The Skeletons of Shanidar Cave
A rare cache of hominid fossils from the Kurdistan area of northern Iraq offers a window on Neanderthal culture
- By Owen Edwards
- Smithsonian magazine, March 2010, Subscribe
1n 1856, laborers working in a limestone quarry in the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf, Germany, dug up some unusual-looking bones. Subsequent study revealed that they belonged to a previously unknown species of humans, similar to, but distinct from our own species, Homo sapiens. The newly discovered hominid was named Neanderthal—thal is Old German for valley—and has fascinated anthropologists ever since.
It was first thought that Neanderthals may have resembled apes—with stooped posture and bent knees—more closely than modern humans. Then, in the 1950s, Smithsonian anthropologist Ralph Solecki, a team from Columbia University and Kurdish workers unearthed the fossilized bones of eight adult and two infant Neanderthal skeletons—spanning burials from 65,000 to 35,000 years ago—at a site known as the Shanidar cave, in the Kurdistan area of northern Iraq. The discovery changed our understanding of Neanderthals.
The early hominids walked upright and possessed a more sophisticated culture than had previously been assumed. One of the skeletons, excavated in 1957, is known simply as Shanidar 3. The male Neanderthal lived 35,000 to 45,000 years ago, was 40 to 50 years old and stood about 5-foot-6. Shanidar 3 now resides at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, showcased inside a highly secure glass enclosure that Rick Potts, director of the museum’s Human Origins Program, describes as a “fossil treasure case.” Shanidar 3, Potts adds, “is the Hope Diamond of the Human Origins collection, and we treat it accordingly.”
Solecki’s pioneering studies of the Shanidar skeletons and their burials suggested complex socialization skills. From pollen found in one of the Shanidar graves, Solecki hypothesized that flowers had been buried with the Neanderthal dead—until then, such burials had been associated only with Cro-Magnons, the earliest known H. sapiens in Europe. “Someone in the last Ice Age,” Solecki wrote, “must have ranged the mountainside in the mournful task of collecting flowers for the dead.” Furthermore, Solecki continued, “It seems logical to us today that pretty things like flowers should be placed with the cherished dead, but to find flowers in a Neanderthal burial that took place about 60,000 years ago is another matter.” Skeletons showed evidence of injuries tended and healed—indications that the sick and wounded had been cared for. Solecki’s attitude toward them was encapsulated in the title of his 1971 book, Shanidar: The First Flower People.
Drawing on Solecki’s research, writer Jean Auel mixed fiction and archaeology in her novel, The Clan of the Cave Bear, a 1980 bestseller that humanized, if not glamorized, Neanderthals. In the book, the clan members adopt an orphaned Cro-Magnon child, who comprehends things beyond their ken, foreshadowing the Neanderthals’ fate. Out-competed by the Cro-Magnon, Neanderthals would become extinct.
According to Potts, climate change was the instrument of their demise. Around 33,000 years ago, the Neanderthal, who migrated south from their northernmost range in Central Europe as glaciers advanced, settled in the wooded regions of Iberia (present-day Spain and Portugal) and Gibraltar. There, they flourished, possibly until 28,000 years ago, when they were supplanted by a supremely adaptable competitor—the resilient Cro-Magnon.
Cro-Magnon groups, says Potts, who were “aided by their ability to make warmer, more form-fitting clothing, had already moved into the Neanderthals’ former territories.” Thus, Potts adds, “Modern humans gained a foothold they never relinquished.” The Neanderthals lived in ever smaller and more isolated areas—suffering what we now call loss of habitat—eventually vanishing from the earth.
“The Neanderthals were smart,” Potts says. “They had brains the same size as Cro-Magnon and were very clever at using local resources. They lacked the ability to expand their thinking and adapt to changing conditions.”
Shanidar 3’s own story, however, is grounded not in large evolutionary forces but in particular circumstances. “There is quite a severe and deep cut to a rib on [Shanidar 3’s] left side,” says Potts. “This cut would have been deep enough to collapse his lung, so Shanidar 3 is the oldest known individual who could have been murdered.”
Owen Edwards is a freelance writer and author of the book Elegant Solutions.
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Comments (10)
Fascinating trail of the assorted Human species and their evolutionary demise combined with the obsolete science of presumption weathered by the vast historical researched evidence that usually proves contrary to what is by then considered fact by the international community ! I would bet my last greenback that the noble censors of this writ would not allow me to say (Please is it not time to allow us all to view the artifacts and skeletons mummified or otherwise of the signifigantly incredible extinct Cro Magnon Caucasoid mound culture of North America who built the earth temples of Ohio locked away warehoused within the old confines of the ancient academics private boneyards ... PS I do not recall the bible talking about Neanderthals Australopithecus Cro Magnons or any other Human Species that were wiped out by the Ethnic and Evolutionary Cleansing of Homo Sapien Culture ...Thankyou
Posted by Magnus Hoffmann on January 28,2012 | 07:34 PM
I lived in Iraq in 1974 and remember seeing in the museum a women,s body from the Shanidar cave in a glass case.The director of the museum explained that she was buried with flowers and that they were still studying the area. Would this body now be lost and not counted. Is there any later site finds?
Posted by Myra Razik on November 28,2011 | 03:06 PM
Interesting article, but I want to bring attention to the fact that it is still acceptable? To keep our ancestors in museums!!! I know I would not like that, maybe its time we re-bury people!
Posted by Denise Dufault on October 10,2011 | 04:46 PM
Dinah Mays: "society ruled by Lucifer"- har-di-har!
Posted by Liz K on March 26,2011 | 05:05 PM
can anyone tell me what sort of flowers were buried with the dead
Posted by ann hounslow on May 9,2010 | 08:34 PM
It was runaway plate tectonics during the flood year, with the mountains having risen due to plates colliding, or plutonic uplift, or magmatic extrusion, or combinations of those. The water slid of the thickened and separated continents into the then-deepening ocean basins of new basalt seafloor at the close of the flood, the plastic mantle beneath having been squeezed over to beneath the continents to enhance their elevation.
Posted by James I. Nienhuis on March 8,2010 | 04:03 PM
Sir, I would have thought that the mountains rising, as you mentioned, would have brought about the flooding, since there was less room in which the water could accomodate itself.
Posted by Nancy SoRelle on March 5,2010 | 08:04 PM
Dinah Mays, the pre-flood world was obliterated (the mountains rose at the close of the flood), so the "neanderthals" were post-flood, during the Ice Age, which was caused by a paradoxically warmer ocean.
Posted by James I. Nienhuis on March 3,2010 | 12:26 PM
This being true Mr. Nienhuis, Then perhaps these Neanderthals are the society ruled by Lucifer before his flood? Please comment......
Posted by Dinah Mays on March 3,2010 | 10:59 AM
The Shanidar "neanderthals" doctored wounds and buried their dead with ceremony, wore clothes and hunted, sounding quite human to me, but who lived there between the claimed 30,000 years ago and the time of the great cultures of upper Mesopotamia circa 2000 B.C., nobody?
The earliest documented tribes who lived in the region were biblical, the Amorites and the tribes of Aram and Asshur for instance, and Sargon I, when on a military campaign in the nearby Caucasus mountains, noted active volcanics, indicating that the carbon 14 dates for the people of Shanidar are exaggerated by carbon 12 dilution, so to speak, of the carbon 14 in atmosphere at that time.
Posted by James I. Nienhuis on February 19,2010 | 08:56 AM