BÉA, BRUNO, AND I made an early Sunday of it and drove to La Chapelle-aux-Saints in the Corrèze, east of Sarlat, toward the slowly rising, drier foothills of the Massif Central, birthplace of many rivers, among them the Loire, Vézère, Dordogne, Lot, Cèvenne, and Tarn. A less-known mountain range in south-central France compared to the Alps and the Pyrenees, the Massif is a wealth of ancient volcanoes and volcanic soil and a place considered the most ancient heart of France, with old mythic associations among the locals. It is a part of a richly variable biosphere as well, with such diverse plant and animal life that it still holds mysteries yet to be discovered. Perhaps the Corrèze wasn’t as rich in fertile soil and forest as the Dordogne, but it was a part of the continuum between the Dordogne and the Massif and the good life, in Neandertal times as well as our own.
After driving through wild, largely unmarked places, as a contrast we arrived at a huge banner across the road, “Musée de l’Homme Néandertal,” our destination, identifying the building nearby. The building had to have been shorter than the banner. The Neandertal museum was at one end of a hooked path that connected us to the village of La Chapelle, also no larger than four or five stone houses anchored by a pretty twelfth-century Romanesque church.
Between the museum and village lay the village cemetery, and right next to it, the Lilliputian cave where the arthritic, practically toothless, and beloved Neandertal Old Man of La Chapelle had been found over a hundred years earlier.
“Let it never be said,” Bruno offered his most theatrical voice, “that there was no intentional burial here in La Chapelle-aux-Saints.” He then broke into a chuckle as we stood practically with one foot in each gravesite, one with hundred-year-old tombstones, and the other with a plaque over the cave mouth announcing the historic discovery of a local who had died around 50,000 years ago. We decided to visit the museum first, and then return to the cave, cemetery, and chapel. We turned around and went to sign up for the guided tour of the history of the prehistory of the place.
In 1905, as the Western world struggled with the mental paradigm shift that science was placing on religious outlooks, grasping the truth that we are creatures in nature and evolved from other creatures, two Catholic priests, Jean and Amédée Bouyssonie, with their younger brother Paul, began to dig here. This seemingly small place was to have a huge effect on our collective psyches.
Being amateur prehistorians as well as professional priests, the two were a part of a modernizing trend in France to harmonize and attune religious doctrine to the emerging facts of biological evolution. Why not let god’s universe be more complex? But making sense of the world was still the order of the day and so when in 1908 they unearthed a Neandertal skeleton, the two priests reported it from the beginning as clearly an intentional burial.
The skeleton was in a tucked, fetal-like position, in a shallow pit, and was surrounded and covered by hundreds of Mousterian stone tools and animal bones that covered most, if not all, of the small cave floor, all artifacts typical of living spaces of Neandertals. Most modern human burials similarly contain ordinary items of everyday life far more than blatant symbolic bling. But these artifacts really appeared to be a part of everyday life, ones that occurred before and continued during and after the body arrived there.
Their find and declaration was “une veritable ‘bombe’ scientifique et religieuse,” a true scientific and religious bomb, wrote Bordeaux paleoanthropologists Jacques Jaubert and Bruno Maureille in their recent book, Néandertal.
Both influential institutions—science and the church—each with their selected ways of knowing, took burial to mean Neandertals must also have had a rich emotional and spiritual life. As much as all mortuary rites are first rites for the living to deal with the loss and grief of the deceased (emotional), and second, to work out what to do with the body (practical)—when looking at how people handled their dead, we also tend to extend beyond the emotional and practical to a possible spiritual life, maybe even to ideas of the soul and a hereafter. This purported burial led the discoverers to see a rich emotional and spiritual life among Neandertals and with their vision the Bouyssonies widened the door for people in 1908 to embrace Neandertals as kin and to stop seeing them as deeply other.
Ironically, the find also had the opposite effect, to deepen the divide in the hands of Parisian-based paleontologist Pierre-Marcellin Boule, who was given the bones to analyze. He misread the severe arthritis as a natural stature, making Neandertals stooped across the board, not just in this one individual who suffered from a painful deformity thanks to the fact that he lived a longer life than usual and had been helped by his people to do so.
That Boulean image, now in hindsight, we understand, came from heavy biases in Boule’s mind that kept him from seeing arthritis and instead he imposed his preconceived ideas of an ape man. The public gobbled this image up—equally gullible to run with bigoted preconceptions—and one would think they entirely forgot the possibility of burial and what that implied about relatedness to us. This, even, when the Bouyssonie brothers spoke and wrote about the origins of human spirituality based on what they thought they had found here.
The little cave in one of the smallest villages in the Corrèze was a huge platform for the whole raging spectrum of ideas about Neandertals, from coarse brutes to the spiritually illuminated. The stakes were high for humanity that burial should win out over brutishness.
Those are still the stakes.
One will never hear an anthropologist, no matter what his or her position on similarities or differences, crack the coarse jokes for an easy laugh that still come off so readily from the lips of the public—even the well-educated public—when calling someone a Neandertal. It is known as wrong and inaccurate—indeed, racist—but so hard to extract from the public mind that does not know the deeper dangers. It is so embedded into our culture that this is okay that we still don’t stop to think just how terribly close it is to othering others and making them subhuman, too.
The stakes are high.
So science steps carefully forward.
On corrective physiology, paleoanthropologist Jean-Louis Heim reexamined the bones in 1983 and found Boule’s errors and biases and realigned the Old Man of La Chapelle to his rightful upright posture. Heim further added that repositioning the skull to sit atop the vertebrae as it originally had been in life changed the shape of the throat and showed that spoken language as we express it was an anatomical possibility among Neandertals as well. While the skeletal record has been set straight, we the public inherited a bad dish from Boule and are still crooked, dropping our mean Neandertal jokes without thinking.
The topic of burial has been revisited as well and has even more sensitivities around it, also thanks to the bad press from Boule. When studying burial among humans, seeking the earliest evidence for such behavior is one of the hardest things to prove because of preservation issues and what will constitute solid evidence for human behavior versus natural actions. And because so much hinges on burial, because we’ve made it so symbolically potent as an issue for humanness, it is especially touchy. But ironically, burial is also only one of many ways humans past and present handled their dead and even burial has a wide range of variation, from simple and practical depositing of the body and mourning the dead (burial) to more elaborate and ritualized matters of giving body and soul a proper send-off (a funeral and rite of passage).
There are also primary burials, such as placing a body in the ground and covering it with earth; and secondary burials, such as laying it on a platform to be picked clean by birds and other creatures and then gathering the cleaned bones and burying them, or defleshing the bones tout de suite and handling the flesh and bones separately. Cremation is also a secondary burial because it involves first burning the body and then distributing or burying the ashes.
Of interest, the form of secondary burial involving defleshing usually leaves cut marks on the bones, offering new possibilities for all those sites where cut marks and cannibalism have been equated. They may also be funerary activities, not just culinary. Defleshing and even cannibalism aren’t uncommon among humans historically or cross-culturally, and moreover, defleshing of bones is found frequently enough in Upper Paleolithic contexts among early modern humans to blur the lines even more regarding how Neandertals and modern humans have handled their dead.
A recently excavated 18,000-year-old early modern Magdalenian site in southern Germany revealed the fragmented bones of two individuals who had been so heavily defleshed that the cut marks on their bones were more frequent than the same style of cut marks found on the animal bones in the same site. Also, there were no clearly symbolic items mixed with the bones, only lots of stone tools and animal bones. Though no one yet seems to have analyzed the frequency of cut marks on Neandertal bones, there is already a growing precedent for cut marks and fragmented bones mixed with animal bones and stone tools in some Neandertal contexts, such as at Les Pradelles. Beyond this, it is anyone’s guess what happened to the nonskeletal part of the bodies and why. The level of fragmentation, and smashing of bones for marrow, suggests eating, which in turn could be both nutritional and ritual.
To deal with the lack of better-documented data from La Chapelle to address the nature of the burial, or if there was in fact such an act, archaeologist William Rendu and colleagues from across France more recently reviewed the Bouyssonie documents and then spent twelve years re-excavating the cave in order to discern better evidence for or against intentional burial. They also excavated the other small caves in the same hillside to better understand the natural processes of the hillside caverns and to understand the wider use of the landscape by Neandertals. Mousterian tools and animal remains were found in the other caves as well as in the burial cave. In the Old Man’s cave they even uncovered fragments of other Neandertal individuals, one adult and two children. Theirs was definitely not a burial but more a placing, a dumping, or a scattering.
It was hard to reconcile the original documents with the current dig’s findings. Some evidence was simply gone, but they eliminated the likelihood of the cave as a bear den and other natural processes that could have resulted in a pit and a well-preserved skeleton, and concluded that the most likely case was still that this was an intentional burial, that others had used a natural depression in the cave floor to carve out a place to set the body and then did a quick backfill to cover it. There is no hard evidence for the backfill sediment, but the good preservation of the human bones, especially when compared to other animal bones in the cave and surrounding caves, implied to them that the body had to have been better protected. In essence, the evidence can’t confirm or negate burial so the team seemed to go with what they thought was the most likely scenario, perhaps to be sure that the door from 1908 remained open.
“It’s a big deal,” Harold said. “This is no small thing, but a big deal that changes the direction of what Neandertals did or did not do. We need to be certain about it before we make it a fact.” He, Dennis, Shannon, Paul, Vera, and Teresa wrote a response to the Rendu team’s publication about their work and called for more stringent criteria. They listed what these criteria best could be—the issue of determining the fill in the grave as laid down by nature or by human action—to test for certain for intentional burial. Rendu’s team considered the critique and responded, after serious consideration, that they felt the same conclusion was the most reasonable, even with the lack of good evidence for the original nature of the backfill or sedimentation in the cave.
Critics from outside these two collaborative teams threw in their two cents on the debate. Some felt that the stringent criteria suggested by Harold and team was setting a good standard for gaining better and testable evidence—real science where outside and independent researchers could test the findings using the same measures. Others said the opposite, that Harold and team hold standards that are too strict and that even most modern human burials would not pass the test, let alone earlier burials. This, to Harold’s mind, is fine and also missing the point.
There is a great deal of similarity in the appearance of Neandertal remains in the Middle Paleolithic up to early modern human remains in the Upper Paleolithic, from simple shallow pit burials to the fragmented human bones with cut marks mixed with animal bones and tools. Then there are the burials found in the Levant that reverse the order of things. There, the earliest burials among humans are among an earlier migration of early modern humans into the area around 100,000 years ago. Qafzeh is the most famous, with a proven intentional burial because the pit is clear and the body was accompanied with ochre and beads—it goes the whole distance and is both a burial and a funeral: emotional, practical, and symbolic all in one. Kebara and its purported Neandertal burial nearby and farther south is some 30,000 to 40,000 years younger than Qafzeh and can only be considered a burial (and yes, some contest this, though most see it more than even La Chapelle as a hands-down burial).
The fossil record also complicates things because despite the Qafzeh remains and a few others, we still have more fossil remains for Neandertals than early modern humans anywhere, even early modern humans much later in time than the Neandertals. Why the Neandertal fossils preserved so well is an important question.
“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” Harold said when I posed this to him. “We don’t know what preserved the bones.” But the conundrum is that there is no hard evidence for covering the bodies with dirt, which is the reasoning most archaeologists give to explain the preservation mystery. And it still doesn’t address the related conundrum, that Upper Paleolithic burials that showed a similar possible practice of backfilling still preserved fewer skeletons and from more recent time periods.
The famous skeleton of Kebara in Israel was a nearly complete skeleton of a man but for his upper skull (the jaw is still there) and a few limbs. Near him, another partial skeleton was uncovered. It was a child, and its relative wholeness may point to some form of burial. But the child could as likely have been “dumped” into a zone the excavators identified as a “dumping zone,” where they found fragments of another twenty-one infants and children, none of them buried. At the very least, there were two different burial practices going on in Kebara, yet it has similarities to other possible burial sites.
But Kebara is also less debated in the burial question because in the Levant there was earlier mixing and contact between Neandertals and early modern humans and the story is different here. The Kebara Neandertal “burial” is younger than the ones of early modern humans at Skhul and Qafzeh by about 30,000 to 40,000 years. The same story extends to other Levantine Neandertal locations, such as Shanidar in Iraq and Dederiyeh in Syria, which are near contemporaries of Kebara.
La Ferrassie has two somewhat complete adult skeletons and five partial skeletons, some very partial, of children and infants. La Chapelle has the famous Old Man nearly whole but fragments of three others, an adult and two children. Maybe some people were buried and others placed and left. Maybe different people used the sites in different times or the same people in different times, as temporary hunting and camping occupations. There are so many maybes, again, including ideas about infant mortality and differential treatment of adults and children that are pure speculation, that one needed to advance with caution.
Another conundrum is that we just don’t have as many skeletons for early modern peoples as we do for Neandertals. “The uncomfortable fact,” Randy White said when I visited him near Les Eyzies, “that people don’t know what to do with is that my people the Aurignacians,” early moderns who appeared right after the Neandertals disappeared, “didn’t bury their dead. The whole premise of the Middle Paleolithic transition was that the Upper Paleolithic people were burying their dead, but they weren’t. It’s the opposite. Neandertals appear to be, in some contexts, burying their dead.
“But what we know is that through the twelve thousand years of the Aurignacian,” Randy continued, referring to the time from around 40,000 years ago to 28,000 years ago in Europe, “we don’t have a single burial. I’m sure they were doing something with their dead, but it wasn’t burying them or it wasn’t burying them at living sites.”
The first burials in Europe to appear in the Upper Paleolithic are associated with the Gravettian people, who lived around 29,000 to 22,000 years ago. These show full-out burials as we recognize them, people buried in dug holes with personal items, such as the beads they may have worn while living. Later Magdalenian people handled their dead in ways that appear very similar to the Neandertal mortuary remains: either mostly placed in natural shallow pits, or defleshed and scattered with animal bones and stone tools and nothing much else.
“What the Neandertal record says,” he continued, “if you believe indeed that those were burials, is that people were burying dead people in places that they were living. When you get to the Aurignacian, you don’t know whether they were burying their dead. They could have been burying them out in the valley bottom or other contexts. They could have been doing other things: hanging them in the trees, throwing them in the river, or whatever. It’s very uncomfortable to have these moderns who have all this symbolic stuff, but guess what they don’t have?”
“Burial,” I say, happy to oblige.
“The thing that’s allegedly made Neandertals human. Well, what do you do when you have the first humans who follow the Neandertals who don’t do it?”
In my mind, it seemed like different cultures, where some do one thing and others another. I grew up aware of Zoroastrian funerary rites in Iran and India, which, similar to those practiced by Tibetans, were to place the dead bodies on high platforms—sky burials—in the mountains and let birds of prey, rain, wind, and sun deflesh the bodies. But the whole debate here wasn’t just different cultures but different pathways of being human that both intersected but also walked in unique directions.
“I think there are all sorts of conundrums,” Randy said. “You probably already know that all of this stuff about burial started with La Chapelle-aux-Saints and its excavation by two Catholic priests.” I told him I had just been there with my friends. “And then Bouyssonie,” he continued, “writes this book on the origins of human spirituality. I mean, they have a really big stake in it that has nothing to do with archaeological theory or the evidence itself. It’s about something else. It’s about being a priest. It’s about the role of the Catholic Church in scientific research.”
I recalled a central quote, attributed to both the Bouyssonie brothers, on a display at the museum that confirmed as much: “Insofar as philosophy and science show that burying the dead presumes religious beliefs and sentiments, one can assert that during the Mousterian period there existed religion among humans.”
This can apply to all of us, Mousterian Neandertals in Europe and Mousterian early moderns and Neandertals in the Levant. But the key pivot, the one that trips people up, is the difference in how philosophy and science arrive at their evidence. Philosophy has its logic and theorems about humanity that can use just the mind to confirm its ideas—feel and reason what makes sense. (As if what makes sense is logical.) Science has to use more hard physical evidence, provable beyond the mind of the beholder—and other like-minded beholders who agreed with each other’s poetic logic—to test criteria that anyone, no matter what they believed, can confirm. Hard physical evidence for the softest, most abstract of substances.
“IT’S CURIOUS,” I emailed Harold, “that more Neandertal skeletons have been found in the Dordogne, or anywhere, in general, than early modern human skeletons.” I told him about my recent visit with Randy and what he’d said about bodies and burial.
“That’s true about the Aurignacian,” he wrote back, “but by the time of the Gravettian, and again in the Magdalenian, there are lots of burials.”
“So this really argues for widening what the handling of the dead looks like, right?” I asked.
“Sure. As I always say, moderns don’t always bury their dead. It’s only one of many ways to handle the deceased. People like to make the argument that ‘well, if a modern group doesn’t bury their dead, it doesn’t make them less than fully modern.’ That’s true. But that’s not the point. The point, and the bigger question, is this: Did Neandertals have modern culture, which we are more and more defining as the heavy use of symbols, which in turn means language, symbolically mediated social structure, etc.? If Neandertals practiced burial, it would heavily imply the use of symbols in ritual, and therefore all of the other stuff, and therefore the conclusion would be that they had some kind of equivalent to modern culture.”
He was on a roll, which I appreciated, because I wanted to sort out how all this mattered.
“But it has to be kept in mind that modern culture began at some time, just like domestication of plants and animals. The question is when. We cannot simply assume that bipedality = modern culture. We cannot assume that tool use = modern culture. Or hunting = modern culture. What the consensus is now is that the use of symbols = modern culture. But like any evolutionary development, if something exists at one time, we cannot simply assume that it was present earlier as well, rather, we have to try to demonstrate that it existed earlier.”
The problem in archaeology is that it will always be limited to what can be found physically in the record, and symbols in our minds have probably been around far longer than symbols outside of our minds, left engraved or carved. When did we decide to express symbols beyond fleeting, oral utterances and turn them into a record? It had to exist long before it showed up in the record.
Paleolithic archaeologists such as Alison Brooks and Sally McBrearty, working in Africa on the origins of early modern human behavior, are finding more and more that these features of a symbolic life don’t just appear suddenly, but are present somehow in earlier forms, or unexpressed but evolving with a suite of traits that positively reinforce each other. The earliest example of this, going beyond the question of just early modern humans, but back into our common genus Homo, is the trend toward a larger brain compared to body size that emerged around the same time as increased lateralization in the brain, tool-making, right- and left-handedness, and, some would argue, language in some form, even if not language as we know it today. This suite of traits may have eventually led to fashioning things more into outward symbolic forms. Perhaps it lay within for a long time but the need to cooperate and communicate with growing groups of people and strangers pushed it to outward expressions, such as beads, paintings, and engravings.
LA CHAPELLE IS as much a part of our collective human legacy as it is a French legacy. Bruno Maureille, one of the coauthors on the study with Rendu, told Noémie Fraiche, for his biographical portrait (which he dedicated to his grandfather) on Chercheurs d’Aquitaine, that he first visited La Chapelle-aux-Saints when he was eleven years old. He was on vacation and visiting his grandfather, who wanted to take him to the site. It made such a deep impression that he went on to dedicate his life to studying Neandertals. La Chapelle is also une veritable bombe emotionelle et intellectuelle. It is a place where people wear both science and emotion on their sleeves and to do otherwise may be impossible.
Most purported Neandertal burials were excavated years ago at a time before archaeologists documented geological strata as exactly as they do today, explained Leiden-based archaeologist Wil Roebroeks at his recent talk in Paris at the Collège de France. He was advising a steady approach to this emotional debate. “This debate will probably remain an open discussion,” he said, “until we find new sites” that can be excavated with better techniques. “We can’t answer this question with what we have today,” he concluded.
Roebroeks also stressed the need to make a distinction between burial and funeral behavior, one addressing emotional and practical issues and the other ritual and symbolic. Even in cases for burial among early modern humans, very few offered evidence for strong symbolic behavior beyond the act of burying. He noted the recent survey made of the entire Upper Paleolithic across Eurasia by archaeologists Julien Riel-Salvatore and Claudine Gravel-Miguel. They found that the majority of burials, which are coming from a small known sample so far, were clustered around the years 28,000 to 20,000 years ago (in the Gravettian) and later, around 14,000 to 10,000 years ago (within the Magdalenian). Very few of them could be called typical burials and fewer still bore such ritual aspects (such as elaborate grave goods or art) to be considered anything other than “sober affairs.” The two authors found that early modern human burials varied quite a lot, but for the most part were simple. In fact, these burials seemed to not be all that different from what were being called purported Neandertal burials. In other words, most lacked the strong symbolic evidence to make the difference between burial for emotional and practical reasons and burial of a highly ritual and symbolic nature.
AS I FOLLOWED Béa and Bruno into La Chapelle’s museum, I heard Béa telling the young woman behind the counter that we were interested in the guided visit to the museum. Bruno added that they were professional guides—hoping for the more detailed tour if possible—and that I was an anthropologist-turned-journalist. As those last two nouns left his mouth, the woman who led the tour stepped out from the back room. “An anthropologist and journalist and two guides! Good! Excellent!” We would get all the details.
I decided to come clean from the start. I was a cultural anthropologist but as a journalist I was writing about Neandertals, especially about the work in the southwest of France. And I was digging with Harold and Co. I held my breath.
“Harold Dibble!” She said. “I know him! He was here!”
“Yes,” I said, waiting, wondering if we would be welcome.
“The one who wrote the strong critique of the recent work here and that this still was not a burial.”
“Yes,” I said again, waiting, wondering.
She turned to Béa and Bruno and filled them in. “I remember when he visited with his colleagues.” She mentioned Paul and Dennis. “I told them, ‘Come back, visit the cave, and you will change your minds.’ They never did.”
I later learned that they actually did, wanting to completely take in the recent report, the past reports from the Bouyssonies, and also the cave and how it had been excavated, but she just didn’t know that. I didn’t at the time either.
“I’m not a specialist,” I reemphasized, “and I just want to learn about this place and see how you see it.”
“Of course. Very good,” she said as two French couples and a family from New Zealand arrived. No more was said about Harold, as if he had somehow been involved at Hastings and had tried to resist the Normans, but we all know how ad 1066 turned out.
The tour began in French. I later learned from the New Zealanders that though they spoke no French, they had found our guide’s enthusiasm so infectious that they were pulled along and worked things out from museum displays, maps, and charts.
The guide was incredibly knowledgeable and on top of all the current debates and theories, not only on burial, but about human evolution from 2.5 million years ago to the present. Before she went full-tilt into the material, she wanted everyone to know that the Old Man of La Chapelle was not that old, somewhere in his thirties and forties, even if the name stuck because of its charm.
The central and most important display was a replica of the grave and skeleton. As a part of her explanation for how he ended up here, in Europe—the wide sweep, not the grave-digging—she delved deeply into human evolution, beginning with Homo erectus, who effected the first series of migrations out of the African continent, one bushy branch wandering off toward Europe and giving rise to Neandertals as other bushy branches inhabited Asia and another for the most part hung out in Africa. Over a long time, isolated from the others in East Asia and Africa, the folks in Europe and West Asia took on features we identify as classical Neandertals. Of course, it’s all about flow and we already know flow continued to be possible much later, with the likes of us and our encounters with Neandertals and Denisovans and who knows who else on all those bushy branches including our own.
When she came to the later Homo sapiens migration, around 60,000 years ago, she let us know it was not a first migration but one of many before it and soon after it as well, as well as flow back again into Africa.
Everyone listened carefully and then one of the Frenchwomen asked, “Why did Homo sapiens migrate out of Africa around fifty to sixty thousand years ago?” By now we had been standing around the display of the burial for several minutes. It was set into the ground level of the floor, the Old Man in his cozy curled position, and for some reason we all stared at him simultaneously, as if the answer lay there with him.
“It’s not known,” the guide answered. “But there are theories that population growth led to movement and expansion, to find new means to eat and live. This trend continued into the Neolithic and hasn’t really stopped.”
It could be our population growth and bigger numbers that pushed Neandertals out of their traditional territories to more marginal ones. That may even be the reason we made that big pulsing series of migrations out of Africa around 60,000 years ago—too many of us there for a nomad’s tastes. Perhaps Neandertals had smaller numbers than we did, which the evidence for density at their sites is telling us. But maybe, she added, we also brought new diseases with us from our long life and separation in Africa that they had never been exposed to. Maybe it was a combination of things, as life is prone to be.
She then worried that people would make the old mistake of thinking Neandertals weren’t as smart and so couldn’t adjust, and added, “We and they are simply two different types of intelligence and adaptations. One is not smarter or better than the other.” It was a matter of chance and the randomness of life. “In the end,” she said, “Neandertals were driven into Iberia.”
This, in current thinking, is considered one of the marginal places Neandertals retreated to, given that the latest occupation sites seem to be there, though Mezmaiskaya in Russia (just north of Georgia in the Caucasus) is recently dated to around 39,000 years old, about the same age (and perhaps a little older) as many southern Iberian sites. And more recently, work from the Altai in southern Siberia is also showing a potential last marginal range of retreat as well, to the north. The prime areas to live apparently were in the band in between and we moderns, in our sheer numbers, seem to have been flooding into them. Maybe.
Add a maybe to everything in this field, and also, don’t let the ink dry.
“Homo sapiens had an especially developed frontal lobe and the Neandertals’ was also extremely developed,” the guide concluded, “but with important differences. We were genetically programmed to do different things. We’re just different, not better.” Her Neandertals were also masters of fire, decorated their bodies with shell beads and ochre and manganese oxide pigments, spoke their own languages, and used symbols. They were different from us but a lot like us, too. Her collective of Neandertals was a certainty of all the issues that are still unresolved and continuously contested, while everyone agrees, at the same time, that they were very, very smart and as human as any other humans who have ever existed.
The tour over, we thanked the guide and made our way back to visit the cave site and then to the church, a walk of 50,000 years in two hundred meters. As we peered over the fence toward the cave, Béa said, “It was very clear that she is very proud of this place and deeply connected to it.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “She is definitely a deep part of all this and I can see why.” I looked at the cave opening where the three brothers had stood in 1908 and revealed a small place with a big impact over one hundred years ago and counting.
All the caves in that hillside were small and low, like hobbit holes inserted into the slope. The middle one had a huge plaque on its arch, which marked it as the famous one where the Bouyssonie brothers found their man. A person even of modest stature could not stand straight inside it without hitting her head.
But as I stood as close to the cave as the fence allowed, I found myself being pulled into that emotional force-field that grabbed people when confronted by time and mortality. How much stronger would it have been had I been born French, or better, Corrèzienne and this too was the land of my own origins?
Speaking entirely emotionally now, just knowing this famous personage had been found there was enough to fill me with wonder and a suspension of time. It was perfectly logical that this was a place a nomadic person might come to die and be surrounded by loved ones, or after the fact be laid in and set away from scavenging carnivores, such as lions and hyenas. But this was purely my mind’s imaging and wouldn’t add anything to the debate except that we humans are emotional and impressionable when faced with things to which we would do better to say, “I don’t know.” But we really want to make meaningful stories instead. Stories are the most fundamental products of our symbol-making mind and rarely get written down because their nature is simply to make sense, offer calming effects, be communicated, and then morph into the next meaningful situation. Invisible.
It seemed to me that Rendu and his team went for drawing the line on burial in a moderate place between emotion, politics, history, and science by saying that, though they felt they have documented enough hard evidence to say burial was more likely at La Chapelle than not, they do not claim that this means it was absolutely certain, nor that burial was practiced all the time, everywhere.
“Some of the Neandertals in some regions,” Rendu told Archaeology magazine editor Zach Zorich in 2014, “in very particular moments, made these kinds of burials.” Rendu had read the report from Roc de Marsal and agreed, as noted in Archaeology, that it was a burial from natural processes, not by human hands.
We walked from there, past the cemetery, and to the Romanesque church with its octagonal steeple and Gothic archway on the edge of the old village with its small cluster of houses. Locals had dedicated their church to Saint Namphaise, an officer in Charlemagne’s army who, tired of war and violence, retreated and became a hermit in a remote forest in Quercy, the region including the Lot just south of us.
I smiled to myself. Saint Namphaise wasn’t the first to think of retreating to quiet solitude and a little cave and he now was the namesake of a church near a small, remote, and quiet cave with another in reclined retreat. Béa went off to gather the huge cast-iron skeleton key from a neighbor that would unlock the chapel and let us inside.
It was a simple chapel and mostly unadorned, but with harmonious Romanesque arches and columns that allowed for perfect acoustics and, dare I say, a primordial cozy cave feel. As my friends turned to leave, I walked a little farther along the aisle before turning to join them. I found they had stopped at the entrance, reading a sign posted on the back wall, and were beginning to chuckle.
“Fees,” it noted at the top, with a list beneath it for different services the parish would perform regarding important rites of passage:
Mass—17 Euros
Marriages—160 Euros
Interments—160 Euros
Baptisms—free
When I caught up to them and read over their shoulders, Béa was saying, “I can’t believe marriage costs the same as burial. I always thought it cost more.” I thought I could almost hear a personal statement in her tone: marriage should cost more. “Burial must be really important here,” she finished and walked out.
“Or it is as important as marriage here even if elsewhere it is less,” Bruno said to me. I wondered what the cultural norms for costs of rites of passage were across France. Did marriage normally cost more than death? Death to my mind had a naturally higher price, but then, it was a one-time deal and marriage could last a lifetime and might need a bit more mass and ritual to get it onto the right groove.
“But,” I reflected back to Bruno, “you still have to pay for both. There’s no way around that.”
He laughed. “At least admission is free.” He then stepped quickly through the door—not wanting to be irreverent in church—before bursting into a good belly laugh outside.
• • •
THE FINAL DIG season folded in 2014 and soon the team was dispersing but for the core members and graduate students who were working the material into their own research. As everyone analyzed more material, consolidated the geological observations, worked out strong dates with several dating methods, all the team leaders met in the summer of 2015 for a powwow session in Carsac, including dating specialist Guillaume Guerin and fossil expert Bruno Maureille from Bordeaux, to consolidate what they all were seeing and offer sound assessments. I think they astounded themselves when they came to swift and aligned agreements about what the evidence was saying.
They agreed on the defined strata and the different occupations and the dates laid out for La Ferrassie. “The other thing everyone agreed on,” Harold told me afterwards with chagrin, “is the La Ferrassie 8 child is at an entirely different level than the other two, La Ferrassie 1 and La Ferrassie 2. So it can’t be a whole family. It can’t even be a cemetery. You’ve just got a coincidence that you’ve got other humans there.”
“How different are the dates for the two levels?” I asked.
“Well, we’ve got a level difference. Guillaume’s dates put it at a good 10,000 years earlier. It’s also probably true for La Ferrassie 5 [another of the children], which is looking as at the same time as La Ferrassie 8.”
La Ferrassie 1 and La Ferrassie 2—the two adults—were separated by 10,000 years and younger than the two children for whom there was good data. It seemed information for the other three children was too incomplete to say much.
“Those are some major things as far as the evidence,” Harold said. “We weren’t talking about the symbolic aspect, but those data are hard to make it work with the traditional interpretation of burial.”
“So it’s true to your mantra ‘Show me the evidence.’”
“Yeah. And when you look at the evidence, it turns out it’s nothing.” I could detect a bit of disappointment, that he had hoped more would come out of all this. But the evidence is like that when you stick to it impeccably: it won’t let you tell stories. Perhaps Wil Roebroeks was right, the time to dig new sites and take a chance on them was upon us.
IT WAS A typical Saturday morning at Sarlat’s weekly market and by midmorning I ran into Aurelie and our friend Christian. They made a ritual every Saturday of stopping for coffee at the market café and asking about any new findings regarding Neandertals.
The Saturday prior to this one I had summarized the paper Dennis and the team had published on the lack of evidence for burial at Roc de Marsal. I had seen the knitted brow of mixed curiosity and concern in Christian. He was French so had inherited the strong emotional and historically paved affinity for burial. Aurelie too was French, and a hundred percent from the Périgord, and the Roc de Marsal child was also one hundred percent from the Périgord, but she too knew Harold, Carsac, and archaeology well from the inside out, so little could surprise her and she just smiled. Never let the ink dry on any of this. Christian listened, asked hard questions, and filed it all away.
This week we resumed where we’d left off and found the last available seats at the café at a table occupied by another friend of Christian’s. “My friend is interested in prehistory and Neandertals, too,” Christian told me by way of introduction and added that he was a retired teacher. We shook hands and the waiter came, took our orders for three espressos, and Christian dove in.
“I considered the report on Roc de Marsal,” he said, “and I looked into it and I have to say, I totally agree with their science and their conclusion. The taphonomy bears it out.”
Christian’s friend, the teacher, leaned forward, intrigued. They batted this about, Christian offering further details from the study, and I saw Christian begin to win the taphonomic cause.
“How do you come to Neandertals?” I asked the teacher once the Roc de Marsal discussion waned.
“Bien sûr, ever since I read Marylène Patou-Mathis’s books. Especially Neanderthals—Une autre humanité,” he noted the most influential. “Her title says it all: another humanity, equal but different. She is an advocate for Neandertals, correcting our false and bigoted views of them inherited from the past.”
In a sense, Patou-Mathis is to France what João Zilhão is to the rest of Europe. Here in France they had their own special spokesperson who really spoke to the people, not just the scholars. It reinforced the idea that the French public really did have a more intense relationship with their prehistory than any other people.
I had heard about Patou-Mathis before, many times before. Nearly all of the French volunteers who came to work with us for a week or two at a time at La Ferrassie had told me, just as a casual part of conversation, that Patou-Mathis was la grande dame of all things Neandertal.
A leading prehistorian and zooarchaeologist at the Institut de Paléontologie Humaine in Paris, she worked especially on the faunal remains of Neandertal sites in Eastern Europe but also had quite a public outreach toward representing Neandertals everywhere. I think her Parisian Joni Mitchell style, part hippie chic, part Parisian panache, further extended her public persona as Madame Neandertal.
Second only in popularity to her nonfiction Neanderthal—Une autre humanité was her novel Madame de Néandertal—journal intime, in which she imagines being inside the mind of a Neandertal matriarch as she records the day-to-day observations of her Middle Paleolithic life.
“How did her books pull you in?” I asked Christian’s friend.
“They’re thorough and engaging and put human flesh onto the bones,” he said. “They made me really think about Neandertals as human and a part of our shared humanity.”
A man at a neighboring table, an acquaintance of both Christian and the teacher, overheard our conversation. “Oh mon dieu, encore? There you go again, about Neandertals. Are you in love? Madame de Néandertal? Can you think of nothing else?”
The teacher blushed. I leapt to his defense. “It’s my fault. I asked him about them.”
“No, Madame, you cannot take the blame. I know him. He’s always talking about his beloved Neandertals.”
“That’s an exaggeration,” the teacher said, “but what would be wrong with that if I did?”
“How about you?” I asked the eavesdropper. “Why don’t you think more about them?”
“Baf. I’m too busy checking the rugby scores,” he said, puffing out his chest and acting the very manly man.
“Humph,” Christian’s friend replied, “compared to how Neandertals hunted, rugby is a game of sissies.”
The man’s chest deflated.
Voilà. Touché.
Marylène was doing something extra for the Neandertals, something João never could; she was acting as a woman advocate. Not only was she a successful woman scientist in a field infamous for its testosterone and male dominating behavior, but she was also putting a female face on Neandertals—who also have a rather testosterone-defined public persona. I bet when you think of them, you think of the males first, right? It’s a common bias.
Svante Pääbo, in his autobiography Neandertal Man (notice the title), wrote that when his team published their groundbreaking work on the first sequenced Neandertal genome in 2010, he received a lot of positive emails from the public saying they knew they were part Neandertal and his work confirmed it. Curious, he went back and counted how many of the writers were men and how many women and found that out of forty-seven such emails, forty-six had been men. Another twelve that came from women were claiming that their husbands were Neandertal, not themselves. He worried, correctly, that the negative image of Neandertals was persisting into the new era, this one celebrating burly men but not burly women.
I found it both disturbing and fascinating that the public was still fixated on the physical appearance of not only our kin but ourselves, rather than the deeper implications of our wider shared genetic wealth that allowed us to adapt better to new circumstances. While all of this fell outside the realm of science and was fully a part of the public and human hunger for storytelling, having a woman in science speak for Neandertals in a positive light has helped close this gap.
I realized too that I had been egregiously excluding Madame La Ferrassie, and needed to bring her into the fold. From there on, not only would Monsieur La Ferrassie be looking over my shoulder, aiding and abetting, but so would she, adding more interesting perspective and dialog to the effort.
I MET DIDIER for another trek into the wild prehistoric past of the region and Christian joined us. We went this time into the Corrèze, not too far from La Chapelle-aux-Saints. As we climbed into a cave near a farmstead that Didier knew about, one that might have been occupied in prehistory, I asked him what he thought about the idea of a cemetery at La Ferrassie. I liked his insights: he had the expansive skill of listening to everyone and reading all the literature and staying on top of the most current evidence. He also tended to keep his ideas to himself unless asked.
“I don’t think La Ferrassie was a cemetery,” he said softly. “That many bodies, especially spread out by so much time, do not make a cemetery. It speaks more about a highly frequented place where people died and were set aside or just simply died right there.”
Further afield, Kebara in Israel has evidence for around twenty-three individuals having been left or having died there. Only one of the skeletons was nearly complete and well preserved. Another is partially complete and in more fragments, and the remaining twenty-one individuals are only small fragments and most of their skeletons are long gone. It comes across as if there were a lot of visits, activities, and deposits over different times and by different people. It, as at La Ferrassie, seemed to be more telling about the life of nomadic foragers than any significant statement about Neandertals or us. I thought also about La Chapelle and its one whole skeleton and thirteen fragments of three others found in the Lilliputian cave. This all made me think of what Dennis had told me recently when we talked about the issues of Paleolithic burial.
“While the vast majority of modern cultures, including simple hunter-gatherers, do have some ritual behavior associated with the treatment of their dead, there are a rare few who did not. There are examples of recent/historic hunter-gatherers who did (at least on occasion) simply abandon the bodies of their dead when they moved on to a new site. We would obviously not accuse these people of being cognitively inferior to other modern humans or incapable of ‘modern behavior.’”
“What about the idea of a cemetery, such as it is attached to La Ferrassie or Shanidar?” I asked.
“The cemetery concept—a special place where an ethnic group/culture would regularly transport the remains of their dead to—is not in keeping with the behavior of simple forager societies,” he said, “who do not view the landscape in the way that more complex hunter-gatherers and food producers do. True cemeteries really only appear with the development of sedentism when people begin to live (and die) in one location.
“There certainly are examples of cemeteries among hunter-gatherers, but almost all undoubted examples of these appear relatively late and their development is likely associated with higher demographic densities that limit free movement by any one group across the landscape.”
I also caught up with Alain to ask him about the whole burial thing.
“I prefer calling it ‘treatment of the dead,’” he said, “‘not burial.’ It’s a Judeo-Christian idea to call things ‘burial’ as well as ‘cannibalism.’ Not all cut marks mean eating, and not all eating means survival or symbolic cannibalism, either.” He revealed the absurdity to our easy way of force-fitting the past into more recent cognitive categories. He next elaborated on the vast diversity across different cultures regarding human mortuary practices.
“The possibilities are infinite. All the more reason not to interpret how people handled their dead without solid data. I prefer the deductive approach, where I observe and observe and build a foundation to put things together when I see patterns. The patterns also need to repeat, to show themselves as real patterns. But this takes time and a lot of work. But,” he added, “the terrible thing today is that to get money and positions, people have to publish very quickly and too soon.” This was especially the case for junior scholars who were just starting their careers and navigating such a contentious field. There’s a lot to balance, all of it precarious.
WHILE PALEOANTHROPOLOGISTS SPEND a lot of time with the dead, their bones and dropped stones, Elisabeth Daynès, a celebrated reconstruction artist, does the reverse and brings them back to life.
Applying knowledge from anatomy and physiology, she closely studies every mark left on the bones, for muscle attachments and how strong they were, and then works with a complex calculation of facial and body proportions for muscle, fat, and skin, and layers these onto casts of the skeletons. She folds in findings from genetics to come upon the most likely phenotypic expression of skin, hair, and even eye color. She has refleshed several of our lineage Homo as well as a few Australopithecines, and these people wander about from exhibit to exhibit across museums around the world. In the Les Eyzies museum and the nearby prehistory didactic and conference center, the Pôle International de la Préhistoire, reside several of Daynès’s creations, including two favorites, La Ferrassie 1 and the child from Roc de Marsal.
One day, after making a run with Susan to store collections in Campagne, a château and grounds donated to the government, which in turn donated it to archaeology for ample and lush storage facilities, I suggested we stop briefly in Les Eyzies to pay homage to the ancestors. A zooarchaeology graduate student with Teresa Steele, Susan was excited to see something whole after working with thousands and thousands of fragments of bones. Exuberant and comfortable with expressing herself, she is also an adamant scientist, dedicated to keeping all speculation and sentimentality out of the research effort, an apple not far from Harold’s tree.
So it hit her hard when she turned the corner and saw one of Daynès’s creations staring back at her through his soulful dark brown eyes. She was struck still and silent as he reached toward her, holding a rabbit he had just hunted, his other hand holding his spear like a walking staff. His long brown hair and warmly wrapped hides added to a sense of comfortable familiarity. It took a few long moments before Susan pried her moistened eyes away and could speak. “I didn’t expect that,” she said. “This is why we do what we do. I just wanted to stay there and ask him about his life and who he was.”
When a grown man in furs holding a dead rabbit can elicit this level of emotion from a staunch scientist, imagine what a three-year-old infant with his soft tender skin, wrapped in a deer hide, can do to the heart. He is the refleshed Roc de Marsal child and in the museum, when he is not on tour, he sits on the ground watching and listening to La Ferrassie 1 (my Monsieur) in avid conversation, teaching him something key about the life around them. Once the visitor gets caught up in the space unfolding between them, the glance, the movement of lips, the gesture of the hand, the glass case in which they sit dissolves.
Emotions connect us. They have from the beginning in a very primate way through our common ancestor with our closest living relations, chimpanzees and bonobos. Emotions underpin things before symbols and language ever do. Emotions are not symbolic, even though people mix them up with symbolic ideas in such highly charged contexts as death and burial. Emotions do not represent anything other than exactly what they are. I recalled my visit to Atapuerca and the young child and her mother standing next to the re-creation of the Neandertal burial.
“¿Qué pasa aquí, mamá?”
“A friend is sad,” her mother had answered, “because his friend is dead and is honoring him and showing his tristeza with the flowers.”
That was it. The mother didn’t say anything more, nothing about assuring a peaceful journey to the other world, nothing about meeting god, nothing about preparing for an afterlife. It was about showing strong emotions of grief and loss, the one solid thing we can say, from chimps to us, about death and burial.
WE HAD FOUND no new skeletons at La Ferrassie but the pattern of some places as a deposit for the dead as a part of living camps made it seem possible there were more. Maybe. I listened in as Alain, Harold, Paul, Dennis, Shannon, and Vera pondered the site and its strata and their data so far and worked out the original orientation of the seven skeletons—an effort that led to realizing these were at least two deposits made at least 10,000 years apart.
As they spoke, that back wall taunted me. I wondered if it taunted them too, knowing future generations of archaeologists would have a go, but that for them, they had gone as far as was feasible for the current research proposal. Like Pech IV, the tail and the hind legs were before us but the rest of the salami, the whole enchilada, the beef, the bulk of the elephant could still very well be in there. Holy coprolite.
I pondered too, again, about the molar that Isabelle, Asier, and Antoine had found, pointing to a possible third adult left at La Ferrassie. I pondered again all the roof fall beyond the child’s final resting place. I considered beyond it that the whole hill still remained a mystery and that the three excavations from 1905 to 2014 were still only a beginning of sorts. I wondered again what the story had been here, even though we’re not really supposed to tell stories. I wanted a sign, a hint at least, about the direction of things.
As I looked around, I saw tout les deux, Madame and Monsieur La Ferrassie, watching with me. It was time to see them in person, to pay a proper visit to their fossils. It was time to head to Paris. Maybe there, a piece of the mystery, a hint, a message, was waiting to direct the story to its most likely direction.
Allons-y, I said, and we made our journey north.