The 2 square-meter painting, in red, black and white, was found at the Neolithic settlement of Djade al-Mughara on the Euphrates, northeast of the city of Aleppo, team leader Eric Coqueugniot told Reuters.

"It looks like a modernist painting. Some of those who saw it have likened it to work by (Paul) Klee. Through carbon dating we established it is from around 9,000 B.C.," Coqueugniot said.

"We found another painting next to it, but that won't be excavated until next year. It is slow work," said Coqueugniot, who works at France's National Centre for Scientific Research.

Researchers led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, found that Neanderthals spread 1,250 miles further east than scientists had commonly believed.

SYDNEY: Scientists are perplexed by a meteorite strike in Peru near Lake Titicaca that has left a 20-metre-wide crater and is reported to have produced fumes that made up to 200 people sick.

News agencies have reported that scores of locals in the farming village of Carancas began vomiting and complaining of headaches and dizziness after the rock crashed to Earth on Saturday creating an eight-meter-deep crater.

Local residents said they heard an explosion and felt the ground shake as the meteorite impacted with the ground. Pictures showed a muddy pool of water inside the crater.