Conversations with a Soul (32 page)

On September 7
^th
1909, two archaeologists
⁹¹
were exploring a rock shelter at La Ferrassie, near the French village of Les Eyzies in the Dordogne Valley, when they discovered several ancient skeletons. The skeletons proved to be those of two adults, two children and three infants. The explorers had found some of the oldest skeletal remains of a race known as Homo Neanderthalensis.

Named after the Neander Valley near Dusseldorf, where the first bones were identified, Neanderthal remains have been found throughout Europe and the Middle East. The earliest date back some 200,000 years, which significantly pre-dates the appearance of human fossil remains. As far as we know the Neanderthals had no written language. Palaeontologists speculate that, based on the structure of the Neanderthal larynx, they were restricted in the range of sounds they could produce making it unlikely that they could orally communicate in any but the simplest ways. Nevertheless, they were a remarkable race of people.

Neanderthal burial sites have presented us with one of the great enigmas of the pre-historic world. Intriguing, puzzling, paradoxical, the Neanderthal remains seem to want to tell a story but the phrases are half-formed, and the evidence is incomplete, and the story relies upon our ability to work with imagination in order for the record to take form and communicate meaning.

Some sites have yielded fragments of bone and tusks, which have been worked on and whose purpose seems to be artistic rather than utilitarian. Perhaps the most intriguing of these is the co-called,
Neanderthal Flute
.

The flute is nothing more than a hollow juvenile bear's femur into which several holes had been bored. The bone is incomplete probably because an animal had gnawed on either end of the femur, yet an examination of each end of the bone indicates that additional holes probably existed.

Why and for what purpose?

Obviously no one can tell us why, but what corrals the imagination is the
spacing
of the holes. The distance between the holes fits a unique pattern found within the Do, Re, Mi diatonic musical scale, hence the suggestion of a 'flute'. This has led some musicologist historians to suggest that the hollow bone
could have been played
to produce musical notes! So we are left to ponder whether the holes were randomly and accidentally created and therefore we ought to assign no significance to them, or whether the holes were deliberately bored in the hollow bone to create sound, and not just any sound but a series of notes different from each other which could be
played
. If the latter, then the Neanderthal flute would represent the earliest inclusion of music into a community as well as pose a greater level of complexity in our attempt to understand these ancient people.

Yet the Neanderthals have not finished tantalizing our imagination!

At other sites fresh possibilities are fired-up by the mysterious arrangement of
cave bear skulls
.

We know from cave bear skeletons that they were monstrous twenty foot tall versions of Grizzly bears with razor sharp claws and huge teeth. These carnivores must have struck terror in the hearts of their hunters.

Never the less, at several widely dispersed sites, significant quantities of cave bear bones and skulls have been uncovered. At Drachenlock, in Switzerland, in a hollowed out stone chest covered by a slab of rock, seven bear skulls appear to have been arranged with their muzzles facing the entrance to the cave. Deeper into the cave, six more bear skulls were found in niches along the cave walls. Perhaps this arrangement of the skulls is purely coincidental, possibly because someone simply needed to find a convenient place to unload an armful of bones, so they plunked them down on an opportune shelf. We all know the temptation that a flat surface holds when our arms are full and we need to put something down!

On the other hand who can miss the stirring of our imagination when we '
hear'
a hint that the arrangement of the bear skulls may have been deliberate and rooted in behavior that went significantly deeper than merely tidy housekeeping?

Were the skulls, perhaps, trophies, set up to display the prowess of the hunters, an ancient precursor to the stuffed moose head above the fireplace?

Or is there another, even deeper level?

Could these creatures, so terrible and terrifying in life, have managed to step over the boundaries of life and death and invade their hunter’s sleep?

Did these skulls have the power to summon the kind of terror which, in daylight hours, still evoked awe and wonder and that over a long time morphed into a world ruled over by mystery and fear? Was this the very first acknowledgement of some mysterious power that didn’t terminate in death and, instead, was strengthened by it? Was it a reminder that the spirit of these terrible animals watched over the cave and in some inexplicable manner, had decreed it to be a sacred place?

Had the Neanderthals started on the long road that would eventually lead to a belief in spirits and the powers of the gods that could reach beyond the silent barrier erected by death?

Much less dependent upon our imagination, is the evidence that these strange prehistoric beings also practiced compassion towards the elderly and the wounded:

The remains of an old man found in a cave in Iraq led to an interesting conclusion. An examination of the bones indicated that some time
before
his death, he had sustained multiple injuries. The left eye socket was fractured, the lower right arm had been amputated and the right foot and lower leg had been severely injured. However, new bone growth on the leading edges of the fractures indicates that he survived for some time
after
the trauma. This could only have happened if he had been cared for and helped by others.

Perhaps the urge to provide for their dead was a natural offshoot from the early stirrings of community and compassion.

The male adult in the La Ferrassie cave site was buried with several animal bones, bone splinters and flint flakes. In and of itself these bits of burial flotsam may not be terribly significant, except that the pattern is repeated in burial site after burial site. Neanderthal burial sites have enough bones and tools to lead one to suspect that, apart from the act of burying a dead body, something else was going on, something to do with more than merely the disposition of a corpse.

At the Shanidar IV burial site in Northern Iraq, the 46,000-year-old, fossilized remains of a 35-year-old male was discovered. Soil samples from around the site indicate a very high concentration of pollen from several types of wild flowers leading Professor Richard Leaky to suggest:

From the orderly distribution of grains around the fossilized remains there is no question that the flowers were arranged deliberately and did not simply topple into the grave, as was believed, as the body was being covered.
⁹²

At many burial sites, large stone slabs covered the remains, which had been interred with food and tools, and buried in a flexed fetal position. Discoveries like these led one anthropologist to write:

Evidence of this source clearly indicates that Neanderthal man believed in life after death and it was probably not unlike the life he lived on earth, since he seemed to be trying to help his corpses along their journeys with tools and food. Death itself appears to have been regarded as a kind of sleep, since corpses were carefully arranged in sleeplike positions.
⁹³

The discovery of fire pits alongside grave sites suggests that the funeral rites incorporated an early version of a
'wake',
where relatives and tribes folk would gather in the presence of the deceased to cook meat and share a communal meal and then place food and flowers in the grave to sustain the dead person on a journey.

In 200,000 years not a great deal has changed in our struggle to cope with death’s intrusive sting!

We customarily have nothing better to offer those who grieve than a plate of sandwiches, a few feeble words and a vase of flowers; simple gifts that still have the power to sustain someone in grief. We frequently refer to those who have died as having '
passed on' 
hinting at a journey initiated by death. We grow flowers around graves or leave bouquets at our memorials, sometimes merely makeshift shrines, and the flowers help us to articulate our grief when the words won’t come or when they do they somehow seem hopelessly inadequate.

Several years ago I was visiting friends in Scotland shortly after the announcement of Princess Dianna’s death. The nation, plunged into mourning, struggled to grasp the tragic news. Then, almost immediately, everywhere, alongside monuments, propped up against historically significant buildings, pinned to fences and mounded at Holyrood Palace the people brought and left flowers: sometimes beautifully arranged in magnificent bouquets, sometimes very simply left in bottles or vases but all witnessing to a people’s love. There was nothing else the mourners could do to give expression to their pain and assert their fragile hope except bring flowers and strangely enough, the flowers felt like a powerful rebuke to the dark powers of death that had claimed their princess.

'Why?'

'Why, why, why?'

And I have never been able to answer the question!

Usually torn from the heart of someone in deep pain, I don’t think I ever found a way to bring comfort to their suffering. Being an ordained minister, I felt I ought to have some wisdom, a few words that would wipe away the agony of loss.

There never were.

I intuitively knew an attempt at a logical answer would not come close to answering the
why
instead it would simply manage to demean their pain, as though
, reason ought to bring an end to grief.
I also knew that eventually the questions would lose most of their severity and become woven into the fabric of their being - but the experience would always be there.

For some of them the pain would eventually be transformed into a gentle graciousness and a depth of character; leaving them more sensitive to others and stronger for having endured the loss, thereby denying death its power to completely destroy a person’s vitality. For others, it would become a gaping wound that would poison their outlook on life and yield to death the ultimate power to destroy.