Neanderthals were different from you and me, the thinking goes, because they were cognitively inferior. For one thing, they appeared to be incapable of symbolic thinking, of using something to represent something else.

Some humans in Africa, for example, adorned their bodies with stained seashells more than 100,000 years ago. To them, a shell wasn’t just a shell, but a way to signify individuality. But evidence of similar behavior by Neanderthals has been discounted.

Now, though, archeologists working in the Murcia region of southeastern Spain report in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have found solid signs that Neanderthals were using seashells in a decorative and symbolic way.

Image A shell discovered in Spain that dates from about 50,000 years ago. This composite image shows the natural color of the interior on the left, and the external side, which may at one time have been painted to match, on the right. Credit... João Zilhão

João Zilhão of the University of Bristol in England and colleagues studied shells found in two caves far from the shoreline and dating from about 50,000 years ago, 10,000 years before modern humans showed up in Europe.