A 43,000-year-old stone roughly the size of a potato, found in a rock shelter in central Spain, was confirmed in 2025 to bear a single red-ochre fingerprint in its centre — placed deliberately by a Neanderthal so that the rest of the stone resembled a face — making it one of the oldest known examples of human-like abstract thinking in the prehistoric record, by a species many people still imagine as incapable of art

A 43,000-year-old stone roughly the size of a potato, found in a rock shelter in central Spain, was confirmed in 2025 to bear a single red-ochre fingerprint in its centre — placed deliberately by a Neanderthal so that the rest of the stone resembled a face — making it one of the oldest known examples of human-like abstract thinking in the prehistoric record, by a species many people still imagine as incapable of art

The story of the stone begins, like many archaeological stories, with a moment of mild astonishment at the bottom of an excavation trench. The team from Complutense University of Madrid had been working at the San Lázaro rock-shelter for several seasons, recovering the usual inventory of Middle Paleolithic finds — stone tools, animal bones, the residues of fires. In July 2022, an excavator brushed away the soil from what looked initially like an…