Neanderthals treated their dead with care — but contrary to a long-standing hypothesis, they probably didn’t bury them with flowers, according to a new study.
A grave unearthed in 1960 led researchers to hypothesize that Neanderthals interred their dead with flowers — challenging the prevailing view that the ancient humans were dumb and brutish. Now scientists say a key piece of evidence from the site, which helped shape the study of Neanderthals, might have been misinterpreted. Archaeologist Ralph Solecki discovered the flower burial, as it came to be known, while exploring Shanidar Cave in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq.
And when Hunt examined Leroi-Gourhan’s illustrations of the pollen found with Shanidar 4, he saw that one of the clumps contained pollen from more than one species of plant. “That is a red flag,” he said, because a flower’s anther only contains pollen from that species. Even if two different kinds of flower were in the same bouquet, it wouldn’t make sense for the pollen of two different species of flowers to be so closely stuck together.
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