The Modern Mind May Be 100,000 Years Old

When I started learning about the Ice Age, the oldest known cave art dated to about 35,000 years ago—now it’s closer to 41,000 years. And while they seemed like a fairly intelligent species, Neanderthals weren’t thought to have been capable of creating art (the first confirmed Neanderthal cave art—an engraved crosshatch—was announced in 2014). Most researchers didn’t think our ancestors interbred with Neanderthals (but a number of them actually did around 60,000 years ago), and we definitely didn’t know that there was a third separate humanlike species called the Denisovans living in Ice Age Europe—and that some of us carry their genes, too. The remarkable fact is that all of us living today are the end product of an incredible story of success against all odds: Each of us carries DNA that stretches back in an unbroken line to the beginnings of humanity and beyond.

Paleoanthropologists have to be fairly flexible and open-minded about our theories, as we just never know when a new discovery or innovative research project could reveal previously unknown possibilities. I encountered this ground-shifting experience firsthand while working on the initial stage of my database of Ice Age symbols. At that point my goal was to gather all available information about the signs from existing sources (archaeological reports, academic articles, cave art books, etc.) and build it into inventories that I could then use to compare signs between rock art sites.

The prevailing opinion in Paleolithic art at that time was that Europe was the birthplace of art, invented by the first modern humans soon after their arrival on the continent. Based on this time line, the cave signs were thought to have started out around 35,000 years ago as simple, crude markings. Only much later—say, around 20,000 years ago—did the number, variety, and sophistication of the abstract motifs supposedly increase as the artists mastered this new ability. This was the assumption I was working with when I first started to compile those inventories back in 2007/8. I thought I would find only a small number of rudimentary signs at early sites, followed by the predicted increase over time.

I was wrong.

At first I had only a hunch that I was wrong—along with much of the literature. The thing with building a database is that you can only do it one site at a time, and it’s not until the end, when all the data have been assembled, that you can finally run tests to see larger patterns emerge. However, even as I sifted through hundreds of pages about the art, I sensed I was seeing a fairly wide variety of signs, even at the earliest sites. I resisted the urge to run the data before they were all in and complete, though.

After several months of data entry, the day finally arrived when I could search the