this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
26 points (96.4% liked)

Archaeology

3483 readers
2 users here now

Welcome to c/Archaeology @ Mander.xyz!

Shovelbums welcome. 🗿

Notice Board

This is a work in progress, please don't mind the mess.

About

Archaeology or archeology[a] is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.

Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.

The discipline involves surveying, excavation, and eventually analysis of data collected, to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Read more...

Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Be kind and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. No pseudoscience/pseudoarchaeology.

Links

Archaeology 101:

Get Involved:

University and Field Work:

Jobs and Career:

Professional Organisations:

FOSS Tools:

Datasets:

Fun:

Other Resources:

Similar Communities

Sister Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Plants & Gardening

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Memes

Find us on Reddit

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
fossilesque@mander.xyz
recreationalplacebos@midwest.social
SciBot@mander.xyz
FlyingSquid@mander.xyz
26
Study casts doubt on Neanderthal ‘flower burial’ theory (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 2 years ago by GreyShuck@feddit.uk to c/archaeology@mander.xyz
2 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Buried in a partial foetal position and surrounded by flower pollen, the discovery of Shanidar 4 – a Neanderthal skeleton unearthed in 1960 – prompted a dramatic reappraisal of our ancient cousins.

However, recent excavations next to where Solecki discovered the Shanidar 4 remains are prompting a rethink of this hypothesis.

Bees may be source of pollen near remains but evidence still suggests bodies were buried with care.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Buried in a partial foetal position and surrounded by flower pollen, the discovery of Shanidar 4 – a Neanderthal skeleton unearthed in 1960 – prompted a dramatic reappraisal of our ancient cousins.

However, during the late 1950s and early 60s, an archaeologist called Ralph Solecki discovered the skeletons of 10 Neanderthal men, women and children at Shanidar cave in the Zagros mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Though it’s plausible they could have been gathered for medicinal reasons, their choice as funeral flowers would be hard to square with modern notions of empathy, he said.

Taken together, he believes the findings imply the transmission of traditions over generations, and that Neanderthals may have lived in a world where stories and symbolic ideas guided their actions.

Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes, an honorary fellow at the University of Liverpool and author of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, agreed that the argument for burrowing bees being responsible for some of the clumped pollen was “convincing”.

However, the discovery of pollen and woody material in association with Shanidar Z “leaves open the possibility that we may be looking at some kind of intentional inclusion of plants with the remains of the dead,” she said.

The original article contains 916 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 78%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] soupspoon@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago

I appreciate this bot in general, but I think in this case it's hard to make sense of the summary, better to read the original article