In the year 2020, 400 centuries after the Neanderthal sunset, it is hard to imagine an encounter with another human species, almost like us, but not quite. 100,000 years ago, in the Middle East, the two species crossed and had sexual encounters that have been recorded in our genome and in several caves of the Iberian Peninsula, 65,000-year-old works of art by Neanderthals have been found. Now, we know that we share the Earth with beings that also had language and symbolic thought and succumbed shortly after our arrival in the Europe they inhabited. But that extinct species did not always have the march of humanity.
In the 1950s, in the Shanidar Cave, in Iraqi Kurdistan, American archaeologist Ralph Solecki discovered part of the skeletons of ten Neanderthals of both sexes and different ages. Some had remains of pollen around them that Solecki attributed to funeral rites in which the deceased's relatives honored him with flowers. In addition, among those skeletons, there was that of a one-eyed man and manco who survived for years with his disability. The Neanderthals were a solidary species with their peers.
In the Iraqi site there are remains of flowers that Neanderthals would use to honor their dead
That discovery and its interpretation humanized the species, but not everyone was convinced. The plant remains could have been carried by animals and the old research techniques employed by Solecki were not as reliable as the current ones.
Solecki wanted to return to the site that made him famous to expand his studies and confirm his hypotheses, but he died last year with 101 years without having achieved his goal. Instead, the Kurdistan Regional Government contacted Graeme Barker of the McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom) to do the job. A team of archaeologists began excavations in 2014, but had to stop for a year when ISIS was about to conquer that Iraqi region. The initial objective of the Barker group was to accurately date the sediments that were already known and determine with greater certainty that they were burials that were carried out in a specific way. However, they found a surprise.
Between 2018 and 2019 they discovered a complete skull and bones from the top of a Neanderthal with the head resting on the left hand. That individual, who died about 70,000 years ago, is another indication, as Barker and his colleagues now publish in the journal Antiquity , that the Neanderthals buried their dead on purpose. According to Emma Pomeroy, first author of the article, a prominent rock next to the head of the new body, baptized as Shanidar Z, could serve as a reference for those human groups, who returned again and again to that place to deposit their dead, during a period that could span centuries.
“The fact of finding another skeleton again and evidence that it is intentionally deposited reaffirms the idea that Neanderthals were able to bury. I am among those who thought they did bury, so this work reinforces me in that opinion, ”says Carlos Lorenzo, researcher at the IPHES (Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution) of Tarragona. For Lorenzo, the mental ability to understand the meaning of death and act accordingly was already developing in previous species. “In Atapuerca, in the Sima de los Huesos, an intentional accumulation of corpses was carried out and it is a preneanderthal site, more than 400,000 years ago,” says Lorenzo.
Neanderthals and sapiens had children in common in the Middle East, not far from the burial of Shanidar
350,000 years later, it is not strange to think that a more sophisticated species, which would have already come into contact with modern humans, had developed funeral rituals. Joseba Rios, a researcher at CENIEH (National Center for Research on Human Evolution) in Burgos, agrees that the new results allow us to propose with solidity that the Neanderthals carried out burials, but qualifies that the deposits are too scarce to affirm that there was a funerary culture shared by the Neanderthals. “It is difficult to establish a pattern because there are few cases. It is likely to be occasional behavior, but we have no evidence to say that it was an entrenched or recurring cultural tradition, ”says Rios. However, the researcher recalls that there are not many burials of 100,000 years ago where you can study the funerary culture of modern humans.
At the time in which Shanidar Z lived, 70,000 years ago, and not far from that region, the meetings between the only two species known as artistic production almost certainly gave rise to a cultural exchange that would be bidirectional. Rios refers to signs near the Upper Paleolithic, when Neanderthals began their decline, of a technological and cultural explosion that can be explained by a closer relationship with the immigrant species. It is possible that the human group that could have been one of the causes of its extinction taught them more sophisticated ways of dying before.