The Cave of Shanidar

In spite of quite a bit of evidence to the contrary, I like to think of the world as kind, of humanity as decent if flawed, my misinterpretation of the just-world fallacy. I like to think that we humans try to do the right thing.

Between 1957 and 1961, at a burial site inside a cave called Shanidar in northern Iraq, archaeologists discovered the fossilized remains of eight adult and two infant Neanderthals, dating from around sixty-five thousand to thirty-five thousand years ago. Found with them were hundreds of stone tools, as well as bones of wild goats and tortoises. Nine of the ten remains were lost, along with fifteen thousand cultural artifacts, during that mess of shock and awe in 2003, when US forces invaded the country, destroyed the infrastructure, and chose to protect the oil ministry building but not the National Museum of Iraq.

The most famous of the ten Neanderthals was the one who was discovered first, called Shanidar 1 but known as Nandy among his excavators. He was remarkably old for a Neanderthal, somewhere between forty and fifty, yet he displayed severe trauma-related deformities. He had a withered right arm, no hand or forearm, and a deformed right leg. He was also apparently deaf, as his ear canals were blocked by exostoses. His day-to-day life must have been excruciatingly painful, yet he was seemingly cared for by the community.

Among the numerous discoveries at the burial site were clumps of pollen representing a large variety of flowers, from grape hyacinth to yarrow. A debate still rages among archaeologists about whether these flowers were part of Neanderthal burial rites or were introduced to the site by jirds, a variety of rodent.

I prefer to think that my ancestors and yours would care for the weakest among them and then bury him with garlands of flowers. Go, dear one, we send you away with yellow cockspur and daisies, cornflowers and hyacinths.

Shanidar 3 does not have a nickname that I know of. He is in the United States at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. An immigrant! He, too, was between forty and fifty years old and was found in the same grave as Nandy. He had a wound to the left ninth rib, a severe cut deep enough to have collapsed his lung. Shanidar 3 is the oldest known individual who was presumably murdered.

My ancestors and yours were also killers.