Why did Neanderthals and humans bury their dead? Scientists have a new theory.
The two species began burying their dead at roughly the same time and place. Now some archaeologists think competition may have played a role in burials.
During the Stone Age, largely nomadic humans didn’t have many ways to mark the limits of their territory—at least in life. But a new analysis of ancient burials in part of the Middle East called the Levant suggests that the dead may have been used as Paleolithic property deeds, separating Neanderthals from Homo sapiens.
“The innovation of burial actually began in the Levant,” says Omry Barzilai, an archaeologist at the University of Haifa in Israel.
Barzilai and his colleague, Ella Been, a physical therapist and paleoanthropologist at Tel Aviv University, compared the burials of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens across the Levant—an area that includes most of modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian territories. Their results, recently published in L’Anthropologie, suggest that these two ancient hominins shared common practices in dealing with their dead.
“We found there are some similarities and some very big differences,” Been says.
What constitutes a burial?
When examining ancient hominin burials, researchers always consider whether the remains of early humans and their relatives were buried on purpose or by some natural process. Anthropologists have argued over whether Neanderthals buried their dead on purpose since a team found clumps of ancient pollen around remains at Shanidar Cave in Iraq in the 1950s and 60s—believed by some to represent a “flower burial.”
Barzilai and Been had previously worked together on a Neanderthal site they unearthed in ‘Ein Qashish in northern Israel dating to about 70,000 years ago—the first Neanderthal burial discovered on an open plain rather than in a cave. In subsequent years, the researchers began to wonder whether it was an intentional burial, and if so, how it compared to other Neanderthal and human burials.
The species overlapped in this part of the world from roughly 120,000 years ago to 50,000 years ago, and during that period, both began to bury their dead. After combing through the literature, the team found five Neanderthal burial sites and two Homo sapiens burial sites in the region from this period.
How do Homo sapiens and Neanderthal burials compare?
The Neanderthals almost entirely buried their dead inside caves, whereas Homo sapiens in this period buried their dead in rock shelters or terraces in front of caves. Both buried women, men, and children, but archaeologists have only unearthed evidence of baby-burying by Neanderthals.
Homo sapiens were only buried lying on their backs or sides in a fetal-like position with the knees drawn up to the chest. While some Neanderthals were buried in this position as well, their positions varied more than those of Homo sapiens.
Both species put goods such as ungulate horns or antlers, or animal jawbones within the graves. But Neanderthals put a kind of flat, modified limestone near the skull that may have served as a pillow, and placed items like tortoise shell, and flint artifacts in the graves.
Archaeologists have found potentially symbolic things near Homo sapiens burials, like red ochre paint, which may have decorated bodies or objects and symbolized status, identify or a belief system. They also found seashell beads brought from far away—perhaps personal adornments that also signified kinship, identity, age or social connections of those wearing them.
(What were Neanderthals really like—and why did they go extinct?)
Gravestones or territorial markers?
Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were both semi-nomadic at the time, but they still likely came back to the same caves seasonally. Because caves were valuable shelters, burying their dead in or near these geological features may have been something like staking a claim to an area or marking territory, as the hominins competed for resources and space. “A cave is an asset,” Barzilai says. “Where species are meeting and interacting, they are defining boundaries.”
If both species used burials as a form of marking, that could mean the two exchanged cultural practices, or at least shared an understanding of what the graves or markers meant.
“Many people have argued that burial periods in agricultural people have used burials to claim ownership on land,” says Graeme Barker, an archaeologist at Cambridge University who wasn’t involved in the study but worked on Shanidar Cave excavations. “It’s clearly a way of marking the landscape.”
The general idea that these burials may have marked territory is plausible, but Barker has some reservations about the explanation. “These things are never a silver bullet,” he says.
Who invented burial practices?
The oldest burials in the dataset from around 120,000 years ago represent the earliest possible burials from either hominin. Been and Barzilai also believe that these burials were the first of a tradition that later radiated out of the Levant into Africa and Europe, where most burials discovered so far are more recent. In Africa, the oldest known Homo sapiens burial, a child found at Panga ya Saidi in Kenya, dates back to 78,000 years ago, while most European burials date to 60,000 years ago or less.
“The innovation of burial actually began in the Levant,” Barzilai says.
The researchers argue that the practice of ceremonially burying the dead occurred after Homo sapiens moved north out of Africa and first began to interact with Neanderthals from Asia and Europe. Barzilai adds that once Neanderthals disappeared in the Levant around 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens burials disappear as well—as if they no longer had a need to set boundaries or territorial claims once their competition was gone.
However, most of our knowledge about archaic humans in Africa comes from very few sites, Barker cautions—there could be a lot more out there yet to be discovered. In 2023, for example, researchers suggested that an older human relative called Homo naledi may have used a South African cave as a graveyard around 100,000 years before most human and Neanderthal burials. But that find has drawn its own controversy.
“You have to be careful with making trends out of two or three dots on a continental map,” Barker says about the new study by Been and Barzilai, adding that the number of overlapping sites between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals is relatively few.
The circumstances of death could also skew the results. Most nomadic hominins in this period would likely have died out on the landscape, and only a few would have died in caves. “So, what we find are these tiny episodes,” Barker says.
While it’s tempting to think of knowledge as a kind of progression, it’s also possible that, given the vast time scales, these practices weren’t really continuous, says Barker: “Knowledge appears to have been acquired and lost, and acquired and lost.”
