Shanidar Z — The 75,000-Year-Old Neanderthal Woman Whose Crushed Skull Was Rebuilt From More Than 200 Pieces
In fact, for a specimen 75,000 years old, it is remarkable.
The Broader Question of Neanderthal Culture
The debate over Shanidar Z’s burial exists within a much larger debate about Neanderthal culture — what they had, what they shared with modern humans, and what was genuinely distinct about their way of life.
The old model, dominant through much of the twentieth century, was that Neanderthals had a limited, stereotyped behavioral repertoire — capable of making stone tools but not of the full range of symbolic, artistic, and communicative behaviors that define modern human culture.
On this view, Neanderthal burial, if it occurred at all, would represent a simple instinctive response rather than a culturally elaborated practice.
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