The creation of symbols to represent ideas, concepts or feelings using language, gesture, dance, music, drawing or painting, is at the centre of all art and arguably, the most important cognitive trait acquired throughout the several-hundred-thousand-year history of modern humans.

Studies in South Africa, for example, reveal pierced seashells, which were probably strung together to form necklaces and other decorative jewelry and the use of pigments such as ochre 70,000 years ago.

But nothing on the scale and beauty of the famous cave art in what is now Spain, France and Germany, was seen until 50,000 years ago, which continued in fits and starts for the following 40,000 years. Subjects often included now extinct animals such as the ibex, saber-toothed tiger, and cave-lion, as well as stick figure representations of humans and countless outlines and imprints of hands.

For a long time, the common view was that humans created art, of which our heavier-muscled and larger-brained cousins, the neanderthals, were judged incapable, as was the proposition that they might have used symbolic language analogous to humans.

That view, at least with respect to art, changed with the recent stunning revelations that neanderthals not only could create cave art such as handprints and animal figures similar to what modern humans created, but their artwork antedated human cave art, in some instances, by thousands of years.

Cave art created by neanderthals was found in three separate complexes in Spain. The challenge was to date the artwork precisely because most cave art contains little in the way of carbon residue. For this reason, and the fact that carbon dating becomes inaccurate much past 40,000 years ago, a new method for dating the art was necessary.

Fortunately, for the task of dating ancient cave art, ground water leaks into some caves, sometimes depositing minerals on the walls, which sometimes covered underlying artwork. These calcite layers form what are called flowstone.

The calcite often contains a tiny bit of uranium, which decays steadily to thorium, with the happy result that the ratio of thorium to uranium provides a highly accurate clock for dating the flowstone and hence the underlying artwork. Of course, the latter may have been created much earlier than the flowstone, so those dates are minimums.

Given that there is no evidence that modern humans lived in Europe before 45,000 years ago, findings that point to neanderthals living in Europe well before modern humans — and the now compelling findings of much older symbolic art on cave walls in Spain than modern humans could have created — should make even the most skeptical of archeologists rethink long-standing prejudices that our ancient cousins, the neanderthals, were incapable of imagination and art.

Indeed, in one example in France, jewelry was dated using the same technique to 115,000 years ago — that’s almost 70,000 years before modern humans reached what are now called France and Spain.

The startling evidence that our cousins, the neanderthals, were capable of symbolic art raises a very important question — how far back in human and neanderthal history does art go?

Could the imaginative impulse and skill necessary to create art have begun in Africa as early as 600,000 years ago, when the lines leading to modern humans on one hand, and on the other hand to neandertals and their cousins, the denisovans, diverged?

We don’t know. But it may be that the impulse to create spirit worlds and supernatural associations and beings began much earlier than previously thought.

And as those myths became systematized and incorporated into the political and cultural worlds of the time, organized religions may have taken root — a body of beliefs, passed on from generation to generation, which found expression in the case of neanderthals and later modern humans, in symbolic and representational art on cave walls.

The evidence that neanderthals created art has important implications and suggests that symbolic thinking antedates the emergence of modern humans by several hundred thousand years.

This suggestion and evidence that much lower on the evolutionary scale animals, such as aplasia, with 20,000 nerve cells and the octopus with 1,000 nerve cells, are capable of learning, remembering what they’ve learned, and in the case of some such as wasps (with a million or so nerve cells) able to learn new tricks and recognize individual members of their clan.

All this suggests that the evolutionary trail to cognition in highly evolved species such as humans had very broad and deep evolutionary origins.

That’s a humbling perspective for a species so enamored with our importance.

Dr. William Brown is a professor of neurology at McMaster University and co-founder of the InfoHealth series at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Public Library.