you see lots of red dots nobody really knows what this means but it's only done by humans who came into this case and painted the walls and the very question is how old when did this happen normally archaeologists would use a technique called radiocarbon dating which dates the time of charcoal has been used to make paintings but we can't do this with these kind of paintings because they're made out of mineral pigments so instead we're focusing on these timely white crust that have formed on top of the paintings and they made of calcium carbonate and they're formed by the water percolating through the rocks and they precipitate out calcite if this cow so it was precipitated on top of the painting the painting must have been there for it to precipitate on top which means the painting must be older than the age of the calcite uranium series dating of carbonates is actually a technique that's been used in geochronology for decades now it's well-established over the last 25 years the developments in mass spectrometry means that we can actually date much smaller samples this is really important for archaeology because it means that we can they these small carbonate crusts found an Associated cave are the exciting thing is that this panel here has a minimum age of 64 thousand years sixty-four thousand years ago in Spain there was only one human species living and that was Neanderthals the modern humans like us they arrived in Spain about 40,000 years ago so our results mean that this red line which is underlying this calcite had to be made by Neanderthals and the fact that we have this from three caves in the North Center and south of Spain older than 65,000 shows us that this was a deliberate part of their symbolical cultural repertoire they are making deliberate decisions as to where to emplace these and of course it's in the depths of caves where they have to be for what Essenes and ritual permits so this is outside of their normal living zone to my mind this closes the debate on the onion a toast they are part of our family they are ancestors they were not cognitively distinct or less endowed in terms of smart they're just a variant a few months that as such exists no more and what we need to do is look at their archaeology look at their skeleton look at their genes in terms of what they tell us about the human story as a whole [Music]