Comments on 'Grave Markers: Middle and Early Upper Paleolithic Burials and the Use of Chronotypology in Contemporary Paleolithic Research' by Julien Riel-Salvatore and Geoffrey A. Clark

Abstract

RielSalvatore and Clark do not address what Gargett (1999) demonstrated. Gargetts point was that the good taphonomic information from well-excavated Neandertal skeletons allows discussion of the taphonomic histories of the bodies. He showed that among the remains of Neandertals claimed as burials, two processes seem to have operated. On the one hand are bodies crushed by rockfall like beer cans that someone has stomped on. These tend to be complete but broken collections of bones, as at Shanidar and SaintCsaire. This process is also evident in the bodies of early modern humans, contemporary with Neandertals, from Qafzeh. On the other hand are bodies that had lain in natural depressions in the sediment such as might have been formed by cryoturbation at La Ferrassie. Natural processes of sediment formation had generally covered these bodies slowly; the typical absence of significant limb segments strongly suggested that the meat had rotted before interment of the bodies. This taphonomic history would explain the absence of the skull from the Kebara 2 skeleton. There will be modern human bodies in caves for the same two reasons as for Neandertals. That people were wandering around in dangerous landscapes long after the emergence of modern human morphology is shown by Otzi, the Neolithic body found in the Austrian/Italian Alps (Spindler 1994).