Whether they expressed those capabilities in surviving art is less certain, but the cognitive potential was present.

This is the world Zlatý kůň inhabited.

She was not a primitive creature struggling toward humanity.

She was fully human, in a fully human social world, with fully human cognitive capacities — playing out those capacities in an environment of extraordinary richness and difficulty that most modern humans cannot imagine.

The Neanderthals in Her Genome

One of the most vivid things about Zlatý kůň’s genome is what it tells us about her relationship to the Neanderthals — the archaic human population that had inhabited Europe for hundreds of thousands of years before the first modern humans arrived.

The story of Neanderthals and modern humans is one of the great narratives of human prehistory.