Sophisticated Neanderthal culture?

For a long time they were considered uncultured Clubswinger. Recent findings provide the Neanderthals in a new light represents a study confirms that they buried their dead relatives. But why? The few findings leave room for speculation.

On 3 August 1908 made ??the three brothers Amedée , Jean and Paul Bouyssonie in southwest France a sensational find : In a cave near La Chapelle -aux -Saints , in the Limousin region , they discovered bones of a Neanderthal . The 50,000 year-old skeleton was nearly intact. The discovery was a scientific sensation . From the - partially deformed - bones referred to in the professional world LCS1 husband researchers recruited far-reaching conclusions about the life of Neanderthals .

The French paleontologist Marcellin Boule coined the idea of a more ape-like beings who have little in common with modern humans . " This was the basis for a long time the image of Neanderthals as keulenschwingendem caveman ," says Prof. Thorsten Uthmeier of the University of Erlangen .

Pit created deliberately

But Ironically, this discovery also provided the first clear evidence that our extinct about 34,000 years ago probably dead relatives buried - long before modern humans arrived in Europe about 44,000 years ago. "Above all, the pit and the good condition of the skeleton seemed to indicate that it was a grave ," says Professor Jean -Jacques Hublin from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Just a quick burial , the assumption have kept the dead from scavenging animals.


In the following years, researchers discovered another possible graves of Neanderthals. Some experts are now talking of a total of 40 well-documented burials , Hublin rated about a dozen finds convincing. They are located mainly in France and the Middle East, about Kebara in Israel or Shanidar in northern Iraq. "At some point you burials took for granted ," says Hublin . " But because there was criticism. "

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