EARLY MODERN HUMAN RELIGION AND BURIALS

RELIGION OF PREHISTORIC MODERN HUMANS

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All that we know about the religion of prehistoric man is surmised from: 1) cave paintings, engravings and sculptures; 2) archaeological excavations of graves and sacred sites; 3) analysis of the way the dead were handled; and 4) studies of traditional hunter-gatherer societies.

Traditional hunter-gatherer societies have a mystical attachment to the land and animals. Cooperation is an important virtue because it is vital foraging and hunting. Jean Clottes, a French art historian and archaeologist, who is regarded as the grand old man of cave art, told National Geographic, "Ice Age people probably believed that animal spirits lived in the rocks." The belief is similar to that of Aborigines.

Seventy-thousand- year-old skulls found in Placard cave near Charente and Dordogne Cave near the village of Les Eyzies in France and Castillo cave near Puente Viesgo Spain were made into drinking cups possibly for sacred rituals. Twenty-seven skulls from around the same period were found each in two caves in Nödlingen, Bavaria where from heads that had been cut off with a flint knife, dried, ceremoniously preserved in nest so that all the heads faced west. A 14,000 year-old half lion and half human head found in a French cave seems to suggest the worship of a supernatural being. [ World Religions edited by Geoffrey Parrinder, Facts on File Publications, New York]

The skull of a 160,000-year-old child found in Hero in 1997 was defleshed after death. Cut marks on the skull indicate the the skin, muscles and blood vessels were removed and lines were scraped on the skull, probably with an obsidian tool. The cut marks indicate that the bone was still fresh when it was done. This and the careful way it was done suggests that there was something more going on than mere cannibalism. The surface of the skull has a polished surface, which suggests repeated handling. Perhaps it was a greatly treasured relic. It was found with no other bones, possibly because it was separated from the body and buried in some kind of special funeral rite.

Neanderthal and early Modern humans were more spiritually and intellectually sophisticated than the popular image of them suggests. The "Bear Cult" of central Europe and the intriguing cave art of southwestern Europe provide evidence, but not proof, of a belief in life after death. However, the paintings scattered around the world, especially those of western Europe, seem to reveal that ancient man was concerned with both beauty and communication not necessarily religion and death. [Source: Internet Archive, from UNT]

Websites and Resources on Neanderthals: Wikipedia: Neanderthals Wikipedia ; Neanderthals Study Guide thoughtco.com ; Neandertals on Trial, from PBS pbs.org/wgbh/nova; The Neanderthal Museum neanderthal.de/en/ ; The Neanderthal Flute, by Bob Fink greenwych.ca. Websites and Resources on Prehistoric Art: Chauvet Cave Paintings archeologie.culture.fr/chauvet ; Cave of Lascaux archeologie.culture.fr/lascaux/en; Trust for African Rock Art (TARA) africanrockart.org; Bradshaw Foundation bradshawfoundation.com; Australian and Asian Palaeoanthropology, by Peter Brown peterbrown-palaeoanthropology.net

Early Modern Human Burial Practices

Neanderthal burial

A man was buried tens of thousands of years ago in Israel with an antler placed in his hand, perhaps an offering to be taken to the after life. A 20-year-old woman found in Santa Maria di Agnano cave near Maria di Agnano, Italy was buried 24,000 year ago with hundreds perforated shells in a red ocher paste covered her head. Beneath her right were the bones of a tiny fetus and lying behind her back was a 35-year-old male with similar perforated shells as well as a deer tooth necklace. Scientists are not sure how they died and

A thumb tip was found ritually buried at a 30,000-year-old site in Poland. A 7,000-year-old funerary mask that resembles a a hockey goalie mask was found in the Middle East. It was carved from white stone.

At Le Moustier in the Dordogne regaion of France the skeleton of a boy was found with his forearm under his head, a fine oval ax in his left hand and a pillow of flint chips under his head. Nearby were the burnt bones of a prehistoric ox which suggests a funeral feat was held. [ World Religions edited by Geoffrey Parrinder, Facts on File Publications, New York]

In Candide Italy the bones of 10,000-year-old stone age man, who had been eaten by a bear, was discovered. The body had been smeared with ocher and buried. In a cave in Monte Circeo Italy a skull, whose brains had been drained out, was found in a position that suggested veneration. Near Moscow, two boys laid to rest in a mound were buried with 8,000 valuable ivory beads, mammoth-ivory spears and assorted rings and anklets.

World's Oldest Human Burial, 78,000 Years Ago — for Child in Kenya

In May 2021, scientists announced the discovery of a child’s burial In a cave near the Kenyan coast. Dating to 78,000 years ago it was described as the oldest known human burial site. The head of archeology for Kenya's museums, Dr Emmanuel Ndiema told Reuters the discovery sheds new light on the emotional life of early Home Sapiens. “"For a very long time we have only been looking at the technology, the subsistence, the environment. But we are beginning to understand now these people having some emotional attachments to the dead, that they can be able to intentionally bury them." [Source: Reuters, May 13, 2021]

Reuters reported: “Nicknamed Mtoto, or "child" in Swahili, the body had been placed in a shallow grave. The head was resting on a pillow, scientists say, and the upper part of the body was carefully wrapped in a shroud. "The age of the child is 2-3 years. That is what we approximate based on the dental formula, and also the sediment itself has bee dated to 78,000 years and that actually falls within the time frame of Homo Sapiens or anatomically modern human beings. So these are people just like you and me."

“Mtoto was part of a hunter gatherer culture, with remains of various antelope species and other prey found at the site. Also found were stone tools and stone points that could be used as part of a spear. Ndiema said the discovery also shows early Homo sapiens lived in different parts of what is now Kenya. That contradicts a long-standing narrative that suggested early humans only settled in the Great Rift Valley, further west from the coast.

Early Modern Human Twin and Child Burials

In 2021, Archaeology magazine reported: Using new DNA analysis and radiocarbon dating, researchers have determined that a pair of baby boys unearthed at the site of Krems-Wachtberg in northeastern Austria are the earliest known identical twins. The Upper Paleolithic remains were buried for about 31,000 years, until 2005, when archaeologists removed them from the site in a block for further study. The twins’ bodies were coated in red ochre, a common feature of burials in the area at the time, and placed under the shoulder blade of a mammoth, which helped preserve them. Maria Teschler-Nicola, an anthropologist with the Natural History Museum Vienna, and her colleagues determined that one of the twin boys likely died right after birth and was quickly buried under the mammoth bone. The other boy survived for about six weeks, at which time the grave appears to have been reopened so he could be buried along with his brother. It’s unclear how the twins died, but Teschler-Nicola speculates it might have been the result of nutritional deficiencies. [Source: Joshua Rapp Learn, Archaeology Magazine, May/June 2021

In 2018, Laura Geggel wrote in Live Science: About 34,000 years ago, a hunter-gatherer group buried two young boys who had physical conditions in elaborate graves. One boy had short and bowed thighbones, and the other was likely bedridden and had trouble eating, as his teeth showed no wear and tear. However, they still received riches galore - including more than 10,000 mammoth ivory beads, more than 20 armbands, about 300 pierced fox teeth and 16 ivory mammoth spears. These boys had specular treasures compared with the other people buried at the site in Sunghir, Russia. This suggests that the Paleolithic group had complex social behaviors, and treated people differently, likely both in death and in life. [Source: Laura Geggel, Live Science, February 14, 2018]

Researchers have known about Sunghir, an archaeological site on the northeast outskirts of Vladimir, Russia, for about 50 years. The site was excavated between 1957 and 1977. Like other burials from the Paleolithic, the bodies at Sunghir are covered with red ochre, mammoth ivory beads and pierced fox canines. They're also lying next to ivory spears, one of which has a disk on it. "The fact that they all have lots of beads probably suggests that they had clothing with lots of beads on it all the time," study co-lead researcher Erik Trinkaus, a professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, told Live Science. "Already at this time period, which is very early in the Upper Paleolithic, we already have a diversity and a complexity of human social behavior that is much more than is normally projected for hunters and gatherers at this time period. "And it's reflected in their mortuary behavior."

The 12-year-old boy didn't have much wear on his teeth, indicating that he likely ate soft foods that didn't require much grinding. He also had a skull with an unusual shape, the researchers said. The thighbones of the 10-year-old boy were short and bowed. The 10-year-old boy had ivory beads and ochre on the upper part of his hip bones, known as the ilia. Next to it is the thighbone of an adult that was placed in the 12-year-old boy's grave.

10,000 Year Old Burial of a One-Month-Old Child in Italy

In December 2021, in an article in Scientific Reports, researchers announced the discovery of 10,000-year-old burial of a one-month-old infant girl in the Liguria region of northwestern in Italy. Known as Neve the child’s remains were were found in the back of a cave adorned with 60 shell beads, four pendants and an eagle-owl talon. She represent the oldest documented burial of an infant female in European archaeology. [Source:Rachel Elbaum, NBC News, December 15, 2021]

Rachel Elbaum of NBC News wrote: “The discovery gives insight into the funeral practices of the Mesolithic era, also known as the middle period of the Stone Age, from which there are few recorded burials. And experts say that the richly decorated remains may also help illuminate how the period's hunter-gatherer society viewed its young and female members. “The burial of such a young female subject indicates first of all the importance that was given to young individuals and also to females within the Mesolithic hunter-gatherer groups,” Fabio Negrino, an associate professor of prehistoric archaeology at the University of Genoa, told NBC News. “The presence of perforated shells with traces of prolonged use means that these have been worn for a long time by the adults. These shells were perhaps sewn to her dress.”

The cave where Neve was found is known as Arma Veirana. Negrino described the cave as having the shape of a hut with a sloping roof, measuring around 130 feet deep, with a 33-foot-high entrance. “It is well recognizable even from a long distance,” Negrino said. “Now vegetation covers most of the entrance and the area in front of it, but during the Pleistocene and the Early Holocene it must have been very visible and represented an essential landmark for the groups of hunter-gatherers who ventured along Neva valley.”

“The excavation team was made of up of researchers from the University of Colorado and Washington University, as well as from universities in Italy, Germany and Canada. They discovered the burial site itself in 2017, and fully excavated the infant’s remains in July 2018. Neve's skeleton was heavily damaged and missing significant portions, including most of the mid-abdominal region, according to the journal article. The researchers used cutting edge technology to examine the remains and were able to date the infant’s teeth, showing that she died 40 to 50 days after she was born. It also showed that she experienced stress that briefly halted the growth of her teeth 47 days and 28 days before she was born.

"Python Cave" Reveals Oldest Human Ritual, Scientists Suggest

In 2006, scientists announced startling discovery of 70,000-year-old artifacts and a python's head carved of stone that appears to represent the first known human rituals. Robert Roy Britt of NBC News wrote: “Scientists had thought human intelligence had not evolved the capacity to perform group rituals until perhaps 40,000 years ago. But inside a cave in remote hills in Kalahari Desert of Botswana, archaeologists found the stone snake that was carved long ago. It is as tall as a man and 20 feet (6 meters) long. "You could see the mouth and eyes of the snake. It looked like a real python," said Sheila Coulson of the University of Oslo. "The play of sunlight over the indentations gave them the appearance of snake skin. At night, the firelight gave one the feeling that the snake was actually moving." [Source: Robert Roy Britt, NBC News, November 30, 2006 \=]

the python stone

“More significantly, when Coulson and her colleagues dug a test pit near the stone figure, they found spearheads made of stone that had to have been brought to the cave from hundreds of miles away. The spearheads were burned in what only could be described as some sort of ritual, the scientists conclude. "Stone Age people took these colorful spearheads, brought them to the cave, and finished carving them there," Coulson said Thursday. "Only the red spearheads were burned. It was a ritual destruction of artifacts. There was no sign of normal habitation. No ordinary tools were found at the site." \=\

“The discovery was made in a remote region of Botswana called Tsodilo Hills, the only uplifted area for miles around. It is known to modern San people as the "Mountains of the Gods" and the "Rock That Whispers." Their legend has it that humankind descended from the python, and the ancient, arid streambeds around the hills are said to have been created by the python as it circled the hills in its ceaseless search for water. "Our find means that humans were more organized and had the capacity for abstract thinking at a much earlier point in history than we have previously assumed," Coulson said. "All of the indications suggest that Tsodilo has been known to mankind for almost 100,000 years as a very special place in the prehistoric landscape." \=\

“The scientists found a secret chamber behind the python carving. Worn areas indicate that it has been used over the years. "The shaman, who is still a very important person in San culture, could have kept himself hidden in that secret chamber," Coulson explained. "He would have had a good view of the inside of the cave while remaining hidden himself. When he spoke from his hiding place, it could have seemed as if the voice came from the snake itself. The shaman would have been able to control everything. It was perfect.” \=\

“The shaman could also have made himself disappear from the chamber by crawling out onto the hillside through a small shaft, the scientists found. Paintings in the cave appear to support part of modern San mythology. While cave paintings are common in the Tsodilo Hills, inside the python cave there are just two small paintings, of an elephant and a giraffe. The images were painted at the exact spot where water runs down the wall. \=\

“One San story has the python falling into water, unable to get out. It's saved by the giraffe. The elephant, with its long trunk, is often a metaphor for the python in San mythology. "In the cave, we find only the San people’s three most important animals: the python, the elephant and the giraffe," Coulson said. "That is unusual. This would appear to be a very special place. They did not burn the spearheads by chance. They brought them from hundreds of kilometers away and intentionally burned them. So many pieces of the puzzle fit together here. It has to represent a ritual."” \=\

Cave Art and Early Modern Human Religion

Some scholars speculate that the early cave paintings were made by people who performed ritual hunts to kill the spirits of the animals to make them less formidable during the hunt and to prevent them from coming back to haunt the hunters. They also speculate that the concept of spirit developed out of the conception that something alive contained a spirit and something dead didn't, and when an animal died its spirit had to go somewhere. [Source: History of Art by H.W. Janson, (Prentice Hall)]

Many of the cave paintings are believed to have been involved in rituals and ceremonies because many of the caves are so hard to get to, sometimes involving climbs up steep slopes, squeezes through narrow fissures and stomach crawling through tiny tunnels. Anthropologists have long noted that the more risky and uncertain an activity is the more likely it is to be surrounded by magical practices. Because hunting is a risky, uncertain activity, many scientists believe that the painting may have been part of a magical ritual.

Chauvet Cave lions

Abbe Henri Brueil, a French priest who skipped Mass to copy hundreds of paintings, is sometimes called the “Pope of Prehistory." He helped classify cave art before World War II, hypothesizing the art was involved with rituals of “hunting magic” and were an attempt to capture the beauty of the animals the hunters hunted---a view that was discredited in later studies. The post-war, Marxist German art historian Max Raphael, concluded the animals represented clan totems and the paintings depicted strife and alliances associated with clan warfare.

In 1962, French archaeologist Annette Laming-Emperaire wrote a doctoral thesis entitled The Meaning of Paleolithic Art . The work made her famous and it is still widely embraced today. In it she chided her predecessors for taking too many liberties in their interpretations and warned about looking at modern hunter-gatherers for insights. Instead she opted for more of a number-crunching, spacial and geometric approach in which images were carefully catalogued, with notes taken on the gender, action and position of figures, and notes were made on they way they were grouped and their frequency and spacial relation to things like hand prints and abstract symbols.

In his book Lascaux , Norbert Aujoulat noted that often when horses, aurochs and stags are drawn together the horses are on the bottom, the aurochs are in middle and the stag are on top and the variations of their coats corresponds to respective mating seasons. This in turn has links to the fertility cycle and is perhaps sacred or symbolic.

Bear Cults

A number of archeologists propose that Middle Paleolithic societies — including the Neanderthals — may have practiced the earliest form of totemism or animal worship. Based on archeological evidence from Middle Paleolithic caves, Emil Bächler has argued a Neanderthal bear-cult was widespread. Animal cults in the following Upper Paleolithic period — such as the bear cult — may have had their origins in these hypothetical Middle Paleolithic animal cults. [Source: Wikipedia +]

Animal worship during the Upper Paleolithic intertwined with hunting rites. For instance, archeological evidence from art and bear remains reveals that the bear cult apparently had involved a type of sacrificial bear ceremonialism in which a bear was shot with arrows and then was finished off by a shot in the lungs and ritualistically buried near a clay bear statue covered by a bear fur, with the skull and the body of the bear buried separately. +

Neanderthal cave art

The Drachenloch cave in Switzerland, excavated by Emil Bächler between 1917 and 1923, uncovered more than 30,000 cave bear skeletons and a stone chest or cist consisting of a low wall built from limestone slabs near a cave wall with a number of bear skulls inside it. Also, a cave bear skull was found with a femur bone from another bear stuck inside it. Some scholars speculated that this was evidence of: 1) prehistoric human religious rites involving the cave bear; 2) a hunting ritual involving cave bears or 3) the skulls were kept as trophies. In Archaeology, Religion, Ritual (2004), archaeologist Timothy Insoll was skeptical about the Drachenloch, writing that the evidence for religious practices involving cave bears in this time period is "far from convincing". +

Neanderthal Religion

It is possible that Neanderthals believed in spirits and the afterlife. Scientists speculate that Neanderthals possibly buried food and prized items with their dead for their trip to the afterlife as the Egyptians and many ancient cultures did. The practice of burying valuable items with the dead was practiced by the ancient Egyptians, Chinese, horsemen of the Central Asian steppe and others. On on the floor of Des-Cubierta cave in northern Spain, Neanderthals placed the dead body of a small child aged two-and-a-half to three years old on two slabs of stone, with aurochs horn on top, and set the body on fire. Archaeologist found some some of the child’s teeth.

Neanderthal were more spiritually and intellectually advanced the popular image of them suggests. Neanderthals left behind evidence of spiritual perceptions. This is most clearly seen in Neanderthal burials: 1) at Shanidar in northern Iraq, and in 2) Russian Turkestan. The Shanidar grave contained the body of a 42-year-old man, sprinkled with flowers. The Turkestan grave contained a 4-year-old boy buried with the accouterment of a warrior [Source: Internet Archive, from UNT]

The Shanidar burial is not clear and unequivocal evidence of a belief in an Afterlife. But in the case of the boy from Turkestan, one wonders why a boy, who could not have been a warrior, be buried with the equipment of a warrior unless there was some expectation that he might need it? This is the best evidence of a belief in an afterlife 45,000 years ago, though it is not proof

Neanderthals Burial at La Chapelle-aux-Saints

Origins of Religion: the 'God Faculty'

Elizabeth Palermo of LiveScience wrote: “There are many theories as to how religious thought originated. But two of the most widely cited ideas have to do with how early humans interacted with their natural environment, said Kelly James Clark, a senior research fellow at the Kaufman Interfaith Institute at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. [Source:Elizabeth Palermo, LiveScience, October 5, 2015]

“Picture this: You're a human being living many thousands of years ago. You're out on the plains of the Serengeti, sitting around, waiting for an antelope to walk by so you can kill it for dinner. All of a sudden, you see the grasses in front of you rustling. What do you do? Do you stop and think about what might be causing the rustling (the wind or a lion, for example), or do you immediately take some kind of action? "On the plains of the Serengeti, it would be better to not sit around and reflect. People who took their time got selected out," Clark told Live Science. Humans who survived to procreate were those who had developed what evolutionary scientists call a hypersensitive agency-detecting device, or HADD, he said.

“In short, HADD is the mechanism that lets humans perceive that many things have "agency," or the ability to act of their own accord. This understanding of how the world worked facilitated the rapid decision-making process that humans had to go through when they heard a rustling in the grass. (Lions act of their own accord. Better run.) But in addition to helping humans make rational decisions, HADD may have planted the seeds for religious thought. In addition to attributing agency to lions, for example, humans started attributing agency to things that really didn't have agency at all. "You might think that raindrops aren't agents," Clark said. "They can't act of their own accord. They just fall. And clouds just form; they're not things that can act. But what human beings have done is to think that clouds are agents. They think [clouds] can act," Clark said of early humans.

“And then humans took things to a whole new level. They started attributing meaning to the actions of things that weren't really acting of their own accord. For example, they thought raindrops were "acting for a purpose," Clark said.

Theory of the Mind

Elizabeth Palermo of LiveScience wrote: “Acting for a purpose is the basis for what evolutionary scientists call the Theory of Mind (ToM) — another idea that's often cited in discussions about the origins of religion. By attributing intention or purpose to the actions of beings that did have agency, like other people, humans stopped simply reacting as quickly as possible to the world around them — they started anticipating what other beings' actions might be and planning their own actions accordingly. (Being able to sort of get into the mind of another purposeful being is what Theory of Mind is all about.) [Source: Elizabeth Palermo, LiveScience, October 5, 2015]

“ToM was very helpful to early humans. It enabled them to discern other people's positive and negative intentions (e.g., "Does that person want to mate with me or kill me and steal my food?"), thereby increasing their own chances of survival. But when people started attributing purpose to the actions of nonactors, like raindrops, ToM took a turn toward the supernatural. "The roaring threat of a thunderstorm or the devastation of a flood is widely seen across cultures as the product of a dangerous personal agent in the sky or river, respectively," said Allen Kerkeslager, an associate professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia."Likewise, the movements of the sun, moon and stars are widely explained as the movements of personal agents with extraordinary powers,"Kerkeslager told Live Science in an email.

“This tendency to explain the natural world through the existence of beings with supernatural powers — things like gods, ancestral spirits, goblins and fairies — formed the basis for religious beliefs, according to many cognitive scientists. Collectively, some scientists refer to HADD and ToM as the "god faculty," Clark said. In fact, human beings haven't evolved past this way of thinking and making decisions, he added. "Now, we understand better that the things we thought were agents aren't agents," Clark said. "You can be educated out of some of these beliefs, but you can't be educated out of these cognitive faculties. We all have a hyperactive agency-detecting device. We all have a theory of mind."”

Origins of Religion: for the Good of the Group

“Elizabeth Palermo of LiveScience wrote: “But not everyone agrees that religious thinking is just a byproduct of evolution — in other words, something that came about as a result of nonreligious, cognitive faculties. Some scientists see religion as more of an adaptation — a trait that stuck around because the people who possessed it were better able to survive and pass on their genes. [Source: Elizabeth Palermo, LiveScience, October 5, 2015]

“Robin Dunbar is an evolutionary psychologist and anthropologist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom whose work focuses mostly on the behavior of primates, including nonhuman primates like baboons. Dunbar thinks religion may have evolved as what he calls a "group-level adaptation." Religion is a "kind of glue that holds society together," Dunbar wrote in "How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Dunbar's Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks" (Harvard University Press, 2010).

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Neanderthal burial “Humans may have developed religion as a way to promote cooperation in social groups, Dunbar said. He noted that primates tend to live in groups because doing so benefits them in certain ways. For instance, hunting in groups is more effective than hunting alone. But living in groups also has drawbacks. Namely, some individuals take advantage of the system. Dunbar calls these people "freeriders." "Freeriding is disruptive because it loads the costs of the social contract onto some individuals, while others get away with paying significantly less," Dunbar wrote in a New Scientist article, "The Origin of Religion as a Small-Scale Phenomenon." As a result, those who have been exploited become less willing to support the social contract. In the absence of sufficient benefit to outweigh these costs, individuals will leave in order to be in smaller groups that incur fewer costs."

“But if the group can figure out a way to get everyone to behave in an unselfish way, individual members of the group are less likely to storm off, and the group is more likely to remain cohesive. Religion may have naturally sprung up from this need to keep everybody on the same page, Dunbar said. Humans' predisposition to attribute intention to just about everything (e.g., volcanic eruptions, lunar eclipses, thunderstorms) isn't necessarily the reason religion came about, but it helps to explain why religions typically involve supernatural elements that describe such phenomena.”

Paleolithic Skull Treatments

Rick J. Schulting of the University of Oxford wrote: “As with later periods, there is the need for an element of caution in recognising evidence for special treatment of the human skull in the Palaeolithic. To a large extent this relates to the circumstances and early date of recovery, often in the nineteenth or early twentieth century. The elements of the human skull are both relatively robust and easily recognised, as well as having been highly sought after by the fledgling science of physical anthropology. One might argue that in the prehistoric past as well as when recovered archaeologically, human skulls embody identity in a particularly powerful and compelling form. For the living individual, of course, facial features provide the most immediately accessible means of inter-personal recognition. When combined with skin, hair and eye colour, hair styles and the use of ornamentation the head can become a marker of group affiliation (artificial cranial modification and dental ablation might also be mentioned in this context). Ironically, when recovered archaeologically, the main concern of physical anthropologists was (and to an extent remains) similarly the identification of different racial groups and populations through craniometrics. Cranial remains in particular were thus more likely to be recovered, retained and described in publications. In the case of disturbed skeletal remains – which feature strongly in the archaeo logical record of the Palaeolithic – it is not always clear whether or not postcranial remains were present. [Source: Mesolithic 'skull cults' by Rick J. Schulting, University of Oxford, Conference Paper at the conference “Ancient Death Ways II. Proceedings of the workshop on archaeology and mortuary practices” at Uppsala, Sweden May 2013 ~]

Skull cup from Gough's cave in Britain

“With this caveat in mind, there is still clear evidence for a special interest in heads in the Upper Palaeolithic, particularly in the Magdalenian. Jörg Orschiedt has provided a recent survey of the evidence, noting a dominance of cranial and mandibular remains, many exhibiting cutmarks, that can only be explained by deliberate selection. At Brillenhöhle (BadenWürttemberg, Germany), for example, there is evidence for careful defleshing of crania as well as postcrania, including cutmarks in positions indicating decapitation and scalping. This is interpreted by Orschiedt as occurring in the context of a complex mortuary treatment rather than as evidence of violence or anthropophagy (cannibalism). Secondary burial is indicated for the well-preserved cranium (sans mandible) of an adult male at Rond-duBarry (Auvergne, France), reportedly found within a setting of stones. No cutmarks are reported, so this might have involved the intentional retrieval of the cranium from a burial, with concomitant implications for marking or remembering grave locations. A striking but unfortunately poorly documented example of post-mortem modification involves the isolated cranium of a young female from Mas d’Azil (Ariège, France), into the orbits of which had been placed bone discs carved from deer vertebrae. These have unfortunately been lost. ~

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons except python stone, Sheila Coulson of the University of Oslo

Text Sources: National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Nature, Scientific American. Live Science, Discover magazine, Discovery News, Ancient Foods ancientfoods.wordpress.com ; Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, AP, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated May 2024