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MAKING MATTERS WORSE, a radiocarbon dating becomes increasingly unreliable beyond about  40,000  years.

Dr. Zilhao joined with archaeologists Alstair G.W. Pike of the University of Southampton and Dirk L. Hoffmann, now at the Max Planck Institute for *Evolutionary Anthropology* in Germany -

 To see, if - the prehistory of European art could be brought into sharper focus.

INSTEAD OF STUDYING radiocarbon, the master research scientists reasoned that they would use a different clock to tell time.

As water seeps into caves, it may deposit milky crusts of minerals on the walls known as  *flowstones*

Flowstones contain tiny amounts of uranium, which breaks down into thorium. The older a flowstone gets, the more thorium builds up inside it.

A flowstone covering a piece of cave art might might give Dr. Zilhao and his colleagues a minimum age for its creation.

The problem was that scientists usually needed big chunks to find enough uranium and thorium to measure. The flowstones on cave art were typically very small.

But Dr. Hoffman had been working on ways to drastically increase sensitivity of the technology so that he could work with much smaller samples.

THE RESEARCHERS returned to caves in Spain where ancient paintings had been discovered over the past century.

The artists had drawn abstract images on the cave walls, including long lines, patterns of dots, and the outline of a human hand.

The team found flowstones covering parts of the artworks and scraped away samples for dating.

In three caves, it turned out, some of the art was over 64,000 years old - about 20,000 years earlier than the first evidence of modern human in Europe.

''They must have been made by Neanderthals,''said Dr. Pike.

Wil Roebroeks, an archaeologist at Leiden University who was not involved in the new study, said the evidence was conclusive.

''This constitutes a major breakthrough in the field of human evolution studies,'' he said.

'' Neanderthal authorship of some cave art is a fact.''

Dating flowstones is a big advance on previous techniques for determining the age of cave art, but the technology has one major limitation :

It can assign only a minimum age to cave paintings. Flowstones may have begun forming the day after a painting was finished - or 10,000 years afterward. 

But a second study which Dr. Zilhao and his colleagues published in the journal Science Advances, hints that Neanderthals might well have been painting long before 64,000 years ago.

The scientists traveled to a cave on the coast of Spain where Dr. Zhilao had earlier discovered shells that had been drilled with holes and painted with ocher.

In 2010, he and his colleagues had used radiocarbon dating to estimate the age of other shells in the same layer of rock at 45,000 to 50,000 years old.

The result did not tell the team who made the ornaments. Neanderthals might be responsible, but it was also possible that the earliest modern humans in Europe made them.

And then uncertainties of radiocarbon dating also had left open the possibilities that the shells were, in fact, far older.

Dr. Zilhao and returned to the cave to try uranium dating. He and his colleagues discovered a layer of flowstone sitting atop the rock where they had found the shell jewelry.

That flowstone turned out to be about 115,000 years old.

The colored, pierced shells themselves are probably not much older than that. Up until about 118,000 years ago, the cave was flooded, thanks to higher sea levels.

The finding provides strong evidence that the shells were made by Neanderthals.

They were definitely living in Spain 115,000 years ago, while modern humans would not arrive in Europe for another 70,000 years.

The two new studies don't just indicate that Neanderthals could make cave art and jewelry. They also establish that Neanderthals were making these long before modern humans-

A blow to the idea that they simply copied their cousins.

The Honor and serving of the  latest *Operational Research* continues on History, Ancestors, Lineage Trees continues.

With respectful dedication to the Research Scientists, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all on !WOW! - The World Students Society and Twitter-!E-WOW! - the Ecosystem 2011:

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