In a paper for another class I’m looking into the origins of burial, which I thought would apply here pretty nicely. I posted about a site a while ago; Sima De Los Huesos in Spain, a cave site all full of youngish hominins possibly Neandertals possibly H. habilis. All these poor guys are basically piled in a sector of this cave and so people are thinking that this is an example of symbolic funerary behaviour. Now from my point of view I think I would be hesitant to chuck Great Uncle Joe and the other 40 people who died that day into a giant hole underground…seems a bit odd to me, but I was brought up in a culture with very strict, very formal, very ritualized funerary practices. And really whos to know what those ancient hominins who aren’t event he same species were thinking about their dead. I think it is pretty widely accepted that Neandertals had culture in one form or another, especially in the later periods of their existence. It is also accepted that they had formal burials for at least some of their people. Neandertals utilized the same tools as modern humans, exhibited complex thought patterns, most likely had speech and fashioned personal ornaments. Now when I look at all these qualifications of the Neandertals I think why not could they have had ritualized burials, I’m sure they were capable of it. But then again I’m capable of running down my street in a clown suit singing the national anthem…but I’m not going to. So, I think we need to be very careful when attempting to subscribe modern human behaviours to these ancient beings. The literature seems to vary between being very cautious about ascribing any kind of ritual behaviour to the ones who seem to be certain that Neandertals were very much like us and practised all sorts of fun symbolic things.

       What I have found is that pretty much all of the super interesting sites which would represent cool symbolic behaviour have been proved to be false. Take the Neandertal cave bear cult of Drachenloch Cave with all the stone structures full of cave bear skulls. Now this would have been an amazing find and truly attest to a ritualistic even spiritual aspect to the Neandertals. But again this site has been discredited by shoddy excavation, badly kept records and contradictory statements about the site by the principle investigator. In addition modern archaeologists have found that taphonomy could be responsible for pretty much all of the ‘ritually’ placed cave bear skulls and so called stone structures. So from this we can see how easily one might mistake natural processes for human produced ones. I think that the origins of burial probably will remain pretty cloudy until more conclusive sites are found or the time machine is invented…which would be awesome.