Did Neanderthals Believe in an Afterlife?

By Jennifer Viegas

Evidence for a likely 50,000-year-old Neanderthal burial ground that includes the remains of at least three individuals has been unearthed in Spain, according to a Quaternary International paper.

The deceased appear to have been intentionally buried, with each Neanderthal's arms folded such that the hands were close to the head. Remains of other Neanderthals have been found in this position, suggesting that it held meaning.

Neanderthals therefore may have conducted burials and possessed symbolic thought before modern humans had these abilities. The site, Sima de las Palomas in Murcia, Southeast Spain, may also be the first known Neanderthal burial ground of Mediterranean Europe.

"We cannot say much (about the skeletons) except that we surmise the site was regarded as somehow relevant in regard to the remains of deceased Neanderthals," lead author Michael Walker told Discovery News. "Their tools and food remains, not to mention signs of fires having been lit, which we have excavated indicate they visited the site more than once."

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http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/neanderthal-burial-ground-afterlife-110420.html

burial pose == afterlife? why?

sometimes lay out their dead with elaborate grooming.

Unless you think it matters somehow? Which at least suggests some loose concept of some other life. I suspect any being that understands death to the level we do, and perhaps the most intelligent animals might give at least some thought to life after death.

aesthetics, for one. remembering someone for how they used to hold themselves.

When my dad died, we dressed him in one of his favorite suits. Not because I thought he'd wear it in heaven, but because I liked how I remembered him in it.

than the average Neanderthal I'd guess.

I think it's more likely belief in the supernatural than aesthetics.

A concept of aesthetics almost automatically precedes a belief in the supernatural, and in fact a sense of aesthetics almost wholly informs one's belief in the supernatural.

An appreciation of beauty is not required to believe in an afterlife. All that is required is a sense of self, and the ability to wonder what happens to one's self once you die.

The bottom line is you don't know the answer anymore than I do, you are guessing just like I am, so if you want to feel righteously certain, feel free, but it's quite frankly a little silly.

I think the moment a being starts thinking about self in more than a basic way (like say Chimps), and death, they are going to start thinking about continuation of self after death.

Generally speaking, at least. Find me a successfully marketed religion (or belief system) that succeeded by defying the aesthetic preferences of its adherents.

A child will demonstrate aesthetic preferences long before she'll posit a belief in the supernatural. If you dispute this, I invite you to demonstrate otherwise. Incidentally, if you fall back on "we can't know what the child is thinking about the supernatural," then you're relying on a statement of faith to justify a statement of faith.

Doesn't work that way.

with the basic belief in an afterlife, two totally separate things, although they clearly operate in tandem.

My "belief" in an afterlife doesn't match my aesthetic, i.e. I wish there was one, it would be nice and beautiful if there was one, but odds are there isn't and that's horrible. If aesthetics guided me in any way on this issue, it wouldn't be a lack of belief in one.

and no, since we currently teach our children about an afterlife from almost the time they can cogitate, it's pretty darn difficult to separate what's taught from what's arrived at independently, because in this area, it often isn't arrived at unfettered by socialization. So your argument that aesthetics comes first has no evidence for it (I find it laughable that you propose a point, then look to me to provide evidence against it, as opposed to you providing evidence for it).

Even if aesthetics is universal, and I have no doubt it is, that has nothing to do with whether or not it interacts with a belief in an afterlife AND there is a difference between a belief in an afterlife at the fundamental level versus what one might actually think that afterlife will be. The former is different from the latter.

You've provided not one whit of evidence or even argument for why an afterlife requires aesthetics, for why neanderthal man even had a sense of aesthetics, or even assuming he did, why that conflicts with belief in an afterlife.

And on edit, I've had discussions with plenty of folks who while professing to be religious and believing in an afterlife, also profess to have no idea of what that might entail, and I know some agnostics about God who are believers in some form of life after death, so those folks aren't "shaping" their afterlife ideas into some vision of rightness or beauty aesthetically.

Whatever your own belief system happens to be, it's irrelevant in the larger sense. For every person you can identify whose belief in the supernatural is independent of an aesthetic concept, I can point at least as many counter examples. And I'm not even saying that Neanderthals didn't believe in the supernatural. I'm simply pointing out that your claim (that their supernatural belief is more likely than an aesthetic concept) is baseless, given the evidence at hand.

As far as my lack of evidence re: child-formed aesthetics, try this test: put two toys in front of a preverbal child and let that child choose between them. If one is chosen consistently or--more broadly--in frequent preference to the other, then this is consistent with an aesthetic that favors the chosen toy. One might argue that the child is selecting the toy because he attributes something supernatural to it, but there again I'd like to see the evidence for that view.

Anyway, the underlying issue isn't whether you or plenty of folks have formed a belief in the supernatural that's tailored to fit an aesthetic ideal; the issue is that you made an unsubstantiated claim and have still provided nothing in support of it.


First, demonstrate that Neanderthals' belief in the supernatural is more likely than Neanderthals' aesthetic sensibility, and then we can discuss the rest.

so it's impossible you say to have a belief in the afterlife that isn't based on aesthetics, I use my lack of belief, not just shared by me by the way, and your response is, well, your beliefs don't count. Ok pal.

The fact that I can point to folks, including myself for whom belief is not dependent on aesthetics is PROOF that aesthetics is not required for a concept of the afterlife.

My claim is no more baseless than yours. So if you want to say because I am not a neanderthal I don't know, well neither do you, so this is all guessing, so if your argument is none of us know, that's certainly true.

Choosing a toy is not an afterlife. The presence of aesthetics in one area does not equal another. Everything in the human experience does not boil down to aesthetics. Plenty of scientific testing has shown that we are "hard-wired" to believe in God. We can stimulate a sense of other/presence by the application of magnetic energy to the right spot in the brain, we can also do it through oxygen deprivation, those are not "aesthetics"

No one can "substantiate" any claim about anything that happened prior to recorded history dealing with cultural practices, we can make educated guesses, so your "criticism" is beyond silly.

Given your laudable compulsion to intellectual honesty, you should have prefaced your comment with "I'm talking out of my ass here, but..." Had you done that, none of this discussion would have been necessary. Instead, you put it forth as if it were revealed wisdom, and I called you on it.

Perhaps if you'd re-read my last post, you'd understand that I haven't asserted that "choosing an afterlife" is "a toy." Instead, I demonstrated that an aesthetic sense precedes a belief in the supernatural.

And even if some of us are hard-wired to believe in God, that still doesn't change my initial point that your claim was baseless.

My argument is indeed that "none of us know." Your unsubstantiated claim was that the Neanderthals' burial customs are more likely evidence of belief in the supernatural than evidence of an aesthetic sensibility.

"Which at least suggests some loose concept of some other life."

There isn't a word in there that...ahem suggests that I wasn't saying I knew it for a fact what motivated their burial habits?

You didn't "demonstrate" anything. Picking a toy has nothing to do with a belief in an afterlife. It would be as if I tried to prove that the sun rises in the East by citing the fact that the moon comes out at night. The latter might be true but has no relevance to the debated point.

My claim isn't "baseless" and repeating that over and over again doesn't make it true.
Unlike you I've actually provided arguments for why the evidence SUGGESTS a belief in the afterlife. And yes, I think it "more likely" to be belief in an afterlife (which is not necessarily belief in the supernatural, there you go conflating ideas and concepts again) than aesthetics. I gave evidence for why, hard wiring, scientific studies, and the ability to separate aesthetics from thoughts on the afterlife.

You've effectively responded with, kids like pretty toys, and but you don't know 100 percent!

Brilliant. Just brilliant.

With this li'l statement of faith:

I confess that I'm troubled by your failure to understand that an example of pre-verbal aesthetic sensibility is not a claim that toys are the afterlife. It was a way of taking issue with your statement of faith by pointing out that we have plenty of evidence in everyday life in support of the assertion that a demonstrable aesthetic sensibility precedes a demonstrable belief in the afterlife.

Your claim was baseless not because there's nothing out there to support it but because you provided nothing in support of it. In effect, you were making a claim and then requiring the readers to document it for you, or else to provide documentation that your claim was erroneous. Perhaps you'd like me to take it on faith that you've compiled a ton of evidence in support of your belief in Neanderthals' belief?


It's hard to tell, but you seem to be arguing against a point that I'm not even making, in which case I wonder what you're driving at. That is, you apparently think that I've declared Neanderthals to be non-spiritual aesthetics with no belief in the afterlife, when in fact I've asserted that Neanderthals' aesthetic concept is at least as likely an explanation of burial habits as is a belief in a hereafter (the explanation that you favor). In support of this assertion--that a demonstrable aesthetic sensibility is more fundamental than a demonstrable supernatural belief system--I've used the obvious (and quite comprehensible) example of a pre-verbal child demonstrating an aesthetic sense prior to demonstrating supernatural beliefs. Perhaps this was my error, because this straightforward example appears to have knocked you irretrievably for a loop.

you say it's more likely aesthetics and you aren't blowing smoke, but i say its more likely afterlife belief and I'm blowing smoke. Riiight.

Toys have nothing to do with the afterlife. An aesthetic appreciation of A does not mean that B requires an aesthetic appreciation. It's a ridiculous argument no matter how many times you try to make it.
There are all sorts of things in our lives that have zero to do with aesthetics. When you can actually tie belief in life after death to aesthetics let me know, until then you are "blowing smoke" is the term I believe you love so much. I've shown clearly in fact that aesthetics are not required to have a belief in an afterlife. Aesthetics plays zero role in many folks modern belief in an afterlife qua afterlife. Those who do believe may have aesthetics involved in deciding HOW that afterlife might look, there is a difference which seems to have "knocked you for a loop."

As for your last paragraph it's clear now that you are just attempting to be contrarian or can't read English, I'm guess a mixture of both.

When i say, "it's definitely a belief in an afterlife" no doubt, THEN perhaps your screed of you can't be certain it isn't something else might be relevant, since I didn't say that, it's a contrarian ridiculous argument, particularly when you assert it could as likely be belief in an afterlife as anything else. Thank you again for wasting my time.

Not sure, but there may be a TOS violation in there somewhere. Hmm...



Anyway, since you still haven't backed up your original assertion, you're in no position to complain that I haven't backed up mine, considering that I have done so, and especially considering that you still don't understand what I've been asserting all along.

Your inability to grasp analogy and example tells me that further discussion with you along these lines is pointless, and that's my fault; I should have realized at the outset that you aren't equipped to discuss it.

Additionally, when someone calls you on your assertion X and your defense is "I didn't say that it's DEFINITELY X," then you've basically admitted that you don't have a leg to stand on, because you're saying "I assert X but don't require me to support X."


I'm done hashing this out with you. Go ahead and believe in your belief in Neanderthal afterlife, if doing so satisfies your aesthetic sensibilities. Or don't, because I really don't care.

And that's my fault as well, because I should have realized the futility of discussion upon your first reply. Shame on me.

that's just a bunch of silliness, and I'm not going to keep wasting my time with someone who clearly can't understand basic English or logic and is only here to be contrarian.

They were trying to understand this universe,like us.

They may have died for someone's misguided sense of good looks. The invading Hominids 50,000 years ago may have seen the indigenous people of Europe as ugly beasts. But, they were every bit as intelligent and human, except they didn't have Clovis Point spear tips.

Had the conquering Hominids not been such successful conquerers, the first man in space might well have looked like this:

which is certainly a possibility. Depending on what studies you believe, their genes persist in Europeans and east Asians.

I mean, it's not cricket, but...

I feel we probably killed the male Neanderthals and raped the females.

look similar to your picture?

but neither did the Homo sapiens. Clovis points are a strictly North American tool type, and date to about 10,500 years ago at the oldest. The fact of the matter is that we really don't know what the effect of the in-migration of H. sapiens was on H. neandertalensis, except that one eventually replaced the other, with some interbreeding. There's no evidence of inter-species violence, for example. Some current research posits that by the time humans arrived on the scene, the neanderthal population was already in trouble from environmental factors.

which some have suggested indicate a connection across the Atlantic, though not many are convinced:

such as the time gap between the end of Solutrean and the beginning of Clovis, and the fact that there's a bunch of elements of the Solutrean tool kit that aren't found with Clovis.

It's a nice hypothesis, but it'll require a lot more evidence to make it anything more than that. I think more people should look at it. The time gap issue is going to be the hardest to surmount in my opinion, closely followed by a recent re-evaluation of the North Atlantic conditions at the time that shows Stafford and Bradley's ideas about ice-margin navigation would not have been likely given the actual environmental conditions, which were not conducive to sea mammal exploitation.

...tax cuts for the wealthiest would create jobs, that climate change is a hoax, in fact that all science is just some liberal scheme to raise taxes.

...there have also been burials found with pollen in the grave, indicative of flowers having been placed in the grave with the body. What it means is open to debate, of course. Maybe a last symbolic gift that a family member wanted to give - or something to take along on the imagined soul's journey. It's entirely possible to have a burial tradition without the concept of an afterlife - it could be a ritual meant to honor the deceased person's life, and nothing more. Even today, funerals are meant as closure for the living, not the dead. If the dead do have a soul that continues its journey, I doubt they place much importance on the actions of those left behind - and if they don't have a soul, they don't know the difference and it's a moot point anyway.

Personally, I think it is an exercise in futility to ponder what an extinct species that left no languge records thought about any given subject. It can be entertaining to debate it, but we can never know for certain. I do know that when I hear "the only possible explanation" I know that I talking to someone with no imagination, applying their biases.

I think you approach the questions the right way, saying it could be, maybe, etc.

Specifically, bears:

Collections of bear bones at several widely dispersed sites suggest that Neanderthals may have worshipped cave bears, especially at Drachenloch, in Switzerland, where a stone chest was discovered with a number of bear skulls stacked upon it. Neanderthals, who also inhabited the entrance of the cave, are believed to have built it. A massive stone slab covered the top of the structure. At the cave entrance, seven bear skulls were arranged with their muzzles facing the cave entrance, while deeper in the cave, a further six bear skulls were lodged in niches along the wall. Next to these remains were bundles of limb bones belonging to different bears. Consequently, it was at this site that the supposed symbol of the "Cult of the Cave Bear" was found. This consisted of the skull of a three-year-old bear pierced in the cheek by the leg-bone of younger bear. The arrangement of these bones of different bears are not believed to have happened by chance.



Some believe it went beyond simple bear worship, and instead was directed on a large scale towards the constellation Ursa Major ("The Great Bear"), which has been worshipped across countless cultures. The seven brightest stars of Ursa Major form the asterism known as the Big Dipper. In South Korea, the constellation is referred to as "the seven stars of the north". In Hinduism, Ursa Major is known as Saptarshi, each of the stars representing one of the Saptarshis or Seven Sages. In theosophy, it is believed the Seven Stars of the Pleiades focus the spiritual energy of the Seven Rays from the Galactic Logos to the Seven Stars of the Great Bear, then to Sirius, then to the Sun, then to the god of Earth (Sanat Kumara), and finally through the seven Masters of the Seven Rays to the human race.

So, yeah, there's that.

Not a bear. Even when you connect the dots it doesn't look like a bear:



Not a bear.

...but, for whatever reason, that's what multiple cultures saw:

"In European star charts, the constellation was visualized with the 'square' of the Big Dipper forming the bear's body and the chain of stars as a long tail. However, bears do not have long tails, and Jewish astronomers considered Alioth, Mizar, and Alkaid instead to be either three cubs following their mother, and the Native Americans as three hunters."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursa_Major

eat the correct type of mushroom. I'm just saying.