The bones speak of an interesting bloke
Work in Progress by Ivan Morgan
So why should you care about a pile of 50,000-year-old human bones found in a Middle Eastern cave? The archeologists called him Shanidar. He was a Neanderthal. Even though he died roughly 50 centuries ago, his remains show us what it means to be human.
Popular culture has Neanderthals as knuckle dragging stupid brutes. Science has now shown us otherwise. They were a separate species of humans, related to us like wolves are to coyotes. Imagine another species of human. We all know how we modern humans can find infinite reasons to divide ourselves from each other: skin colour, religion, political beliefs – how would we have dealt with another species?
There are no more Neanderthals. Popular culture has our species killing them off. Again, science has shown the truth is far more complicated. If you are of European or Asian descent you have between two and four percent Neanderthal DNA. We didn’t kill them off, they are part of us.
Popular culture depicts these “cavemen” as violent hunter-gatherers living by the law of the jungle.
Shanidar, when he was unearthed by scientists, changed that image. His right arm was mostly gone. His right eye socket had been smashed, and he was probably blind in that eye. His right leg was badly damaged. His ears showed damage that probably rendered him deaf. In short, he was in a state.
The interesting thing is those wounds were all old. He apparently lived for years after sustaining them. He had clearly been in a bad way for many years, yet he lived to a ripe old age (40, which was very old back then). A lot of his injuries had occurred when he was young. A person with his wounds would not have survived in the wild long, unless others took care of him. Which, it appears, they did.
He was cared for by a community.
Those were dangerous times back then, full of predators who would like nothing more than to hunt a big mammal with no claws, horns or fangs. A wounded, disabled human would have been an easy meal. That didn’t happen to Shanidar because he was protected.
In the scientific world he’s a celebrity – an important archeological find. To me the celebrities were the long-forgotten folks who cared for him. Science found Shanidar, but it is his caretakers who deserve the credit. Just like today, it’s the average day to day souls who do the work, provide the care and help as they saw fit who get my admiration, not the stars.
Shanidar’s bones are a tribute to his people, his community, the tribe who kept him alive. His remains show us why we are here today. He is not interesting in himself, he is interesting as a reflection of his people. Much has been written in the scientific world about why he was kept alive. Some are puzzled, arguing that in the ancient forest he would have been an expensive drain on limited resources. Messed up as he was, they argue, he was a liability.
To me it doesn’t seem that complicated. Clearly his people didn’t see him as a liability. He was kept alive because he was human, and those who cared for him were human. Caring for each other is what makes us human. The fact that he was buried after his death further shows how they felt about him.
His bones show us the lives of the people who cared for him were not based on “survival of the fittest.” Their society was based, like ours, on looking after each other. Their lives were focused on community, empathy, support and probably love. What’s left of his old broken body make that clear.
They cared for him because, like you and I, he was one of them. You don’t need to be a big fancy scientist to understand that.
What Shanidar’s people did for him all those millennia ago is why we are still here today, and hopefully why we will still be here millennia from now. His people share the same fundamental humanity we do, regardless of how long ago they lived.
They were humans, they looked after each other.
We are humans. We look after each other.
Ivan Morgan can be reached at ivan.morgan@gmail.com