When I read the other day about those cross-hatched engravings found by archaeologists in Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar being “the first known examples of Neanderthal rock art,” I, of course, thought immediately of Rolling Stone magazine. Rolling Stone, the magazine for modern aesthetes, covers “rock art” ceaselessly. That a Rolling Stone writer might have found modern rock’s roots among Neanderthal man came as no surprise to me. What about punk rock? What about grunge? I believe the word is grunge.

Yet I had leapt to a hasty conclusion. The report I was reading about in London’s Daily Mail was not drawn from Rolling Stone but rather from the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And it was not about the artistic aspirations of rock singers, but rather about artists who really were scribbling on ancient rocks over 39,000 years ago, artists drawn from the species Homo neanderthalensis, a species of human much like us only less intellectual.