Crude scrawl?
It's evidently a spreadsheet to keep track of hunting kills.
A primitive and apparently meaningless marking ground into a rock by a Neanderthal using a crude implement more than 39,000 years ago would appear to support the idea that the pre-human ape-men possessed artistic faculties at least as sophisticated as those of the "young British artists" movement of the '90s. Dahling, such …
"What is it Ug?"
"Ug have vision. Ug see great camp of many caves. This picture is map of camp."
"Who has camp?"
"Ug not know. But it bigger than all the camps in the world. It guarded by great bison made of stone."
"Do you think was future, Ug?"
"Ug says it was a true seeing."
...
"Perhaps we choose extinction instead, Ug."
Pfft! Naughts and crosses? It's obviously the corner of a pre-historic scrabble board, and if they have a proper look at the contents of the previously undisturbed sediments, they'll find the remains of a small bag and the following letters:-
W H A T D O Y O U G E T I F Y O U M U L T I P L Y S I X B Y N I N E
F O R T Y T W O
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The reason dinosaurs died out was Facebook.
They should have been ideal users, due to the small brains, but it turns out their arms were too short. Every time they reached for the mouse, they fell over... After falling on your face/snout/nose 15 times a day, you'd die out too...
They only had black and white in those days, as you can see from old photographs.
Since I am not an art aficionado and have very little understanding of the "conceptual-ism" behind some of todays ideas, I would hazard to state, in judging this modest cave conception, that the Neanderthals were equally as intelligent as we are today.
Fortunately for them they probably didn't have to suffer 2 hours of queueing to get into the cave to see the aforementioned chef d'oeuvre.
I object! There is a varying level of intelligence in the population (as anybody who has ever done/supervised first line support will bitterly agree) and I think it's fair to assume that the Neanderthals had a similar range of intelligence.
Therefore, it's obvious that the most intelligent Neanderthals were more intelligent than the least intelligent people in the human race, which admittedly is setting a very, very low standard.
The buyer, if he is an advertising man who can persuade lots of people that the scribbles are worth a lot of money, sell them on, and then get out before the market collapses.
BritArt, of course, is the work of enormously talented people and was recognised as such by Charles Saatchi. Just ask Brian Sewell.
This description of the Neanderthals was fashionable until the nineteen fifties. Nowadays, most anthropologists reckon the Neanderthals to be our equals, intellectually speaking. If they were still alive today, we'd probably classify them as just another human race (whatever that means).
Unfortunately for the Neanderthals, we were the lot that went in for land theft and genocide. There is some evidence that H. sapiens sapiens nearly went extinct around 40 000 years ago, being reduced to a precarious existence on the coast of South Africa. Failing to top ourselves completely was bad news for H. sapiens neanderthalensis, and the Denisovans, another earlier human race. Since then we've had to practice on ourselves, there being nobody else left. Which is doubtless why we've got so good at it.
cart before the horse?
I think the researchers have never done anything mindlessly repetitve in their lives. I think that if they had to cut animal skins or treebark into similar pieces, they'd hold it up against the wall and run their flint knife down the groove, over and over again.
Either that, or they were trying to teach their offspring to count and only ever got to 1.