New cave fossils have revived the debate over Neandertal burials
The excavation of an adult Neandertal’s partial upper-body skeleton in Iraqi Kurdistan has revived a decades-long debate over whether Neandertals intentionally buried their dead. Analyses of the fossils, unearthed from the region’s Shanidar Cave, and the surrounding sediment indicate the individual was placed at the bottom of a shallow depression that someone had dug, scientists report in the February Antiquity. The discovery follows excavations in Shanidar from 1951 to 1960 that yielded fossils from 10 other Neandertals, including a partial skeleton known as the “flower burial” for the ancient clumps of pollen that surrounded the remains. The late archaeologist Ralph Solecki, who led those earlier digs, concluded that the pollen showed that Shanidar Neandertals had buried their dead and scattered flowers over bodies in funeral rituals. Burying the dead — a behavior typically associated only with Homo sapiens — implies compassion for group members, care and mourning for the dead, and perhaps spirituality and belief in an afterlife. If Solecki was right, Neandertals could have engaged in...