Neanderthal

by Paul Jordan

  Above all, it is in the matter of the disposal of the dead that the humanity of the Neanderthalers seems to be evinced, especially in those cases where some tinge of cult and belief appears to be present. Even the probable cannibalism at some Neanderthal sites can be classed as a form of disposal of the dead (though it requires that the dead be brought to be dead in the first place), and one most likely of ideological import since cannibalism except in very extreme situations is not a very practical thing to do. ‘Long pig’ (as some recent cannibal societies have called human meat) is nothing like as rewarding as the flesh of hunted wild animals and cannibalism is vanishingly rare as a source of food – it is a cultic practice to do with subduing one’s enemies’ spirits and perhaps absorbing their qualities (located in brain and marrow) to one’s advantage. The long-term cannibalism that some see, probably correctly, in the Krapina sequence is hardly likely to have been undertaken as a regular method of food provision over many generations and so points to some sort of ‘spiritual’ notion, though we cannot now imagine what exactly that was, and might be dismayed to find out. It would be comfortable to dismiss the Krapina evidence as casual burial of the dead around the site with subsequent interludes of disturbance by cave-dwelling carnivores and scavengers, like the cave-hyena whose teeth marks are said to have been found on some of the bones. On the other hand, the burning of some of the bones and the apparent breakage of long bones at marrow-rich points and smashing of skulls does look like cannibalism, and the nearby site of Vindija seems to show the same sort of evidence, as does Hortus in France. If not cannibalism, then post-mortem defleshing might be a possible interpretation, which would amount to another sort of cultic disposal of the dead.

  Cannibalism (or post-mortem defleshing) followed by random scattering of the bones is a far cry from deliberate burial. The relatively frequent discovery of fully articulated Neanderthal skeletons (among them the delicate remains of children) shows beyond doubt that the Neanderthalers did deliberately bury their dead and the fact that they did it in the soil of their cave homes strongly implies that such burial somehow went beyond the mere practicality of getting rid of potential nuisance. If that was all their concern, chucking into ravines or uninhabited caverns would have served their purposes better – shallow burial at home, as was often the case (only about 30 cm below ground level), could not even have removed the possibility of nuisance very decisively. The way they buried their dead does confirm that the Neanderthal folk had some ideas behind what they did in this respect, but evidence for precisely what those ideas were has proved to slip through the fingers when looked at hard. But it is to the bearers of the Mousterian culture that the distinction belongs of being the first people we positively know to have buried their dead at all – we cannot say that that distinction strictly goes to the Neanderthalers, because among the earliest and most clearly spiritually coloured burials of Mousterian times are the graves of some Levantine early Homo sapiens sapiens individuals of Mousterian toolmaking habits who were clearly not Neanderthalers: more of them later. And it is worth remembering that the caves, especially of south-west France, in the northern latitudes of Europe – with frost-broken soil and good conditions of preservation – have afforded us Neanderthal burials in numbers that we cannot expect to find for their contemporaries in Africa of Middle Stone Age times, where caves with different chemical properties would often have destroyed any bones that came to rest in them; our sample of these African contempories of Neanderthal Man is small and burial is not clearly evidenced. Even in Europe stray finds of fragmentary and isolated Neanderthal bones outnumber clear burials.

  Reconstruction of the burial at la Chapelle aux Saints.

  But clear burials there most certainly are. The original Neanderthaler of the Feldhof caves was probably deliberately interred, and so most likely were the Spy remains discovered later in the nineteenth century. The male from la Chapelle was buried in a rectangularly cut pit at the bottom of the Mousterian levels and a whole ‘family’ of Neanderthalers were buried in six graves at la Ferrassie. The le Moustier youth was accorded deliberate burial, and so was the very late (after 40,000 BP) Neanderthaler discovered at Saint-Césaire in association with not Mousterian but primitively Upper Palaeolithic tools. Interestingly, all the Neanderthal burials of Western Europe are accompanied by Mousterian of the Charentian (Quina-Ferrassie) variety except for the above case from Saint-Césaire and the youth from le Moustier who seems to have belonged to the so-called Typical Mousterian, itself an ill-defined category. No Neanderthal (or other) remains have been found with the Mousterian of Acheulian Tradition (characterized by the presence of axes and backed knives) but it seems likely this tradition was the handiwork of Neanderthalers since it clearly forms the basis of the Chatelperronian Upper Palaeolithic of Saint-Césaire and a few other sites in France and Spain. Perhaps it is cultural custom that explains the presence of graves in the Charentian Mousterian and their absence in other Mousterian contexts. The Charentian belonged to a very cold time in the career of the Neanderthalers and it is possible that death was both commoner and more calamitous to the group in Charentian times – and perhaps that the dead were more difficult to dispose of in those times, except in the frost-broken floors of the home caves. Outside of Europe, Neanderthal burials are known at Shanidar in Iraq, with perhaps as many as five ‘graves’, at Kiik-Koba in the Crimea, at Teshik Tash in Uzbekistan, and at the Levantine sites of Amud and Kebara.

  Neanderthal burials often show a body flexed and lying on its side in an attitude recalling sleep (or the foetal position), but we should be careful not to see too much spiritual meaning in that, since the posture requires a smaller grave with less digging. The le Moustier youth was lying on his right side, with his knees slightly drawn up and his head resting on his forearm. It is how we interpret the rest of the apparent ‘contents’ of his ‘grave’ that heralds the problem of assessing the ideological import of Neanderthal burials beyond the bare fact of deliberate interment. In short, were some Neanderthal corpses buried with grave goods or other deckings in a way that suggests some sort of belief in a continuity of life after death? Bold claims were made in the past of just such ritual furnishing of Neanderthal burials. The young man of le Moustier was said to have a ‘pillow’ of flints under his head and a fine stone axe to hand, with all around him the bones of wild cattle charred in some cases (including an ox skull) like the remains of a funeral feast or provision for the afterlife. The excavation of the le Moustier Neanderthal was done in the early days of archaeology and left much to be desired in terms of careful recording, but even the best of archaeological technique cannot always decide on the nature of associations of material from such a remote epoch. Mousterian sites are full of stones, tools and animal bone fragments and, certainly in the case of le Moustier, it is easy to see how, quite adventitiously, an axe might lie near a hand and stones might lie under a head, with a general scatter of animal bones all around (and easily mixed in with poor excavation technique, if not as a result of animal or human disturbance at some time in the past). The bison leg bone on the chest of the old man of la Chapelle must be regarded with scepticism on the same basis.

  At Regourdou near le Moustier the bones of an adult Neanderthaler are reported to have been found lying on a flat bed of stones and covered over by a cairn of rocks, with sand and ash on top, in which flint tools and animal bones (mostly of bear and deer) were mixed. Clearly, some doubts as to the significance of the animal bones, tools and stones must remain, but the bear bones are very interesting in the light of further evidence (at Regourdou and elsewhere) of some attachment on the part of the Neanderthal people to the bear, which we will explore shortly. Evidence of fire over the burial at Spy was also noted in the nineteenth century, prompting ideas about Neanderthal provision of warmth for the dead or funeral fires and feasts, but evidence like this is always open to other interpretations, in this case that living occupants had subsequently lit a fire unheedingly over the grave of a quite possibly forgotten fore
bear.

  At the other end of the Neanderthal range, 3000 km from the Mousterian sites of Western Europe, at Teshik Tash in Uzbekistan, a Neanderthal boy of perhaps nine years of age was buried among an array of horns of mountain goat that suggested to his excavators that his grave had been furnished with a ring of six pairs of upstanding goat horns driven point first into the ground in some sort of ritual spirit (see p. 41). Others have pointed out that, without a precise plot of the entire situation of strewn goat horns that litter the site, it is not possible to conclude that a distinct ring was ever in place, and the site had evidently been disturbed by animals in view of teeth marks on some of the limb bones and the incompleteness of the skeleton. The mountain goat was evidently the staple of the Neanderthalers’ subsistence in this high-altitude region and so might have figured in some cultic fashion in their thinking, but the case for the ring of horns is not proven. Perhaps some of the horns were used to dig the grave, which was back at the cave wall, with the boy’s feet pointing towards the entrance. As with some other Middle Palaeolithic sites in Russia, the stone tools of Teshik Tash’s five occupation layers included some rather blade-like forms along with more ordinary flakes and cores, and there were five concentrations of ash with signs of a small fire near the body.

  Some 1600 km from Teshik Tash, at Shanidar in the Zagros Mountains of northern Iraq, a number of Neanderthal skeletons were discovered in what, in some instances at least, look like deliberate interments (though one at least of the Shanidar Neanderthalers was evidently killed by a slab of rock falling from the cave roof). One of the graves was interpreted in a very suggestive way as we saw in Chapter 3: a concentration of pollen traces in association with the body in question was speculatively attributed to the casting of flowers on to the grave at the time of burial since the pollen was found in clusters that might have come from flower heads. If not necessarily decked with wreaths, it was possible to conjecture that the body had been laid out on a bed of boughs and flowers. But more sceptical commentators have suggested the activity of burrowing rodents or even the wind as agencies for the introduction of the pollen. The flowers from which the pollen came, by one means or another, were evidently brightly coloured ones: grape hyacinth and hollyhock types.

  The Crimean site of Kiik-Koba produced evidence of burials of both an adult male and an infant and the site of Amud in Israel also showed an infant Neanderthal burial (only about ten months old, but already displaying some distinctly Neanderthal features) in a lower and older stratum than the striking adult male Neanderthaler of great height (for a Neanderthaler) and great cranial capacity (for any sort of human being ever). A red deer upper jawbone was found ‘leaning against’ the infant’s pelvis but, again, it is impossible to say whether this really represents any sort of provision of grave goods or is merely an accident of contiguity in the deposit. Fairly complete skeletons were found in the neighbouring sites of Tabun (a rather small-brained Neanderthal female) and Kebara (a male buried in a shallow pit on his back, headless, though possessing the hyoid bone that shows there was really nothing wrong with the Neanderthal voice-box); both were almost certainly deliberate burials, without anything one could fix on for evidence of grave goods. Lumps of red ochre have been reported in close association with some Middle Eastern Neanderthal bones, but not with Neanderthal burials in Europe – the Upper Palaeolithic people do appear, as with the so-called ‘Red Lady of Paviland’, to have ochred the bodies of the dead on occasion, presumably with something of the same intention as the cosmetic morticians of today, as well as using ochre in their artistic productions. But this practice is not evidenced among the Neanderthal folk. It is in the clear-cut occurrence of grave goods and funerary ritual that the Upper Palaeolithic people are signally to be distinguished from the Neanderthalers. Very interestingly, there are Mousterian graves in Israel that do clearly show the presence of grave goods but they are not the graves of Neanderthalers and they are apparently older than some of the Neanderthal burials like Amud and Kebara, by tens of thousands of years. One of the early moderns from Skhul had the lower jaw of a wild boar in his arms and the Qafzeh child held the antlered skull of a fallow deer in its hands. The stone technology of the levels in which bodies of early moderns like these were found is pure Mousterian, indistinguishable from the Mousterian of the Neanderthalers found in different levels in the same region. The complex implications of this situation are vital to the problem of modern human origins – for the moment, suffice it to note that the clear association of moderns with grave goods and failure of Neanderthal burials to evince the same clear evidence must be important to any discussion of Neanderthal mentality and capacity for symbolic thought and belief.

  The infant Neanderthaler’s jaw from Amud, with the later adult male’s skull behind.

  The Neanderthal cemetery at la Ferrassie.

  The nearest the evidence of Neanderthal burials comes to suggesting ritual and belief is reached at the French site of la Ferrassie. Here we have a veritable cemetery of the Neanderthal folk, in a situation without much sign of Mousterian domestic habitation. La Ferrassie is not a deep cave but a rock shelter with only a slight overhang of rock. Most of the graves were found in a position that, nowadays at least, lies out from under the overhanging rock. These may not be the oldest certain graves in the world (which distinction probably goes to the older Levantine burials) but la Ferrassie likely constitutes the oldest cemetery, with the remains of at least seven Neanderthal individuals (only two of them adults) and the powerful implication that more children were once buried there. The age and sex distribution of the human remains is strongly suggestive of a family plot, but in the absence of discovery of comparable situations elsewhere caution is to be recommended about any such speculation. Suggestive, too, is the orientation of five of the graves (with two more less obviously so) on an east–west axis – a state of affairs seen at other Neanderthal burial sites like Spy in Belgium and Kebara in Israel. The daily round of the Sun, with its metaphorical linkage in our minds with birth and death and resurrection, suggests itself as a possible factor in motivating such burial orientations, but it is very debatable whether the Neanderthalers were capable of metaphor along those lines. Still, it must be scraps of evidence like this that we go on when we speculate about the prehistoric evolution of the human mind.

  The shelter wall at la Ferrassie itself runs east to west, with the burials and associated features to its south. At the westernmost end were the adult burials, lying head to head. The male skeleton was discovered almost complete, but for both hands and the right foot. It is possible that disturbance by animals accounts for these missing parts, as for other absences of remains in other parts of the site. It was the la Ferrassie male that Boule used to supplement his reconstruction of his typical Neanderthaler – and it is the skeleton in which evidence of the effects of lung cancer has recently been identified. The male was buried in a shallow subrectangular pit, in a flexed posture, with three flattish stones at his head, which have been interpreted as some sort of protective covering, or more fancifully as a means of making sure that his dead body would continue to lie in the earth and not walk again among the living. There are parallels for such thinking in the ethnography of modern or recent foraging peoples, as there are for the flexing which might – with bonds – have served the same purpose. On the other hand, the stones may have fallen from the cave roof and flexed burial makes for less effort in digging the grave. Flint tools and pieces of animal bone were recorded with the body, but the usual strictures about accidental association apply.

  The female skeleton of la Ferrassie was much more tightly flexed than the male, and must have been bound to achieve the foetal position – an interesting piece of indirect evidence for the Neanderthalers’ use of plant fibre or rawhide for rope. The extreme foetal position is commonly encountered in much later human burials (such as the Andean mummies) and is ethnographically attested to be sometimes a means of immobilizing the dead, but certainly in the case of the Neanderthal Woman fr
om la Ferrassie it allowed the provision of a very small grave.

  To the east of the adults two smaller children’s graves were discovered with the same east–west orientation, and further to the east of them nine low round mounds in rows of three (staggered like cinema seats) running north–south came to light. The northernmost of them, nearest the cave wall, contained the remains of a very small infant with two Mousterian scrapers and a point. (An infant with flint tools under three blocks of stone was found at le Moustier, too.) To the north of that infant burial, another was more recently discovered of about two years of age, this time under the shelter of the rock overhang and very close to the cave wall. One of the other mounds of this group contained suggestions of a further infant burial, but the other seven mounds were empty of human remains as excavated. Probably they too once held children’s bones, which were later disturbed by animals or destroyed by erosion without the benefit of the overhang, or they were just possibly the places where funerary goods like joints of meat were buried to supply the dead of the cemetery.