
·E87
The Shanidar Cave Neanderthals
Episode Transcript
Meredith Johnson: This is Origin Stories, the Leakey Foundation podcast.
I'm Meredith Johnson.
In this episode, we're exploring a one of a kind fossil site that changed our understanding of Neanderthals, their way of life, and even how they treated their dead.
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Thank you so much.
Now here's our story of one of the most important Neanderthal sites in the world.
In the mountain foothills of Kurdistan in northern Iraq, there's a limestone cave that has sheltered people for tens of thousands of years.
It's called Shanidar Cave.
A site where in the mid 1950s archeologist Ralph Solecki uncovered the remains of 10 Neanderthals.
These skeletons told a surprising story of the Neanderthals who lived there, cared for each other and possibly buried their dead.
The discoveries at Shannon, a cave challenged fundamental ideas of who Neanderthals were and what separates our species from theirs.
And ever since anyone studying archeology or human evolution has learned about Ralph Solecki and the Shannon AR Neanderthals.
Graeme Barker: Ralph Solecki was an extraordinary, tough man.
He stood on the landmine in the second World War and amazing.
He didn't lose his foot.
He always had a limp afterwards.
He was very, very tough.
Meredith Johnson: That's archeologist Graeme Barker.
He's a Leakey Foundation grantee and Disney professor of Archeology emeritus at the University of Cambridge in England.
Ralph Solecki first came to Iraq as a grad student after the war.
He was searching for a site where he could hopefully find evidence of ancient human life.
Over a deep stretch of time.
Locals told him about Shanidar a cave in the mountains to the north up near the Turkish and Iranian borders.
Graeme Barker: When, when Ralph Solecki saw the cave, people were using the cave.
There were shepherds living in it, and they were, they would come there in the winter months from the high mountains.
Meredith Johnson: The cave is very big, like an aircraft hanger in the side of the mountain.
Graeme Barker: It was a light, airy cave facing south.
Wonderful visibility, fantastic, wonderful views down to the main valley of the, the greater Zab river that flows out onto the Mesopotamian Plains.
And he could see from the the geology what looked like the likelihood of a deep sequence of soil sediment.
Meredith Johnson: It was exactly what Solecki was looking for.
With an agreement between the Iraqi government and the Smithsonian, where Solecki was an associate curator.
He started work at Shanidar doing five field expeditions between 1951 and 1960.
Graeme Barker: He laid out a trench, basically straight down the middle of the cave, and there are pictures from his first excavations when as the trench started to go down of people in the houses peering out, looking down into his excavation.
Meredith Johnson: Solecki and the local Kurdish men he worked with continued to excavate their trench until it went down 14 meters through layers of time.
It was archeology on a grand scale.
They found stone tools, animal bones, and signs of ancient hearth fires, and then they started to find neanderthal bones.
A lot of them.
In 1953, Ralph Solecki's team found the first Shannon d Neanderthal, a baby.
Eventually, they uncovered the crushed skeletal remains of 10 Neanderthal men, women, and children, Graeme Barker: and he thought that some of them had been killed accidental death by Rockfall.
And indeed there are massive rocks.
Some of them the size of well SUVs and even buses that have come down from the roof of the cave.
And we can see through the sequence.
Meredith Johnson: At Shanidar, they numbered the individuals they found Shanidar one, Shanidar two, Shanidar three with the dating methods available in the 1950s.
Solecki dated these Neanderthals to around 45,000 to 50,000 years, but it wasn't just the number of remains or the age of the remains that was remarkable.
Emma Pomeroy: A couple of the individuals he found had evidence of really significant injuries, um, and disability, and yet they survived at least some period of time.
Meredith Johnson: This is Emma Pomeroy.
She's a paleoanthropologist and a human bone specialist at the University of Cambridge.
She works with Graeme Barker and she's closely studied Ralph Solecki's work and the Shanidar Neanderthals.
Emma Pomeroy: For example, Shanidar one, he'd had a major injury to his head, which had probably made him blind in one eye.
He was also paralyzed down one arm and had probably lost that arm just above the elbow.
So he'd lost a lot of that, that right arm, and couldn't use what he did have still, uh, he had arthritis.
He had an infection in one of his collarbone, and yet he'd survived to a pretty good age for Neanderthal, and the evidence indicates that he'd suffered some of these major injuries as a, a young adult, Meredith Johnson: Shanidar one would've had a lot of trouble getting around, let alone hunting, foraging, and fending for himself.
Yet scientists estimate he lived to be between 35 to 45 years old, Emma Pomeroy: and so this was argued to, so actually there must have been some kind of compassion and care and support from fellow group members for him to have lived the kind of life he did.
Meredith Johnson: Another individual, Shanidar three also showed signs of having healed from some pretty serious wounds.
Emma Pomeroy: He was found having had a puncture wound in his rib cage from some kind of stone tool, essentially from some kind of projectile, and that had partly healed, so he'd at least survived a few months.
Meredith Johnson: Shanidar three was between 40 and 50 when he died.
Old for a Neanderthal.
His teeth were worn down almost to the roots.
And the severity of she Arthur Three's wounds suggested he would've needed some help from other Neanderthals to stay alive.
Emma Pomeroy: And that really challenged this idea that Neanderthals were incapable of compassion and caring for one another because the evidence suggested that actually they were Meredith Johnson: Ralph Solecki and his team's discoveries.
At Shanidar Cave didn't only change what we thought about how Neanderthals treated the living.
Emma Pomeroy: The other big thing at Shanidar Cave was the evidence for Neanderthal burial and the treatment of the dead.
And this has been a particularly controversial area or or focused area of discussion about Neanderthals and what their abilities were, how they thought, how they related to one another, because.
If we're finding evidence that they are caring for their dead, again, it shows that idea of compassion, that ability to, to mourn, to perhaps empathize.
So perhaps most famous at Shadow Cave was the individual number, Shanidar Four, which has also been known as the flower burial.
Meredith Johnson: Shanidar four was somewhere between 30 and 45 years old when he died.
He was found laying on his left side, all crouched up in a fetal position when Ralph Solecki and his team found Shanidar four in 1960, they could see there were other bones packed in around the fragile skeleton.
So they cut in through the trench and removed the whole block around him, soil, skeleton, and all up out of the ground to study in detail in a lab.
They protected the block by encasing it in wood and plaster.
Graeme Barker: And it took five or six guys to get it up the ladder and get it out.
The extraordinary pictures of how they did this.
So they got this, this body in its earth, and they got it down the mountain and onto the roof of a car and drove it to Baghdad and, and jig, jig, jig, jig, jig to get there.
Meredith Johnson: That's Graeme Barker again.
Graeme Barker: They worked out that there was number four.
And there were a whole set of bones that, that they identified as another Neanderthal, which they called number six, and there were bones left over, which didn't fit either, which they called number eight.
Meredith Johnson: The team also took samples of the sediments throughout the cave and from around the bodies, which was very forward thinking at the time, and they found something quite unexpected from the sediment in the block around Shanidar four.
Emma Pomeroy: The pollen specialist that Solecki was working with Arlette Leroi-Gourhan, she found clusters of pollen in those samples.
She had lots of samples elsewhere in the cave, but she wasn't finding these clusters.
And because the pollen was in these little clusters, it suggested that actually whole flowers had been there.
And she and, and Ralph Solecki argued that.
The only reason you'd have whole flowers there right under the body was that the body being placed on a bed of flowers.
And of course that's something that's really a behavior that we can relate to right in, in our kind of modern western ways of, of treating the dead.
We often put flowers as, um, ways of memorializing people as part of the funerary process.
Solecki was able to argue, actually, you know what?
They weren't so different from us.
There's evidence here of the mourning and caring for their dead.
Meredith Johnson: This discovery captured the public imagination and sparked debate that bloomed for over half a century, did Neanderthals bury their dead?
What did it mean?
Did they really pick flowers and use them in funeral practices?
If not, how did the flowers get there?
Emma Pomeroy: It was very controversial.
His interpretation, other people later said, oh, well, it's down to borrowing rodents, dragging these flowers in.
It's contamination from the workmen.
Because Solecki himself says that they, some of 'em like to tuck flowers into their belts while they're working.
So it, not everyone has accepted it, but it has been an important part of this whole process of rethinking neers holes.
And I think it becomes.
Hard to imagine that they can have been so vastly different from us in, in their behavior in, um, the things they were capable of.
Graeme Barker: People say, did Neanderthals do this or that?
Well, Neanderthals were around from 400,000 years ago at least.
Until 40,000 years ago, and they're around from the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains in Russia and from northern England and Germany down to Shanidar, you know, over this vast area and this vast timescale.
They must have done many in varied things.
Shanidar started the process, which has gone on ever since of us.
Archeologists having to grapple with the fact that Neanderthals are much more complicated than were thought.
Meredith Johnson: At the end of the 1960 field season.
Ralph Solecki assumed he'd just keep exploring Shanidar and learning about the many and varied things Neanderthals did.
The site had already yielded so much it could keep him busy for the rest of his career.
Graeme Barker: He never backfilled it the way he intended because, you know, the end of an excavation, you're meant to fill up the trench to protect the archaeology.
And part of the trench was backfilled the deepest part, but much of the upper trench.
He, he couldn't backfill, uh, because he was intended to go back.
Meredith Johnson: But the decades after 1960 were times of political upheaval, war and trauma in Iraq and Kurdistan.
The Kurdish people were targets of violence and genocide.
It was not a time for archaeology.
Even though Ralph Solecki lived to be 101, he never could go back.
And for the next 50 plus years, Shanidar Cave was closed off to science.
By around 2010, things became stable enough for people in Kurdistan to turn attention to its places of deep cultural and world heritage.
Like Shanidar Graeme Barker: indeed Out of the blue.
I got this invitation from the representative of the Kurdistan Regional government.
Would I be interested to re dig Shanidar Cave, which was an extraordinary offer and I, I got hold of Ralph Solecki and, and emailed him and broadly asked for his blessing, you know, to go back to the site.
And he wrote an incredibly encouraging email that this is 2011.
He was enthusiastic, and at the end of it, he said, and by the way, the flowers at Shanidar in spring are absolutely beautiful.
Meredith Johnson: So decades after Solecki Graeme Barker began a new Shanidar cave project, it was a collaboration between the directorates of Antiquities of Kurdistan and Soren Province and the University of Cambridge.
Graeme Barker: I went out in that year with the key colleagues.
Uh, Chris Hunt and Tim Reynolds who were going to be the co-investigators.
We met all the various archeologists, the antiquity service, the ministers, and so on and so forth.
And we then went back in 2014 with the money, a grant and the permit.
We did survey work around the cave and then we went out again in the summer and that's when ISIS attacked, so we had to come out.
So we didn't actually start excavating till 2015.
Unknown: Okay guys, this is the excavation area that we have now.
This is trench W.
Um, you've got a section pin there, which goes to that one in sec in the shoring, and the section on this side needs to be updated as you go down through the layers.
It's very Paul Benetti.
Meredith Johnson: back in the cave.
They expected they'd see the trench.
So lucky had left uncovered, but no, in the decades since his last field season, people had been using the cave, living in it, and sheltering hundreds of goats and cows there.
And of course, a nice big trench in the center is perfect for tossing your ash and dung and rubbish.
Graeme Barker: We've had to clear out that post 1960s rubbish and sometimes pre 1960s backfill to expose the walls of his trench and then doing to the walls of his trench what he couldn't do in terms of the techniques available.
The old excavation has informed the new and the new has informed the old, and there's a conversation going on between that past and present work.
Meredith Johnson: Graeme and his collaborators brought new methods and new technology to help answer lingering questions about the Shanidar Neanderthals and the controversial flower burial, but they also brought their own questions about the relationship between people and the landscape around Shanidar.
And about how and why Neanderthals disappeared.
Emma Pomeroy: The point of the project was never to find new Neanderthal remains.
So when some did come up, I was asked if I would join the team just to lead on that, um, aspect, you know, the excavation, the conservation, the study, um, and the publication of of those remains.
Meredith Johnson: Graeme and his team had found little pieces of Shanidar five from Solecki's original dig.
And they needed someone with Emma Pomeroy's expertise in bones.
So she came to Shanidar in the spring of 2016.
Emma Pomeroy: I thought, wow, this is an amazing opportunity to go see a really iconic site.
And, and of course we ended up finding an awful lot more than, um, we anticipated.
But yeah, no idea it would turn into what it has.
Meredith Johnson: Not long after Emma joined the team, she made.
What would become the biggest discovery of the new Shanidar project so far Emma Pomeroy: it just so happened that on that, uh, one particular day, you know, I'd been down at, at the dick house helping with the sorting, you know, processing basically all the sediment samples, getting all the little bits of charcoal and the little mammal bones, all that kind of thing.
And I've been up on site just to see how things were progressing.
The directors were chatting about other things, so I was just helping to dry sieve some of the backfill.
And as I was doing that, um, a few hand bones came out from what I was sitting.
So of course I said, you know, okay, we've gotta try and figure out where these are coming from.
Stop.
Meredith Johnson: Everyone stopped.
Of course.
And at that point, it wasn't clear where the bones had come from.
I.
Emma Pomeroy: These were probably a few remains that have been disturbed from the section wall, so the wall of the excavation.
So we then very carefully started sort of cleaning back those excavation walls, trying to figure out where these bones might have come from, and right towards the end of that field season, we were able to identify the outline of a rib cage, possibly with a second bit at the top in the section wall, and then on.
Over on the right side as we were facing, it was a concentration of hand bones with a few finger bones that seemed to be in articulation.
So still in their anatomical positions, Meredith Johnson: it looked like they'd found another individual because it was the end of the field season.
They didn't have time to start removing their remains right away, so they covered up the bones to protect them until they returned the following year, Emma Pomeroy: and that's where we left it, which is a kind of a real cliffhanger, I guess, you know, knowing those remains were there, but not being able to excavate them at the time Meredith Johnson: they wanted to be able to excavate from above because that would allow them to preserve the context and better understand how these bones came to be there and what had happened to them in all the years they'd been in the ground.
The next field season, they had to remove a big boulder that was right in the way.
So it wasn't until 2018 that they started to excavate the individual who'd become known as Shanidar Zed Emma Pomeroy: as I was excavating, the first thing that really came into view was the right side, um, of the eye socket.
And up until that point, you know, we'd known we had some, some ribs, perhaps a bit of a spine, uh, a hand.
Or some fingers, but we hadn't known about the skull and that the skull was there.
So that was very exciting.
So I remember uncovering that and saying, wow, you know, not, there seems to be at least part of a skull here.
But not only that, from the shape of the bones, we can see that this isn't modern human.
You know, it's not like us Neanderthals have much heavier brow ridges above their eyes, and you could see that that's what we had.
Meredith Johnson: They worked through the 2018 and 2019 field seasons to fully recover Shanidar Zed they had found the upper body of an individual cut right through at the waist.
Zed was the first articulated Neanderthal skeleton found in the 21st century.
A massively important discovery anywhere.
But maybe even more so because it happened at such an iconic site.
Emma Pomeroy: Any find of human remains is important, but particularly to know that these are Neanderthal remains from Shanidar Cave, very exciting and a big sense of responsibility.
Um, they were also very difficult to excavate, so the bones aren't fossils.
They, you know, the, the bone has not been replaced by mineral.
They're still bone, but very soft.
So sometimes even with a, a light brush, the bone falls apart Meredith Johnson: to stabilize the delicate bones.
They used a consolidate, a kind of inert glue that you can paint onto bones.
It strengthens them from the inside out and bonds the bones to the surrounding sediment to make a kind of a block of bone sediment and glue.
Later the glue can be dissolved, returning everything to its original state.
Emma Pomeroy: So then the question is, well, how do we, what's the best thing to do with that?
Do we take out a whole block?
Do we take out the whole skeleton at once?
You can then excavate everything in a much more controlled environment in a lab.
But there's also a risk, and we were particularly aware of that risk because actually the reason Shanidar Zed is cut through at the waist is because.
The skeleton was right next to where the famous flower burial was found, Shanidar Four Meredith Johnson: back in 1960, Solecki's team had unknowingly cut right through Z when they removed the big block around Shanidar Four and when they worked on Shanidar four in the lab.
They also found partial remains of two more adults, Shanidar six and eight, and a baby Shanidar nine.
But because they hadn't known what they'd find in there, they didn't preserve the context that might help them understand why all these Neanderthal remains were clustered so tightly to together inside such a big roomy cave.
Emma Pomeroy: What I ended up doing was removing the remains in, um, smaller blocks so that we could have much more control over.
The other information and understanding the relationships between them.
Meredith Johnson: They took micro CT scans of all the blocks.
The scans were like a map to guide their work as they carefully extracted hundreds of delicate bone fragments.
The project's lead conservator worked for more than a year to painstakingly reconstruct Z's crushed and flattened skull, and the team got to work to figure out who ShanidarZ was.
And how she came to be in the cave.
Emma Pomeroy: I think we're still at the very beginning of what's gonna be quite a long research journey.
Um, but what we have been able to learn so far is that she was an adult and an older adult.
Her teeth are extremely worn down.
Some of the front teeth don't have any crown left, and she just had the little bits of the roots.
At the front, Meredith Johnson: the team used a variety of new techniques, like analyzing proteins in her teeth to determine that Zed was a female.
Zed was small and lightly built.
She would've stood around five feet tall.
There were signs of degeneration like arthritis in her spine, which like her worn teeth pointed to Zed being an older individual.
They estimated she was in her forties when she died.
And with modern dating tools, they found that Zed lived and died around 75,000 years ago, roughly the same time as many of the other Shanidar individuals, including Shanidar four, the famous flower burial.
And now Zed is giving researchers a second chance to solve the mystery of why these individuals were there and whether they were intentionally buried with flowers or not.
The sediments the team collected from beneath Zed give a tantalizing clue.
Emma Pomeroy: So what we could say for Shanidar Zed is that actually there was a, probably a shallow water channel where the body was originally.
So there's already a bit of a dip there.
But that dip had been intentionally made bigger.
To accommodate the body.
And you can see that because you know, if you imagine digging a little hole as you scoop out the soil or the sediment you push down on the sediment, that's just below what you're taking out.
And we can see that sort of compression of the sediments just under where the bones are.
Meredith Johnson: This was clear evidence that around 75,000 years ago, someone had on purpose dug outta space to place Z's body.
Not only that, but around Zed are four other Neanderthals buried in a cluster, but at different points in time.
Emma Pomeroy: So we've got multiple occasions where we can see remains coming to be in this one spot.
And that's really exciting because puts aside these interpretations of people saying, oh, well it was just a, a family group that died of exposure on a cold day all huddled together.
No, we can say they're coming back to this one spot.
Multiple times and they're coming back on separate occasions.
It does start to suggest that that's not just chance.
Graeme Barker: We think it's of the order of like a generation each time it looks like it.
It's not within days or weeks or months or even a few years, that these bodies are being placed there.
And it's clear also from the micro morphology, the sections that there was vegetation involved too.
So probably they covered the body in vegetation.
Meredith Johnson: So if Zed and the others were intentionally placed there at separate times like a family cemetery plot and there's evidence of vegetation, does this mean Solecki's flower burial hypothesis was right?
It's actually not so simple.
The team with Chris Hunt as the lead author published a study in 2023, reexamining the Pollen clumps that were the evidence for the Shanidar four flower burial interpretation.
What the new researchers found was that many of the pollen clusters underneath Shanidar four were from flowers that bloomed at different times.
They couldn't have been picked on one day.
So rather than Neanderthals placing these flowers below the body before burial, they say ground nesting bees were most likely responsible for the ancient clumps of pollen.
Graeme Barker: Although we've shown, yes, the flowers might have been taken in by bees.
There's just so much more that is just so extraordinary.
Emma Pomeroy: I think perhaps our focus on burial has been a bit misguided because if you look across human populations today, we don't all.
Burial dead.
We have different traditions, different cultural traditions that can be cremation.
Burial.
They're probably the ones we are most familiar with in the west.
But, you know, placing the body in water, um, sky burials where the body's left, exposed, all sorts of things, right?
And so burial per se is not special.
But what's quite unusual about what humans do is that however we treat the dead, it has some meaning.
So really that question needed to be broadened out to say, okay, are Neanderthals doing something that potentially has meaning with the body?
What we wanted to do was just gather the evidence.
Meredith Johnson: The team is still working at Shanidar and there's still much to learn about the Shanidar Neanderthals.
The increasing evidence they're finding is that these Neanderthals, were doing something intentional.
Emma Pomeroy: We have to be a bit careful about overinterpretation, but the more we find this kind of repetition, you know, what's the chance that in a relatively short period of time, you're gonna get five Neanderthals, perhaps on at least three separate occasions within this one tiny space.
When you've got this huge cave, it, it starts to suggest there's something else going on than just people happening to die in the cave because they, they've curl up there 'cause they're feeling sick or 'cause it's cold or whatever.
Meredith Johnson: At least three of the bodies are oriented in the same direction.
Their heads are towards the cave entrance to the east.
Their feet are towards the west.
And if you remember all the large boulders at Shanidar Z and the others are clustered behind a tall rock pillar that would've stood a couple meters above the surface, like a marker for the burial spot.
This all gives the team even more to consider as they work to interpret the evidence for how the Shanidar Neanderthals treated their dead.
Graeme Barker: I think why the, why Shanidar is just so important in these burials, if you like.
We're under a public scrutiny, a professional scientific scrutiny, and it's our job.
Just try to be as open and as clear about this.
We can see this, we can show, so we have got micro chronological evidence about plants there.
Emma has got hard scientific evidence of what bones, where they are, what state they're in, how they're placed.
We've just had some new information from some special imaging where it looks like the body juices, if you like.
A gathering in particular place.
In other words, it, it's another piece of solid evidence showing that they were placed there as bodies, not as skeletons.
And what that adds up to is, is more and more extraordinary.
It clearly was a special place.
It's clear that Neanderthals are passing on information down through generations.
This is where you go, this is what you do.
Meredith Johnson: Graeme and his colleagues say that like with the Kurdish herders who used the cave in modern times, Neanderthals were probably returning to live at Shanidar for a few weeks or months every year.
Graeme Barker: The campfires of these Neanderthals, they're immediately there.
I mean, they're, they're half a meter to two meters away from where these bodies are.
And the rubbish, the, the bits of stone, stone tools and the bits of animal bone, they're scattered in around the, so the bodies are being, there isn't a separation of life and death, but there, there's care and there's attention, and there's repeated memory.
Handed down about this is what you do and this is where you do it.
Now we can't get to the storytelling bit where they're all sitting around, you know, socializing.
But we're on the edge of that.
If we've got people coming back to the same site, they must have been storytelling.
They must have been passing information on from generation to generation and sitting around.
These campfires and we don't understand, but it just shows a lot of complicated things going on at that time.
In the heads of those Neanderthals, there's nothing like it anywhere else.
Meredith Johnson: Shanidar preserves a deep and wonderful record of Neanderthal and human cultural heritage.
Graeme Barker and Emma Pomeroy and their team hope that their ongoing work there will help make a case for Shanidar to be named a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a designation that would help preserve Shanidar for future generations.
Emma Pomeroy: It's not just about the archeology as well.
I mean, Shanidar Cave has been used.
Right up until very recently, and, and it's still used in different ways.
So there's us there escalating it, there's people coming to visit as tourists, you know, to, to understand a little bit more about Kurdish heritage.
And we hear stories from people who come and visit or who live locally about, you know, how they were.
Part of those herding groups, and we've spoken to someone who lived in the cave when he was a young boy, and people have said, oh, I was born in the cave.
And we know people sheltered above the cave when, uh, Saddam Hussein was trying to exterminate the Kurds.
There's this amazing history that stretches at least back 75,000 years right through to, to today, and all of that.
All of that package is so culturally important and deserves to be widely recognized.
Meredith Johnson: Thank you to Graeme Barker and Emma Pomeroy for sharing their work.
Check your show notes to learn more about Shanidar and the new Leakey foundation supported excavations by Graeme and his team Origin Stories is a project of the Leakey Foundation, a donor supported nonprofit dedicated to funding human origins research and sharing discoveries.
This episode is generously sponsored by Dub and Ginny Crook.
They are longtime Leakey Foundation Fellows and Origin Stories sponsors.
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This episode was produced and written by Ray Pang and me Meredith Johnson Sound Designed by Ray Pang.
Our editor is Audrey Quinn.
Michael Gallagher helped record the interviews at Cambridge.
Our theme music is by Henry Nagel with additional music by Blue dot Sessions and Lee Roservere.
Thanks for listening.