Burial Custom Or Cult Of The Dead
Speculation runs rampant when it comes to prehistoric ritual behavior. The dead of the ice age provide the most conclusive evidence for the existence of rituals. For the first time in human history, burials took place. They can possibly be interpreted as evidence for solicitude, love of neighbor, and culturally developed manners of the individuals of a group toward one another. This perspective was, to be sure, not accepted without question in the early twentieth century. Many scholars of the time were of the opinion that such burials were, by our standards, not carried out intentionally. The burial of a human being also presumes that those left behind grieve, and in their sorrow honor the deceased. That, at least, is our average experience of the procedure. But perhaps the dead were also buried "only" for purely pragmatic reasons, that is, to clear away the decaying corpse, if possible without odor and hygienically, and thus not attract animals. For whatever reason the Neanderthals carried out burials, some motive must have moved the Neanderthals in all regions of Europe to dispose of their dead under the earth.
For paleoanthropology and archaeology, the fact that burials were conducted is highly significant, because without burials the mortal remains of our more or less related forebears would have been left exposed to the destructive action of weather and animals. Most of the 35 Neanderthal skeleton finds that suggest purposeful burial that have been uncovered to date come from caves and the area of cliff overhangs, in other words in naturally protected locations that the Neanderthals visited repeatedly. Flat, up to one-meter deep graves were dug to bury the dead. The deceased was mostly laid in the grave on his back or crouching—lying on one side with drawn-up legs. Grave deposits, such as the mountain goat horns in the case of the boy from Teshik Tash in Uzbekistan, are rather rare. Graves from the Upper Paleolithic (40,000-11,500 years bp) are richer in grave deposits. Jewelry-adorned dead like the ice-age man from Sungir with pearl-embroidered clothing mentioned above (Figure 20) are found much more frequently among modern humans than with Neanderthals. In the 1970s, people did not want to accept this fact. In the period of general hippie bliss and Woodstock exuberance, the view came about—when the supposed "flower tomb" of Shanidar in northern Iraq had been uncovered—that as early as the Neanderthals people had buried their dead with flowers. As discussed above, analysis of the surrounding sediment has, since that time, showed that the fossil flower pollen was really the remains of food "smuggled in" subsequently by voles. There was also no trace of fossil "flower power" in the Neanderthal graves of Le Moustier, La Quina, Saint Cesaire, Spy, Amud, Tabun, or Kiik Koba in the Crimea. Nonetheless, stone implements, animal bones, and animal teeth were discovered within graves in these places, although they may well be objects of general daily life that were only included in the grave coincidentally.
Pigment remains of red ochre have been identified in the graves near La Ferrassie, Spy, and La Chapelle-aux-Saints. But it is not known what significance colors had in Neanderthal burials, or what cultic practices might lie behind the use of natural pigments.
The isolated finds of Neanderthal skulls have also given rise to speculation. "Headless" skeleton remains like the c. 60,000-year-old bones of a young man in Kebara have led to the supposition that the ice-age Europeans separated the skulls of the dead and when possible buried them in different places from the body, in order to remember their dead there. At all events, no evidence whatsoever of any grave plundering was discovered in the case of the Kebara skeleton (Figure 14). The skull therefore must have been painstakingly removed after the body was reduced to a skeleton and taken out of the grave, because the right wisdom tooth provides evidence that the skull too was buried there at some point. Multi-stage burials of the dead are by no means rare in human history, so this case is not evidence of a unique "Neanderthal cult" but rather of a widely disseminated interaction of the living with the dead of their group.
Discussion of the question as to whether Neanderthals were cannibals has rarely been dispassionate or free of bias. It is not scientifically sound to link or indeed equate every stripping of the flesh from a corpse with cannibalism. Thus the cut marks on the world-famous Neanderthal from Mettmann, but also on his distant neighbors from Marillac, Combe Grenal, Teshik Tash, and Ochtendung, are apparently the result of skinning and stripping the flesh, but are not proof of cannibalism. We know of the symbolic consumption of the dead in many archaic cultures as a symbolic transferal of the dead person's former strength to the living who remain behind. But this practice too should be distinguished from cannibalism. The differentiation becomes still more difficult in the case of the finds from Krapina in Croatia. Traces of fire, cuts, and blows have been found on the fossils of more than 24 individuals discovered there, suggesting the external use of force in the breaking of bones and skulls. Apparently the Neanderthals there dined on the marrow of their dead—if this is so, how often this took place in a ritual context can no longer be reconstructed. A completely different picture emerges from Moula-Guercy, a Neanderthal find site in southeastern France. Here, the state of the find speaks unambiguously for cannibalism. In the midst of goat and red deer food remains that the Neanderthals left behind, investigators found human bones that displayed open marrow cavities as well as traces of cuts and scrapes. Microscopic examination of the finds also shows that humans were apparently prepared before being eaten. Their cadavers were prepared, at least so it appears, no differently from those of the animals whose remains lie round about.
Thus Neanderthals clearly interacted with the dead of their species in widely varying fashions, ranging from painstaking burial, eventually taking place in stages, through symbolic consumption of parts of the body, to apparent cannibalism. In this respect, each find must be treated independently and be carefully interpreted. Bias regarding the Neanderthals and the attempt to set them off from modern humans as brutish and animallike leads to error, as the interpretation of the isolated skull from Monte Circeo has shown: it was not caused by the Neanderthals' cannibalistic customs, but was the result of hyenas feeding.
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