How To Think Like a Neandertal by Wynn Thomas Coolidge Frederick L

Author:Wynn, Thomas, Coolidge, Frederick L.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2012-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

Grave Miscalculations

One of the few commonly known facts about Neandertals is that they buried their dead. Some of the first Neandertals ever found over a century ago in southwestern France were purported to have been found in graves, including the Old Man of La Chapelle. For the original French archaeologists burial carried with it an implication of ritual corpse treatment, and ritual in turn implied religious sensibility, perhaps including a concept of afterlife. In other words, they concluded that Neandertals shared with us a sense of the supernatural. Like many established truisms, these ritual graves of Neandertals have wielded an unfortunate influence on our understanding of Neandertal lives, implying an emotional and religious similarity to us that is overstated at best, and perhaps even entirely unwarranted. Both terms, “ritual” and “grave,” are misleading. We have no evidence that ceremony of any kind accompanied corpse treatment, and the small-scale scrapings of earth qualify as graves in only a very technical sense. So just what were Neandertals doing with corpses?

Perhaps the most famous Neandertal mortuary site of all is the cave of La Ferrassie in southwestern France. Between 1909 and 1921 archaeologists recovered the remains of seven Neandertals; two of them consisted of nearly complete skeletons, and the other five were partial skeletons. Introductory textbooks on human evolution still commonly reference these La Ferrassie Neandertals and the graves that contain them, and often include a photo of La Ferrassie #1 (a Neandertal with a huge cranial capacity of 1,700 cubic centimeters). But close examination of the sources reveals something odd: La Ferrassie #1 was not found in a grave. It lay in a depression next to the back wall of the cave, its head and shoulders covered by three limestone blocks. La Ferrassie #7 was similarly situated nearby. The legs and arms of the skeletons were slightly bent (“semiflexed” is the archaeological term), but not enough to suggest that the corpses had been bound into tight positions (“flexed”). Indeed the only possible graves at La Ferrassie were two shallow pits in which #3 and #4 were found. The pits were very small, from about 1 to 2¼ feet deep, and the skeletons in them only partial (#3 had only arms and a head; #4 was actually two fragmentary skeletons of a 10-month old and a neonate). In other words, not one of the La Ferrassie Neandertals was an intact burial. The most complete, #1 and #2, were not buried, and those in the only possible graves, #3 and #4, were incomplete. This is hardly convincing evidence of mortuary ceremonialism. But La Ferrassie was excavated long ago, when excavation standards were a bit more lax (but not by much). Perhaps a more recent excavation will be more definitive.

Kebara Cave in Israel, mentioned earlier in the context of Neandertal hunting and plant consumption, provides the best recently excavated example of a Neandertal grave.8 All told, Kebara has yielded the remains of at least twentythree adult and juvenile Neandertals, most represented by scattered teeth. But two of the Neandertals appear to have been buried.

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