Trophy hunt

A DISCOVERY in a Spanish cave suggests that Neanderthals collected trophies. That’s according to a study published this week in the magazine Nature Human Behaviour.

Researchers from Spain’s CSIC public research institute found a total of 35 horned skulls from large herbivores on the site in Madrid’s Pinilla del Valle.

They believe that the bones served as trophies, something that would, for the first time, prove that these primates had the capacity for symbolic actions.

This kind of intelligence had, until now, been attributed only to humans.

“There is nothing like this in the world, it’s exceptional,” the coauthor of the study, paleoanthropologist Juan Luis Arsuaga, said.