Julian Cope presents Head Heritage

Paul Pettitt gave a talk at a conference over the weekend and was willing to speculate that some of the earliest phases of cave art could have been made by Neanderthals.
Nicholas Humphreys had a paper a good few years ago comparing some cave paintings with those done by non-verbal people with autism or degenerative brain diseases that resulted in loss of language. He put forward the proposition that the paintings were likely to have been created by pre-modern minds who were more accomplished with visual communication than verbal which could put Neanderthals in the picture (presuming they were non-verbal visual thinkers, which may be completely false). The claim was highly controversial though, and heavily criticised by Bahn, amongst others.