This week has seen me immersed in the spirituality implied from the archaeological record of early humans from the time of the Neanderthals forward into the era of early farming. This fascinating period of human development is as much a journey into speculation as it is into evidence, but it remains compelling.
Why did Neanderthals bury their dead?
One of the most interesting things about proto-Human life is the fact that sometime around 40,000 BCE they started to bury their dead. Why is that of interest?
Think about it a moment: we have the apparently under-evolved early Human ancestors, whose life seems to have been mostly nomadic as they followed the herds they hunted, taking the time to bury their dead. More than this, they seemed to take a lot of time over preparing grave sites: neatly arranged circles of stones, red ochre powder mined and spread over the corpses, and (occasionally) leaving the dead with precious artifacts. Why?
You’re a cave-dwelling, nomadic hunter with no metal. You use flint and wood weapons to hunt animals and feed yourself. Why carry the body of an horrifically injured colleague back to your cave, or near it, and spend precious energy lining a pit with pebbles and stones (often near the fire pit), decorating and arranging the body, and leaving it with those hard-worked-for artifacts?
Why not just eat the body? Or if not that, why not just leave it where it falls? Or, even if you want to bury it, why not just dig a quick pit and chuck it in? Why take so much time and care?
Beliefs?
It is said by some that we act upon our beliefs. Perhaps our ancestors were not so primitive and crude as we pretend; perhaps they had a sense of something ‘other’ about themselves.
Is laying the body in a grave near the fire pit an effort to help the spirit keep warm in the after-life? Is leaving artifacts preparation for life beyond the one just departed? We can never know… but the evidence is intriguing, don’t you think?
I’m not really as interested in “why” these beliefs arose as much as I am in the inference that they may have existed. Archaeology suggests and encourages an interpretation of these actions as pointing to some kind of early burial ritual and/or belief of life beyond the physical.
Did Neanderthals believe that they had a spirit that would somehow live on beyond physical death? The question intrigues me.
Spiritual Denial
It always troubles me when people play down their internal, spiritual sense. However you might view such ‘sense’ of ‘self’ it seems to exist in most human beings. As Sue Phillips comments, we all have a spiritual core which is somehow universal and in need of exploration – these are our ‘inside bits’. Jung alluded to it, and it is a timeless truth denied at our peril.
For me, the signals from our earliest ancestors, while not something that should necessarily be emulated, are clues about the nature of our sense of self. We are spiritual beings who see ourselves, rightly or wrongly, as something ‘other’ than the animals we used to hunt and the world that we reside within. Humans are special, they are precious. Their memories and bodies deserve careful treatment.
In a time of spiritual denial, sometimes seeming to overwhelm those of us who seek the truth, perhaps that red ochre covered body lying in a beautifully arranged grave is a reminder that we might just have a spirit after all – even if it’s only a phantom of our need to survive.
And, we are in trouble as humans when we stop to listen to the inner spiritual sense.
I meant, when we stop listening to that inner spiritual sense. Sorry, I was listening, not typing well.
Could just be a more intense and focussed form of social connections that it appears is a stronger trait in humanity than any other species. Neanderthals operated in close knit family groups rather than in wider, broad social networks. I think there is a variety of valid interpretations of what you have observed without the need for a spiritual or supernatural explanation.
What this could be a good reflection of is the survival aspects of each race. Neanderthals with a close knit family grouping could have been less able to survive in harder times due to lack of idea sharing and evolution, or adapt as quickly as the more broader looking, adaptable and idea sharing Sapiens. The reflection could be that the more we rely on a wider more populated society to survive, the more we lose that deeper links and reliance on those supposedly closest to us; family.