Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The old image of the Neanderthals as brutish and primitive is now much outmoded. Quite a lot is known about their intellectual life and although it was simple compared with our own, the advance it represented on life forms that went before is clear. While they were alive, the Neanderthals developed more or less in parallel with modern humans. The latest excavations in Spain show that Neanderthals for example knew enough to ‘settle’ in areas of greatest biotic diversity.³¹ The picture is, however, muddied by the emergence of anatomically modern humans, who seem to have arisen in Africa between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago and then spread out across the globe. They are believed to be descended from archaic H. sapiens, or H. heidelbergensis, with smaller teeth, no brow ridges, and a brain size of between 1,200 and 1,700 cc. And so from then, until around 31,000 years ago, when we find the last traces of the Neanderthals, these two forms of humanity lived side-by-side, and such artefacts as remain could belong to either. The French palaeontologist, Francesco d’Errico, concludes that both Neanderthals and H. sapiens showed evidence of ‘modern behaviour’.³²

Until about 60,000 years ago, for example, we find thick ash deposits, burnt bone and charcoal becoming very common in both open and cave sites.³³ Middle Palaeolithic people had fire, it appears, but they did not yet build elaborate hearths. (Middle Palaeolithic applies to the period of the Neanderthals and the fifth kind of stone hand-axe – blade tools, dating to 250,000–60,000 BP – years before the present.) Only at around 60,000 years ago do we find controlled fire, proper hearths – at Vilas Ruivas in Portugal and at Molodova on the Dnestr river in Russia – significantly associated with windbreaks made from mammoth bones. In fact, it seems that here the first undisputed use of fire may have been not so much for cooking as for defrosting the huge carcasses of large mammals frozen in winter, and which other scavengers, like hyenas, would have been unable to touch.³⁴

Some of the Neanderthal sites, especially in the Middle East, seem to show individuals who have been buried, and one was associated with flower pollen. This is disputed, however, and it is not at all clear whether these are ritual burials. In these so-called Neanderthal graves, more than one individual lies with his or her head resting on his or her arm, so in theory these people could have died in their sleep and just have been left where they were (though the practice has not been found among earlier hominids). Other burials have been accompanied by the remains of red ochre, or with goat horns stuck into the ground nearby. Though many archaeologists favour naturalistic explanations of these discoveries – i.e., the apparent association is accidental – it is quite possible that the Neanderthals did bury their dead with an associated ritual that implies some form of early religion. Certainly, at this time there is a sudden increase in the recovery of complete or nearly complete skeletons, which is also suggestive.³⁵

In assessing the significance of these burials it is important to say first that the sample size consists of about sixty graves only and so, given the time-frame involved, we are talking about an average of two burials per thousand years. With that qualification in mind, there are three further factors worth discussing. One is the age and sex of the bodies buried. Many were children or juveniles, enough to suggest that there was a ‘cult of the dead’, in particular of children, who were buried with more ceremony than adults, designed perhaps to ensure their rebirth. At the same time, more males than females were buried, hinting that males enjoyed higher status than females. A third factor is that in one case of a Neanderthal discovered in the Shanidar caves in northern Iraq the man was blind, suffered from arthritis and had his right arm amputated just above the elbow. This individual lived till he was forty, when he was killed by a rock fall; so until this point, his colleagues had evidently looked after him.³⁶ The amputation of his arm also implies some medical knowledge, and this idea was further fuelled by the discovery of a second individual at Shanidar, dated to around 60,000 BP, who had been buried with no fewer than seven species of flower, all of which had medicinal properties. These included woody horsetail (Ephedra), which has a long history of use in Asia to treat coughs and respiratory disorders, and as a stimulant to promote endurance on protracted hunting forays.³⁷ Were these medicinal herbs/flowers placed in the graves as substances to help the dead on their journey to the next world, or were they, as critics claim, simply used as bedding, or, even more prosaically, blown into the caves by the wind, or buried by rodents?