Did The Neanderthals of Shanidar Cave Really Bury their Dead?

There has long been debate among scientists regarding how Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals compared in terms of their cognition and intelligence. Some anthropologists believe Neanderthals were just as intelligent as modern humans, while others believe that Homo Sapiens endured over Neanderthals because they were superior in intelligence. Shanidar Cave in northern Iraq has been a subject of contention in this debate because it appears to contain evidence of a burial with funerary offerings made by Neanderthals in the form of flowers.

First Traces Emerge from the Cave

Initial excavation was done in Shanidar Cave, located in the Zagros Mountains, in the late 1920s. One of the first people to attempt excavation at the site was Dorothy Garrod, a British archaeologist. She found animal bones and a few stone tools such as handaxes, but no human remains. Work began in earnest in 1950, when an archaeology graduate student from Columbia University named Ralph Solecki began excavating the caves.

Shanidar cave in the Zagros Mountains. (Jan Sefti /CC BY SA 2.0)

The first human skull was uncovered in 1957 and was nicknamed, “Nandy” because the specimen was a Neanderthal, an old man of about 40 or 50 years who had apparently been cared for by the group for many years. In the Paleolithic era, 50 was a ripe old age.