Lower and Middle Palaeolithic Mortuary Behaviours and the Origins of Ritual Burial

摘要

Although we now know that the site of the 1856 discoveryof the eponymous remains – the Kleine FeldhoferGrotte, in the Neander valley – was in all likelihood aplace of burial (Schmitz 2006 ), the fact that Neanderthalsburied their dead was not scientifi cally established until1908, at the Bouffi a Boneval, one of the caves in theLa Chapelle-aux-Saints complex of Palaeolithic localities( Figures 3.1and 3.2 ). A near-complete skeleton, the‘old man’, was found here, lying inside a 0.30 m deep,approximately 1.50 × 1.00 m depression of the marlybedrock whose morphology (roughly rectangular, withstraight walls and a fl at bottom) indicated that it hadbeen deliberately dug for the disposal of the corpse(Boule  1913 ).