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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. 50,000 years ago, in a cave nestled high up in a hill in what is today northern Spain,

a group of ice age hunters gather for a special purpose. Firelight illuminates

the cave wall in front of them as they begin their work. Mixing their saliva with rich red

ochre, they artfully blow this prehistoric paint over the vertical rock surface, creating a line of bright red discs.

Markings filled with meaning.

Next, they place their hands on the wall and do the same again, creating striking red outlines,

handprints that will remain there for the next 50,000 years.

Today, those markings have become the legacy of those Ice Age painters. But those painters, they

weren't modern humans. They weren't Homo sapiens. They were Neanderthals. And they were leaving behind

some of the oldest known art in Europe. So what do we know about this archaic art? What types of

images did Neanderthals draw? What did it mean? And how might Neanderthal art have influenced that of our

ancestors, of the first groups of Homo sapiens that interacted with them? I'm Tristan Hughes,

your host, and this is the fascinating, developing story of Neanderthal Art with our guest, Dr. Genevieve von Petzinger.

Genevieve, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. So that's always a pleasure to talk about my favorite subject

with people who actually want to hear me talk about it. Oh, absolutely. Go wild on this topic as well. So, I mean, Neanderlard, first of all,

this belief that it has been there for so long that it's only modern humans who can make art,

...