New evidence for Neandertal symbolic thought.

Yeah the Regourdou neandertal. Very cool and incredible story of the farmer who excavated the site. IIRC he was convinced there was another entrance to the Lascaux cave system and originally wanted to find it and possibly find more art. Kept this massive excavation secret from the world even though its only a few hundred yards from one of the most famous and most visited archaeological sites on earth.

He didn't find another entrance to the cave, instead he found a well preserved neandertal skeleton(IIRC the skull is missing). It's often claimed as an example of deliberate burial and associated grave goods, like bear bones and tools. Personally I don't buy it. It looks more like the body of the neandertal and bear bones were washed into the lowest level of a cave, which then collapsed on top. The grave "lid" was a lucky event that preserved much of the skeleton. The fact that what remains is in fantastic condition, yet the skull and other bones are absent suggests this. If it were a deliberate burial it would likely be more complete.

Though TBH I'm dubious of any claimed neandertal burial. When you look at the actual evidence it's more a case of modern human looking for that interpretation. In my humble anyway. That doesn't mean they didn't observe other funeral rites or didn't mourn their dead of course. Even in modern humans different rites around death can be observed. EG some Neandertal remains show evidence of butchery, likely cannibalism. Now this conjures up images of missionaries in big cooking pots, but in some cultures consuming the bodies of loved ones is seen as deeply spiritual and respectful. That might have been the case with Neandertals. Doubly so because they often lived in times of famine so.. Sky burial is another ritual seen in modern humans were corpses are left out in the open to be rendered back to nature by natural processes. Maybe they did that too. Maybe they felt that the dead were just gone and that was that and left where they fell. There's a tribe in the Amazon who think like that. Plus Neandertals lived for hundreds of thousands of years in many different environments and across Eurasia. Plenty of scope for many different practices. Though I'm still dubious of deliberate burial.

RIGOLO wrote: »

You make valid points. I got sold when they described how there were flowers remants found scattered around the body.

Well R they found some pollen, but that was throughout the sediment. Joke is the farmer who dug his holes can be forgiven for coming to assumptions like a Bear cult(which was big at the time, but has been quietly dropped), the archaeology professionals he called in after he found the jawbone fired assumptions all over the place and continue to do so.

This particular area of archaeological research is scarily assumption filled and with little to no evidence. There can be more than a touch of amateur hour to it too. EG the recent finds of Homo Naledi where excavators went in picking up very well preserved specimens with bare hands. Contrast that with Spanish researchers into earlier hominids in that country who go into caves dressed like ebola doctors to try and minimise contamination. Then again Homo Naledi researchers were being followed and funded by a TV production company and they need their shots...

If we look at any site of reported burial of Neandertals in every single case natural deposition is just as, if not more likely. When we modern humans show up there's rarely any debate about evidence for deliberate ritual burial. This Regourdou lad, or ladess is no different. The lack of lower limbs, bits of the arm and chest and skull, while the rest of the skeleton is well preserved raises questions. As does the disarticulation of the skeleton, mixed in with some brown bear bones. And in the lowest part of the original cave whose roof collapsed repeatedly, strongly suggests a natural deposition. Put it another way, if the same researchers had excavated the cave and only found mixed up bear bones they'd come to that conclusion, but add in a neandertal and the accepted notion at the time and now that they sometimes buried their dead and evidence free conclusions get jumped to all over the place.

Similar is to be seen in Neandertal toolmaking, where one guy many moons ago(Bordes IIRC) decided on very flimsy evidence that there was a particular set of planned for tool types, yet if you look at tools actually found very few follow these types. Another site in Africa of early modern humans is reported as showing a "blade culture"(this is a biggie in the field) and yes a few "blades" are found, but they're a tiny minority of the tools excavated.

Now this kinda thing was common when it was amateurs collecting such things. They naturally tended towards the "pretty" and displayable tools like handaxes and tended to ignore the less crafted looking stuff. Thats' understandable with amateurs, but pros doing similar is a worry and it still goes on. The evidence is made to fit the pet theory of the day rather than the other way around kinda thing.
 

The site is impressive nonetheless, when you see the antiquated way he went about digging this giant sinkhole, him and his wife hauling it out bucket by bucket. It connected the neanderthal , to the old man, to the present day . 
One of the things I drew from it was it highlighting the creativity and ingeniuity of the common man, here was this ordinary farmer who thru perseverance, invention , determination , time and using vary basic equipment managed to achive a physical manifestation of all that. To me , it maybe me rethink, well if one man can do this, think what these pre-historic communites could have done, many academics dont give them enough credit IMO. 

Oh I agree. Very much so. People often forget in these days of specialisation and qualifications understandably required to do most science(Astronomy is the odd one out there) a huge chunk of finds and research into paleoarchaeology and palaeontology were by dedicated amateurs. Almost every single example of art in caves was found by amateurs, some who were deliberately looking for them(Chauvet one example).

Yeah, that's the La Ferrassie site. I got the chance to visit it when I was a kid on holidays. One of the best sites of neandertal occupation in Europe and very unusual for the number of remains found. In La Ferrassie 1 we have one the the best preserved neandertal skeletons anywhere. Most complete skull so far found. He's usually the base for reconstructions of today. Looks to have been about 50 years of age when he died and interestingly his bones show evidence of a chronic lung condition, even lung cancer that may have killed him. Hold a cast of his skull in your hands and you'd be left in no doubt he's not like us.

The interesting symbolic thought example in that site are the child's remains covered by a slab decorated with cupoles (indents in the rock). Though the child's skull is displaced from the main skeleton and the slab could be a later Aurignacian modern human piece that slid into the earlier sediments.