BEGINNING OF RELIGION

INA WUNN

Summary

In the last two decades the study of Palaeolithic religion has come to be of in-creasing concern to both scholars of the history of religion and archaeologists In thispaper the appropriateness of some recent views in the interpretation of the archaeo-logical ndings is re-evaluated The conclusion of this study is that neither evidenceof early ritual practises nor of belief in an afterlife can be endorsed All relevant con-ceptions of that kind are either products of a certain mental climate at the time of thediscovery of the fossils or of ideologies The results of palaeanthropological researchprove that none of the early representatives of the genus Homo was capable of de-veloping a complicated symbol system Only in the middle Palaeolithic period Homoneanderthalensis had developed advanced intellectual abilities But neither in connec-tion with his hunting customs nor with his domestic activities can any traces of cultpractice be found Only the rare burials can be interpreted as a rst sign of religiousfeelings But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All assumptions that Nean-derthal man already believed in an afterlife are mere speculation Theories of ritualsduring the lower and middle Palaeolithic belong to the realm of legend

The search for the origin of religion was one of the main topicsof discussion during the rst half of the twentieth century It wasJohannes Maringer who interpreted the archaeological ndings ofstone-age cultures as a possible indication of early belief in supremebeings1 Whenever the question of prehistoric religion arises in recentpublications authors still refer to Johannes Maringer or one of hiscontemporaries2 to emphasise their particular point of view3

When Johannes Maringer initially set out to portray the beliefsystem of prehistoric man he was well aware that knowledge about

1 Maringer 19562 James 1957 Narr 1966 298-3203 See for example Verkamp 1995 5 and Dickson 1990

cdeg Koninklijke Brill NV Leiden (2000) NUMEN Vol 47

418 Ina Wunn

early hominids was hardly suf cient to attempt a reconstruction oftheir religion4 Since then however a vast amount of literature dealingwith early religion or the origin of religion has been publishedWhereas Johannes Maringer carefully interpreted the ndings andcriticised the documentation of the excavations his successors areconvinced that religion came into being with the birth of the rsthominids several million years ago Their theories are based uponrare archaeological material interpreted with the aid of ethnographicanalogues The use of ethnographic analogues in prehistoric researchis however a source of heated debate The archaeologist AndreacuteLeroi-Gourhan emphasises the dif culties encountered in tracing thereligion of a society of which only material remnants remain Itis even more complicated to gain insight into the mentality of apeople whose culture is hardly documented and only scarcely known5

On the other hand scholars such as Peter Ucko and Lewis Binfordextensively discuss the value of ethnographic analogues to explain thebehaviour of early hunter-gatherer communities6 They have failedhowever to develop a set of mutually agreed-upon research guidelinesand de nitions that will clarify analytic approaches to the subject7

Therefore scholars continue to use ethnographic analogies to explainpossible belief systems of early man without the necessary criticaldistance As a result the presumed religion in Palaeolithic timespartly resembles the mentality of arctic peoples and partly resemblesthe belief of Australian aborigines according to the experience andresearch interests of the scholar8 The sparse archaeological materialitself hardly allows precise interpretation Sometimes there are severalpossible ways to explain the remains sometimes nothing can besaid about the context of the archaeological ndings Despite the

4 See Maringer 1956 2985 Leroi-Gourhan 19816 Binford 1984 Ucko 19777 For a recently developed guideline see Wunn 2000 (in press)8 Mircea Eliade for example is convinced that arctic shamanism was as much part

of the Palaeolithic belief system as the rites of pygmies see Eliade 1978 19

Beginning of Religion 419

controversial discussions among archaeologists it seems to be anaccepted fact in the eld of History of Religion that Palaeolithic manhad a speci c religion9 They performed rituals related to huntingand believed in a master of animals They buried the dead andacknowledged a life after death On the other hand due to tracesof cannibalism they are assumed to have been wild and primitiveModern archaeologists and palaeanthropologist s are more cautious intheir interpretations They describe only fossils and excavations andhardly ever venture to comment on the mentality of their object ofresearch10

1 Religion of Australopithecus Homo rudolfensis and Homohabilis

While scholars such as Ioan Couliano or Marija Gimbutas assumethat there is no actual proof of religious activity before 60 000 BC11

Mircea Eliade is convinced that even the rst hominids had a certainspiritual awareness For him it is essential that the upright posture ofAustralopithecus was the decisive step beyond the status of mere pri-mates Therefore this early genus of hominids is believed to have had asense of consciousness which differs only slightly from that of modernhumans For Mircea Eliade it is proven that both Australopithecus andthe rst species of the genus Homo were successful hunters He takesfor granted that these early hominids were already familiar with ritualsthat are typical of recent hunter-gatherer communities12

The commonly accepted starting point for prehistorical religion isbelieved to have been about 6 million years ago when the commonancestor of modern apes and human beings lived somewhere in theAfrican bush The fossil remnants of this common ancestor a truemissing link in the evolution of man has not been discovered until

9 See for example Gimbutas 1987 505-515 Heyden 1987 127-133 Ripinski-Naxon 1995 43-54 and Otte 1995 55-75

10 Henke and Rothe 199411 See Eliade and Couliano 1991 27 and Gimbutas 1996 3f12 Eliade 1978 15

420 Ina Wunn

recently However the nding of a new African hominid speciesin 1994 considered to be at least 44 million years old is closestto approaching the roots of the human phylogenetic tree This newspecies was rst identi ed as Australopithecu s ramidus but accordingto the latest anatomical studies it seems to belong to a differentgenus Ardipithecus13 Ardipithecus ramidus is probably the ancestorof the so-called australopithecines who lived in wooded environmentsof eastern and southern Africa14 During the following two millionyears the australopithecine s developed into several species whichdisappeared in part after a comparatively short period Only onespecies most probably the Australopithecu s afarensis developed intothe rst member of the Homo lineage Even the rst members of theearly genus Homo show considerable variability in size and shape sothat they now have been classi ed as three different species Homohabilis who is at the beginning of the phylogenetic tree of the genusHomo H rudolfensis and nally H ergaster the ancestor of themodern human15

As a result of the latest research in palaeoanthropolog y (morphol-ogy and anatomy) it is impossible to maintain that Australopithecusand the early representatives of the species Homo pursued the nutri-tion strategy of hunters When Raymond Dart published his biologi-cal analysis of a childlike skull found in the area of Taung in 1925he discovered certain anatomical features which made it necessary forhim to classify the unknown species as a new biological taxon16 Aus-tralopithecus africanus DART 1925 held in biological terms an inter-mediate position between the well-known apes and the genus HomoThese anatomical features of the skull and therefore the brain arehowever not linked to intellectual abilities meaning that the bipedal-ism of the younger Australopithecus could lead to a change of con-

13 Henke and Rothe 1999 143ff14 The phylogenetic tree of Austalopithecus and Ardipithecus is still a main topic

of discussion among scientists See Henke and Rothe 1999 143ff15 Strait et al 1997 17ff Henke and Rothe 1999 17716 See Henke and Rothe 1994 248

Beginning of Religion 421

sciousness First assumptions that Australopithecus knew how to use re were based on a false interpretation of the facts The blackishpatches which were originally interpreted as traces of re were at-tributable to manganic discoloration The hypothesis that these earlyhominids mainly fed on meat had to be revised The fossil accumula-tions of bones found in certain places of the South African savannahwere caused by lions and hyenas From a palaeanthropologica l point ofview it is impossible that the different species of Australopithecus withtheir low brain volume of 310 ccm up to 530 ccm were able to thinkin abstract terms It is true that early hominids pursued the strategyof progressive brain development and therefore managed to occupya new ecological niche as carrion-eaters This strategy proved to bequite successful during the rst steps of the evolution of man but doesnot mean that Australopithecus Homo rudolfensis Homo ergaster andHomo habilis had necessarily better intellectual facilities than modernday chimpanzees17 From a different point of view the archaeologistStephen Mithen comes to the same conclusion He pleads for a certainmodel of the mindrsquos development during evolution deduced from evo-lutionary and developmental psychology18 Hominids as well as youngchildren seem to have intuitive knowledge in four fundamental behav-ioural domains Content-rich mental modules provide young childrenand probably our ancestors with certain abilities such as social intelli-gence19 intuitive biological knowledge20 technical intelligence21 andlinguistic intelligence Those domains of the mind determine the waya young child starts learning about language other minds and theirnatural and physical surroundings During individual development andevolution the multiple specialised intelligences start working togetherso that knowledge and ideas can ow between the former modules22

17 Grzimek 1972 517 and Goodall 199018 Mithen 1996 42ff19 Whiten 199120 Atran 199021 Spelke 1991 133-16822 Mithen 1996 64

422 Ina Wunn

But the ancestor of Australopithecus and Australopithecus himself stillhad a primitive mind with only powerful general intelligence a spe-cialised domain of social intelligence and several minor mental mod-ules comparable to the mind of recent apes and monkeys23 This meansthat Australopithecus was absolutely not capable of performing rites ordeveloping any religious ideas

A further crucial step in the direction of hominisation was thepreparation and use of tools by the earliest representatives of the genusHomo as Mircea Eliade emphasises He is convinced that the veryslow advancement of the rst lithic cultures is not connected to alow intelligence24 Eliade takes for granted that early humans of thelower Palaeolithic made their living mainly by hunting As a resultthose early hunters should have developed a reference system betweenhunter and killed animal which rst led to a kind of mythical solidaritybetween hunter and game and was the origin of religiosity25

The hypothesis that early hominids already were successful huntersis attributable to Raymond Dart who suddenly found himself at thecentre of general critical interest due to his exciting discovery of anew species26 Since humans according to Raymond Dart are theonly meat-eating primates his biological conclusions regarding theclassi cation of the skull of Taung would be supported by evidenceof similar behaviour of this early hominid species27 Therefore helooked speci cally for fossil bone beds which he interpreted to bethe remnants of the prey of Australopithecus In this context he alsodiscovered densities close to the bone beds which he thought to betraces of re Today it is known that those dense areas are merelymanganese discolorations Dartrsquos thesis seemed to be con rmed by

23 Ibid 9424 Eliade 1978 1625 Eliade 1978 16 1726 Many arguments against Dartrsquos classi cation of the ldquoBaby of Taungrdquo are due to

scepticism and envy Henke and Rothe 1994 24827 Also the hypothesis of Joseph Campbell is based on Dart See Campbell 1987

359f

Beginning of Religion 423

Louis Leakey in the Tanzanian Olduvai Gorge where the famousanthropologis t found remnants of an early hominid classi ed asZinjanthropus along with primitive stone tools Although there weresubstantial doubts about Dartrsquos thesis mdash how could a delicate creatureweighing approximately 45 kg be able to kill the large ungulatesof the African savannah mdash Dartrsquos point of view became generallypopular and accepted in the sixties28 Only intensive research regardingthe behaviour of carnivores and taphonomic and sedimentologica lprocesses made it clear that the fossil bone beds were the results ofdifferent forces in an ecological system seen as a whole29 The layersof the ndings were by no means the result of the activities of only onespecies and certainly not of the weak and delicate AustralopithecusAs a result of these investigations it is certain that the rst humansincluding Homo habilis fed on fruit vegetables and carrion and werenot at all able to hunt30 On the contrary the so-called ldquoBaby ofTaungrdquo had itself become the prey of a predatory animal The rststone tools the so-called choppers did not serve to kill the prey butto crack nut-shells and split open the bones of ungulates killed bylions or hyenas in order to obtain the precious marrow That wasthe single part of the prey that was left for Australopithecus or Homohabilisrudolfensis ergaster31

Neither Australopithecus nor Homo habilis nor Homo ergaster tsinto the category of a hunter The mythical solidarity between hunterand victim claimed by Mircea Eliade for the humans of the lowerPalaeolithic results from false assumptions Eliade assumes that in-telligence imagination and the activity of the subconscious of theearly hominids differed only slightly from the intellectual abilities ofthe modern Homo sapiens The results of modern palaeoanthropolog y

28 Even in the late seventies and early eighties the archaeologist Glynn Isaacadvanced a hypothesis concerning human evolution based on the assumption that earlyHomo consumed a large quantity of meat (Isaac 1978)

29 See Binford 1984 28-57 and Henke and Rothe 1994 355f30 Binford 1984 57 and Schrenk 1997 49 and 7231 Henke and Rothe 1999 187

424 Ina Wunn

and evolutionary psychology indicate that the intellectual capability ofthose early forms of hominids is in no way comparable to that of re-cent Homo sapiens As stone tools and remains of meals prove the

rst member of the genus Homo had developed only a very small do-main for technical intelligence and several tiny mental modules forinteraction with the natural world but had not yet full natural historyintelligence32 The discrete domain of social intelligence which theancestor of early hominids had already acquired developed during the

rst steps of human evolution into a more powerful and complex partof the mind Probably even a primitive kind of linguistic intelligencehad started to develop As Steven Mithen emphasises the intellectualcapability of the Homo habilis group was already higher than that ofAustralopithecus but nevertheless ldquolittle more than an elaborate ver-

sion of the mind of the common ancestorrdquo33 Therefore Australopithe-cus Homo rudolfensis and Homo habilisergaster were at the originof a development that encouraged the growth of hominids by forcingthem to occupy the niche of meat-eaters They were competitively suc-cessful because they developed the intellectual facilities allowing them

to use stone tools to serve their needs but not to think in abstract termsMircea Eliade also assumes that early hominids were able to hunt

successfully There is no archaeological evidence for this assumptionIt is certain that both Australopithecus and early Homo occupied the

niche of carrion-eaters Eliade himself was absolutely convinced thateven the rst of the hominids had a kind of religion that resembledin one way or the other the religion of recent hunter-gatherer com-munities He called upon his critics to present evidence on the non-religiosity of early hominids34 The palaeoanthropolog y and evolution-

ary psychology has since provided this evidence

32 Mithen 1996 104ff33 Ibid 11234 Eliade 1978 17

Beginning of Religion 425

2 Religiosity of Homo erectus and his Contemporaries

Homo erectus and his immediate descendants were the rst ho-minids who succeeded in leaving the African continent and to settlealmost everywhere in the Old World35 One of the oldest known Euro-pean fossiles is a jaw of the genus Homo discovered among the peb-bles on the banks of the Neckar river at the village of Mauer near Hei-delberg This jaw of Homo erectus heidelbergensi s is approximately650 000 to 600 000 years old36 Geologically the nd belongs to theperiod of Cromer This is a period between two long-lasting ice-agesthe Guumlnz- and the Mindel-periods when a relatively warm climate en-abled humans to occupy new habitats Primitive stone tools from theNeuwieder Becken and the latest excavations at Burgos in Spain provethat the European continent was inhabited at least 800 000 years ago oreven earlier Information on the life style of Homo erectus could onlybe gained from excavations at Bilzingsleben where an early settlementof Homo erectus could be found Geologically Bilzingsleben belongsto the Holstein period This means that the ndings at this place are notonly 200 000 years younger than the jaw from Mauer but completelyindependent of the rst appearance of a specimen of Homo erectus as aresult of an entire ice-age This period led to a characteristic change of ora and fauna which formed the landscape and ecosystem during the

35 The oldest human fossil of Europe was detected in 1994 in the Gran Dolina ofAtapuerca in Spain These early humans are about 780 000 years old These hominidsnamed Homo antecessor seem to differ signi cantly from the well known (Asian)Homo erectus and the African Homo ergaster which means that the early hominidsof Africa Asia and Europe belong to different species Several scientists emphasisethe following phylogenetic tree Homo antecessor developed from the African Homoergaster and succeeded to settle in Europe Here he became the ancestor of Homoheidelbergensis who himself developed into the European Homo neanderthalensisSee Henke and Rothe 1999 204-217

36 The remnants of four individuals of the species Homo antecessor which weredetected at the excavation site ldquoLa Gran Dolinardquo near Burgos belong to the eldestmembers of the genus Homo in Europe An isolated skull found near Isneria Italyis nearly as old Early tools from France have an age of between one million and twomillion years and prove that Europe was inhabited very early

426 Ina Wunn

rst conquest of Europe by a hominid The distance in time betweenthe ndings of Mauer and Bilzingsleben is re ected in the developmentof the culture While the tools of Homo erectus heidelbergensis werestill simple handaxes the Homo erectus bilzingslebensi s was alreadycapable of manufacturing developed weapons and tools Theoreticallythis made him capable of hunting for game

Anatomically H erectus bilzingslebensi s was more developed thanhis predecessor Therefore the way of life of H erectus heidelbergensismust have been even simpler and less advanced37 The excavation ofthe settlement at Bilzingsleben provides insight into the way of lifeof the younger Homo erectus The archaeological ndings of earlyman prove the following facts At Bilzingsleben a small group of earlyhumans camped at the shore of a small lake in not more than two orthree tents Here they seemed to have occasionally hunted a beaveror other small animals Their stone tools were suitable for huntingsmaller prey whereas no weapon was found which would have beeneffective enough to kill an elephant or a bison The distribution of theelements of the fauna supports this point of view38 Additionally theymay have fed on the corpses of dead animals which were probablyfound frequently along the shore of the lake Surely elephant and rhinobones which were found at the working sites and served as supportor work material originated from dead animals that were not killedby H erectus bilzingslebensi s One could conclude that they also ate sh eggs and vegetables and that the food was most likely cookedThe people of Bilzingsleben were already aware of a certain code ofsocial behaviour and it is also clear that there was some degree ofemotional exchange between certain members of the group There areno indications of any religious activities The comparison of Homoerectus bilzingslebensi s with recent hunter-gatherer communities isnot convincing due to the following facts The popular belief thatH erectus successfully hunted larger game has been disproved Manyof the ndings of fossil bone beds which were said to be due to

37 See Henke and Rothe 1994 407f38 Mania and Weber 1986 20ff

Beginning of Religion 427

the hunting activities of the H erectus are in the near vicinity ofwatering places Here the ungulates frequently became the prey ofpredatory animals Analysis of the individual age of the bones offossil mammals at Bilzingsleben and other Palaeolithic settlements ledto the conclusion that many of those animals died naturally39 The rst evidence that at least the younger Homo erectus was capable ofhunting larger prey came from Schoumlningen near Helmstedt Germanywhere a wooden spear about 15 meters long was found in a huntingcamp inhabited about 400 000 years ago40 Homo erectus had a brainvolume which was still quite small compared to the brain of recentHomo sapiens Only the younger H erectus is supposed to havebeen capable of verbal communication as anatomical investigation shave proven Though there is no direct relationship between brainvolume and intelligence behaviour or certain abilities scholars areconvinced that H erectus was quite primitive compared to H sapiensas the archaeological ndings related to his culture have revealed41

The results of evolutionary psychology seem to prove the followingfacts Obviously technical skills increased dramatically over those ofH habilis Natural history intelligence and social intelligence werealso well developed On the other hand the technical conservatismof Homo erectus over a period of about one million years is strikingThe only explanation for this contradictory evidence is to assume thatthe well developed multiple intelligences of the H erectus were stillcommitted to speci c domains of behaviour with very little interactionbetween them42 Thinking and communication in abstract terms whichare essential for religious awareness probably developed quite late

Though excavations like the camp of Bilzingsleben MarkleebergKaumlrlich or Bad Cannstadt and the results of archaeological psychologydo not support the hypothesis that early man performed any religiousrites and though the discussion of palaeanthropologica l facts prove

39 Henke and Rothe 1994 42840 Thieme 1997 807-81041 See Henke and Rothe1994 42442 Mithen 1996 115ff

428 Ina Wunn

that H erectus was not at all capable of performing complicated rit-uals it is still the opinion among scholars of the History of Religionand several archaeologists that ritual cannibalism was common amongearly human populations Thus Alfred Rust writes ldquoUnique nds fromAsia prove that cannibalism was exercised in the whole worldrdquo43 Al-fred Rust refers to nds of Homo erectus in the caves of Zhoukoudianwhich reveal many similarities to Bilzingsleben44 While Alfred Rustis convinced that the presence of several ldquosmashedrdquo human skulls isa clear sign of ritual cannibalism Johannes Maringer presumes thatskulls and lower jaws are the remnants of the deceased which had beenkept and worshipped by their family Similar customs are still evidentamong members of primitive cultures in Africa or Asia45 The palaean-thropologist s Winfried Henke and Hartmut Rothe express strong andjusti ed doubt about this assertion The analysis of several craniumsof early man gave evidence that the destruction of the skulls was dueto the activities of ancient hyena and normal taphonomic processes46

The archaeologist Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan had already noted in the six-ties ldquoThe conditions of the former excavations of Chou Kou Tien makeit dif cult to even nd a map of the site of skulls The skulls were ex-tracted from solid limestone and not even one of them is near to beingcomplete After decomposing into tiny sections they entered the gen-eral category of the animal remains It is dif cult to understand how themyth of head-collecting Sinanthropus could have assumed a de niteformrdquo47 Another victim of such prejudice is Karl Dietrich Adam withhis hypothesis that the skull of Homo erectus steinheimensis showstraces of having been subjected to postmortal manipulations48 Thedestruction of the base of the skull is his only criterion for the hy-pothesis that stone-age man was frequently the victim of ritual prac-

43 Rust 1991 17544 Ibid 17845 Maringer 1956 64-7146 Rust 1991 178f and Henke and Rothe 1994 42847 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 4948 Adam 1991 218

Beginning of Religion 429

tices Between the death of the individual and the later recovery ofthe fossil a number of taphonomic processes take place which havesigni cant effects on the later fossil One of those effects is the modi- cation of organic matter and its decay the assortment or destructionof hard sections as well as sedimentologica l processes Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan was able to show that the cranium and lower jaws are usuallywell preserved Therefore it is only due to taphonomic processes thatthese individual body parts survive and not at all due to human ac-tivities or postmortal manipulation49 In this connection it is necessaryto emphasise that scholars can only come to a decision based on a se-ries of complex investigations using a scanning electron microscopeas to whether scratches on fossil bones are due to violence caused bya stone tool or the teeth of a predatory animal Since there are no ar-chaeological ndings for the entire Palaeolithic or Neolithic period toprove the opening of the skull by humans none of the speculationsabout possible cult practice connected with human skulls is based onfacts50

3 Religion in the Middle Palaeolithic

From an anthropologica l point of view the European middle Palae-olithic is characterised by Homo neanderthalensi s51 This early form ofHomo sapiens or descendant of Homo heidelbergensis lived over a pe-

49 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 45 5550 Experiments with animal bones have shown that scratches made by stone tools

are absolutely equal to scratches caused by sand Those scratches occur frequentlyduring the process of embedding It is still dif cult to distinguish between traces ofhuman activities and traces of animal bites An examination is only possible with thehelp of a scanning electron microscope See Henke and Rothe 1994 20-24

51 The so-called Neanderthal-problem is however a source of heated debateOnly ten years ago many palaeanthropologists were convinced that Neanderthalman belonged to our species H sapiens His characteristic features were supposedto be due to the extreme climate of the ice-age In the meantime most scientistshave been convinced that Homo neanderthalensis developed directly from Homoheidelbergensis while the modern Homo sapiens developed during the same timein Africa and conquered Europe about 40 000 years ago See Henke and Rothe 1994433ff and Henke and Rothe 1999 272f

430 Ina Wunn

riod of nearly 100 000 years during which the landscape climate andliving conditions changed dramatically These environmental changesmight have contributed to the special anatomical features of the Nean-derthal man Surely the need to adapt to a frequently changing habitatforced H neanderthalensi s to develop sociocultural abilities that wereclosely related to the progressive evolution of intelligence and psycho-logical abilities52 The frequent environmental changes to which H ne-anderthalensis had to adapt made life immensely challenging In thewarmer and humid periods of the Eem period dense forests coveredthe landscape Population migration was only possible in the valleysThe fauna consisted of elephant deer stag aurochs bear and othersSuf cient food-supply in the direct surroundings allows one to believethat Neanderthal man was relatively stationary during this climatic pe-riod The excavated settlement of Weimar-Ehringsdorf was inhabitedduring this time During the initial phase of cooler climate the orachanged Fir and pine trees were common and formed large and humidforests The winters were cold and snow was plentiful even in sum-mertime the temperature remained low Not only non-migrating ani-mals were hunted by Neanderthal man herds of reindeer wild horsebison and mammoth provided suf cient opportunity for hunting Dur-ing the coldest periods the forests disappeared and made room for

52 Steven Mithen emphasises that natural history intelligence technical intelli-gence social and linguistic intelligence of Neanderthal man were all well developedbut there was still a lack of interaction between the four domains of the mind Cogni-tive uidity took place only between the domains of social and linguistic intelligence(Mithen 1996 143 and 147ff) The author of this article has a different opinion In gen-eral the lithic culture of Neanderthal man is the Mousterian which is still simple com-pared to the technology of the upper Palaeolithic On the other hand the lithic culturesare not strictly related to the one or the other human species Homo neanderthalensistoo was found together with the more advanced tools of the upper Palaeolithic whileHomo sapiens was found with the simple tools of the Mousterian culture Thereforedirect connections between a certain human species and its lithic culture cannot beproved The technical skills of the younger H neanderthalensis and early H sapiensobviously did not differ That means that there is no palaeanthropological evidence forthe assumption of fundamental difference between the minds of H neanderthalensisand H sapiens (Henke and Rothe 1999 275 Reynolds 1990 263ff)

Beginning of Religion 431

prairies and tundra The climate became dry with extremely cold win-ters and relatively mild but short summers The prairies were full ofgame which migrated with the seasons53

The Magic of Hunting in the Middle Palaeolithic

The hunting activities of the Palaeolithic man which Mircea Eliadeand other scholars take for granted are only able to be proved with ref-erence to later periods of ice-age At the town of Lehringen near Ver-den an der Aller the skeleton of an elephant had been preserved thathad been killed with the aid of a wooden spear found between the ribsof the animal This is impressive evidence of the fact that Homo nean-derthalensis was able to successfully hunt big game Therefore it canbe assumed that Mircea Eliadersquos precise conceptions of religion duringprehistoric times may at least be correct with regard to the people of theMousterian He describes this religion as ldquomagic-religious conceptionsof Palaeolithic manrdquo as follows54 The documents regarding the reli-gion of the Palaeolithic man are obscure he says but available Theirmeaning can be deciphered if the scholar succeeds in inserting thesedocuments into a semantic system55 This semantic system is alreadygiven by the results of investigations of recent hunter-gatherer commu-nities Their similar lifestyle offers suf cient certainty for identical orvery similar religions of recent hunter-gatherers and Palaeolithic manTherefore Homo neanderthalensi s believed that the animal is a beingquite similar to man but talented with supernatural forces He wasconvinced that gods such as the ldquoMaster of the Animalsrdquo or ldquoSupremeBeingrdquo existed The kill of the animal took place after a complicatedritual On the other hand rites must have existed which were linkedwith a skull-cult and deposits of long bones Similarly Ioan Coulianoargues that ldquoeither similar models of well-known primitive peoplesare referred to or one dispenses with any model The History of Reli-gion can only use the rst option as imperfect as it may be Scholars

53 See Henke and Rothe 1994 52554 Eliade 1978 15ff55 Ibid 18

432 Ina Wunn

have to endeavour to decipher the mental horizon of the people of pre-historic times by using the results of ethnographic and archaeologicalstudiesrdquo56 John Campbell concludes from the myths of known peoplesthat there must be close connections between the religions of Palae-olithic man and recent hunter-gatherers The following conviction isboth precondition and result of his investigations ldquoI nd that its mainresult has been its con rmation of a thought I have long and faithfullyentertained of the unity of the race of man not only in its biology butalso in its spiritual historyrdquo57 He proves his assumption with the helpof a comparison Under the title ldquoThe Stage of Neanderthal Manrdquo thereader nds the detailed description of the life habits of the small anddelicate Negritos of the Andaman Islands in the Gulf of Bengal butCampbell fails to prove the connections between the habits of a peopleof recent tropical Asia and an anatomically different prehistoric peo-ple which lived in boreal climates 100 000 years ago58 Another argu-ment of John Campbellrsquos is founded on archaeological facts The stoneblades of the Mousterian (the material culture of Neanderthal man ismainly Mousterian) are still very similar a wider range of differenttools was unknown at that time This means for Campbell that thecustom of tool-making was carefully handed down from one genera-tion to another comparably to customs of recent bushman culture Thisextraordinary attention is due to a certain feeling of the holy whichwas connected with the manufacturing and use of the tool59 The pass-ing on of Palaeolithic religion to religions of recent hunter-gatherercommunities serves as a proof that the myths of recent peoples origi-nated in the Palaeolithic and have been handed down till today withoutany changes This means that Joseph Campbell constructed a typicalcircular argument Todayrsquos behaviours and myths are taken as proofin order to postulate the existence of the same behaviours and mythsas practised by Palaeolithic man Then the postulate itself is taken as

56 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2757 Campbell 1987 v58 Ibid 365ff59 Ibid 364f

Beginning of Religion 433

a voucher to prove the unchanged existence of those myths from thePalaeolithic up to now

The opinion that Palaeolithic man already had a complicated reli-gion with certain notions of the holy and various rituals can be foundin nearly every religious reference work Fritz Hartmann writes forexample ldquoThe magic of the hunt belongs to this typically human con-ception of the worldrdquo60

Even if the consequences drawn from the archaeologically securedfacts in the past seem frequently exaggerated several sentences in thevolume of Johannes Maringer explain the intention of the authors Itwas the common statement that prehistoric man was a mere beast with-out a developed mind that made the opponents of this point of viewlook for counter-arguments which are no longer defendable in the lightof modern research results61 The use of ethnographic analogies to re-construct prehistoric religion is based on a speci c understanding ofthe evolution of religion In the nineteenth century Charles Darwinrsquostheory of biological evolution in uenced nearly all branches of sci-ence In the elds of the study of religion and anthropology scholarslike Edward Burnett Tylor or James George Frazer developed concep-tions of religious evolution which have strongly determined researchuntil today Tylor as well as Frazer were convinced that they couldprove an ascending development of religion from primitive origins tothe modern religions of the industrial age According to this theory thereligions of recent hunter-gatherer communities can be classi ed asrelics from ancient times62 This means on the contrary that it is pos-sible to reconstruct the consciousness of ancient people with the helpof knowledge about the religion of todayrsquos hunter-gatherer communi-ties However only a brief insight into the multiplicity of so-calledprimitive religions reveals that their contents and symbols are not sim-ilar by any means According to Max Raphael the faith-conceptions of

60 Hartmann 1957 403 Among the latest literature see for example Grim 19981107-1108 and Hultkrantz 1998 746-752

61 Maringer 1956 59ff62 Michaels (ed) 1997 41-60 and 77-89

434 Ina Wunn

recent hunter-gatherer communities cannot be consulted in order to de-rive from them a certain belief of prehistoric man Even people livingon a relatively primitive economical level up to the present day havebeen affected by their past which has in uenced their state of mindAs a result their ideas and religious conceptions changed in the samemanner as the belief system of modern communities did63 The an-thropologist Wilhelm Emil Muumlhlmann acknowledges the arguments ofMax Raphael when he emphasises that all known primitive religionsare younger than theological religions64 Even if ecological and eco-nomical prerequisites of different societies are the same they do notnecessarily have the same or a similar belief system identical ritualssymbols and practices Hermann Schulz emphasises ldquoKulturell aufdas engste verwandte Gruppen koumlnnen einen religioumls-symbolisch undartefaktreichen Ritualismus entwickeln (Sepik-Gebiet) oder innerhalbder elaborierten ritualsymbolische n Medien tendentiell nichtreligioumlseartefakt-arme Programme elaborieren (Kapauku)rdquo65

The arguments show that it is by no means suf cient to nd prooffor the hunting practices of Neanderthal man in order to imply any kindof religion and especially not a de nite and well-known religion

Bear-cult

The existence of the cult of the bear in the middle Palaeolithic pe-riod is taken for granted Aringke Hultkrantz writes ldquoDie Kulturen des ark-

63 Max Raphael writes ldquoMan hat diese Schwierigkeit umgehen wollen durchHeranziehen von Aussagen sogenannter primitiver Kulturvoumllker Diese nur in sehrengen Grenzen moumlgliche Analogie uumlbersieht daszlig auch diese Staumlmme eine Geschichtegehabt haben mdash eine regressive statt der progressiven der Kulturvoumllker Es liegt einunberechtigtes Vorurteil in der Annahme der Einfrierung des Gewesenen denn dielsquoPrimitivenrsquo nden sich selbst wo sie auf dem Stadium der Jagdwirtschaft stehengeblieben sind mit den alten Werkzeugen und Waffen einer anderen Umgebunggegenuumlber die starken den Einzelmenschen an Maumlchtigkeit uumlberragenden Tiere sindersetzt durch wesentlich kleinere und schwaumlchererdquo (Raphael 1978 78)

64 Muumlhlmann 1957 119865 Schulz 1993 189

Beginning of Religion 435

tischen Raumes sind Bruchstuumlcke einer palaumlolithischen Jagdkulturrdquo66

Friedrich Heiler67 refers to similar ideas as those expressed by JosephCampbell who describes the cult of the bear in an interesting buthardly well-grounded manner First Campbell refers to a bear-festivalamong the Ainu After the killing of the captured bear and during theceremonies the skull of the animal is put at the top of a long stick68

In a second step Campbell portrays Neanderthal man in impressiveterms ldquo when the remains of a strangely brutish yet manlike skele-ton were found in a limestone quarry not far from Duumlsseldorf in theValley of Neanderrdquo69 The following descriptions shortly mention thecaves of the Alps where the remains of the bears were detected Theexcavators had the impression that the arrangement of the fossil bonescould hardly be due to nature so they attributed this to the activitiesof H neanderthalensi s who were assumed to have killed the animalsand arranged their bones during certain ceremonies70 It is true thatnearly everywhere in the Arctic primitive peoples know certain ritu-als connected with the hunting of the bear71 The excavators of thecaves Emil Baumlchler and Karl Houmlrmann took these ceremonies of cir-cumpolar peoples to prove their hypothesis of an ancient bear-cult inprehistoric times72 In the following years several discoveries of simi-lar bear-caves seemed to support the hypothesis of cave bear worshipEmil Baumlchler himself discovered bear bone deposits at the Wilden-mannlisloch in Switzerland and in Sloveniarsquos Mornova Cave In 1946Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan excavated seven cave bear skulls arranged in acircle in Furtins Cave Saocircne-et-Loire In 1950 Kurt Ehrenberg secured

66 Hultkrantz 1998 75167 See Heiler 1979 7868 Campbell 1987 334ff69 Ibid 33970 Ibid 341f71 Edsman 1957 84172 Maringer 1956 95ff

436 Ina Wunn

a deposit of long bones arranged together with cave bear skulls in theSalzhofen Cave in the Austrian Alps73

The latest nd of supposed traces of prehistoric cave bear worshipwas published in 1996 In the Rumanian Bihor-Mountains ChristianLascu et al discovered a cave rich in palaeontologica l cave beardeposits74 Scholars such as Johannes Maringer or Aringke Hultkrantzrefer to the reports of the excavators when they interpret the depositsas the remainder of cult practice The historian Karl Narr also gives anaccount of the deposits of cave bear skulls and long bones but remainssceptical75

A detailed discussion of the nds of cave bear bones from a palaeon-tological and ethnographic point of view led to completely differentresults76 The careful and critical use of ethnographic analogues onwhich the theories of a cave bear cult is founded in the end leads toeven contrary results If H neanderthalensi s had known cave bear wor-ship its traces would have been found inside the settlements The re-mains of such a cult would have been the bone deposits of Neanderthalmanrsquos favourite and most dangerous game among which howeverthe bear did not rank Recent peoples who know the bear cult catchor kill a bear in his winter accommodation and bring it to their settle-ment There it is killed and eaten by the villagers under different ritualregulations The bones of the dead game are put into a holy place orare carefully buried near the village but never brought back again tothe dwelling of the bear

The most impressive arguments against cave bear worship comenevertheless from the bone deposits itself Crucial palaeontologica lobjections are to be stated rst of all Both the cave bear (Ursusspelaeus) which was extinct at the end of the last ice age and thebrown bear (Ursus arctos) which spread all over Eurasia since theEem period show a strong preference for cave accommodation There

73 See Lascu et al 1996 19-20 and Maringer 1956 91-9674 See Lascu et al 199675 Narr 1957 1076 Wunn 1999a 3-23

Beginning of Religion 437

they hide during wintertime and give birth to their young The caveswhere the relics of alleged bear worship were found are the naturalhabitat of the animals where they spend the long winters and hidetheir young At those places the bears sometimes died for severalreasons for example age illness lack of food Therefore their bonefossils are bound to be found in those places if they were not carriedoff by carrion eaters or removed by sedimentologica l processes Theoccurrence of cave bear bones in the caves of the ice age which servedgenerations of bear families as shelter is just what a palaeontologis twould expect

The proponents of Palaeolithic bear worship did not only think themere occurrence of bear bones in the caves to be remarkable butalso their alleged assortment and arrangement in which they werefound However there rst takes place an amassment of bear bones incertain places by the activities of the bears themselves as Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan correctly noticed The parts of skeletons of the deceasedanimals which originally are in their anatomical order are thrownin disorder or scattered by later generations of bears Sometimes theyare pressed to the walls where they are relatively protected againstfurther decay77 Also the outweighing of skulls and long bones is aresult of a process of natural decay and not due to human activitiesThe mentioned parts of the skeleton are relatively heavy and compactso that they are more able to resist decomposition processes thanthe small vertebrae ribs foot-bones or hand-bones A result of thoseprocesses is the natural selection of the bone material78 But notonly decomposition in uences the state of the bones During theirhistory the caves were ooded several times as the accumulatedsediments prove Such oodings do not remain without in uence onthe fossil material With high water level and stronger current all loosematerial is either rinsed away or carried for a certain distance andthen dropped at a place where there is a weaker current During theseprocesses the anatomical bone order is radically altered Therefore

77 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 3978 Ziegler 1975 44-45

438 Ina Wunn

the accumulation of several skulls in one place and the absenceof other bones is due to geological and sedimentologica l processesand not to human intervention The oating ability of sediments canbe reduced by prominent parts of the walls or unevenness of the oor resulting in some bone parts being deposited in the proximityof obstacles A concrete example of this effect is the discovery ofseveral skulls deposited in a crosslike pattern in the Cold Cave ofthe Bihor Mountains The obstacle which reduced the transportabilityof the skulls crucially was a stone at which the fossil skulls weredeposited79 Just as little as the assortment of the bone material isproof of human activities so the adjustment of the fossils is anunnatural process The movements of a transport medium be it windsediment or water are transferred to the material to be transportedso that the movement in a special direction leads to its assortmentTherefore the assortment of bear skulls is not due to human activitiesbut to the owing water or other transport mediums in the caves Itcannot be said clearly enough There was no cave bear worship inthe middle Palaeolithic period at all The bear caves show exactlywhat a palaeontologis t would expect Nothing suggests that the naturalprocess of decay and sedimentation was at any time interrupted ordisturbed80

Combined burials of man and cave bear

In connection with assumed bear worship the opinion was heldthat sometimes men and bear were buried together in one grave81 Asevidence served the excavations at Le Reacutegourdou near Lascaux whereunder a hill of debris both the remains of a bear and a Neanderthal manwere preserved The French archaeologist Fabienne May demonstratedthat the remains of the bear bore no connection with the human

79 See Lascu et al 1996 30 plate 380 Wunn 1999a 6ff81 Rust 1986 15

Beginning of Religion 439

skeleton and questioned whether there was a funeral at Le Reacutegourdouat all82

Skull deposits and skull worship

Just as the bear worship was regarded as irrefutable fact there washardly any doubt that Neanderthal man subjected the heads of thedeceased to a special treatment and set them up for ritual purposesOther scholars are convinced that Neanderthal man hunted fellowhumans to kill and eat them83 It is said that the skulls of the killedlater became the focal point of a ritual This hypothesis is suggestedby Ioan Couliano ldquoEinige Schaumldel sind in einer Weise verformtdie den Gedanken an ein Herausloumlsen des Gehirns nahelegenrdquo84

Alfred Rust expresses himself absolutely clearly He is sure that the nds of isolated lower jaws and craniums are closely connected withreligious customs85 Detailed and critically Johannes Maringer arguesthe question of the skull cult He discusses the nds which wereconsidered as proof of the presence of the alleged practices Thereis for example the crushed childlike skull from Gibraltar or the nds of human remains at Weimar-Ehringsdorf and particularly theoutstanding nd of the skull of Monte Circeo which is mentionedby every author as evidence of the described ritual practice Finallyhe comes to the following result ldquoDas Fundbild der Guattari-Grottespricht klar fuumlr einen Kult in dessen Mittelpunkt der Schaumldel standUrspruumlnglich scheint er auf einem Stock aufgesteckt gewesen zusein Einem heiligen Bannkreis gleich umgab ihn der Kranz vonSteinen Der ganze Houmlhlenteil erweckt den Eindruck als habe er den inder vorderen Houmlhle wohnenden Urmenschen als Heiligtum gedientrdquo86

and further ldquoDie Schaumldelsetzungen duumlrften aller Wahrscheinlichkeitnach eine Art Schaumldelkult darstellen in dem das Gedaumlchtnis der

82 Ibid 1583 Ullrich 1978 293ff See also the overview in Henke and Rothe 1999 27784 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2885 Rust 1991 19486 Maringer 1956 80

440 Ina Wunn

Verstorbenen gep egt und ihre Hilfe wie auch ihr Schutz fuumlr die Sippeer eht wurderdquo87 Even Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan agrees that the skull ofMonte Circeo is an intentional deposition of a skull but he refusesto draw any conclusions concerning religious customs88 On the otherhand he can prove that all other nds of isolated heads or jaws arethe result of taphonomic processes89 After a careful re-examinationof the original reports of the excavations Fabienne May states thatnone of the descriptions of the excavations is suf cient to con rm ordisprove the hypothesis of a ritual90 The discovery of a supposed cultsite at Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan where the skull of a child was set upbetween several skulls of ibex does not prove the hypothesis of a cultIn this case the remnants of ibexes and the skull of the child have noconnection at all91 Since it could be shown that even the skull depositof Monte Circeo was not the result of human activities but that thedamages of the skull were due to the work of hungry hyenas the lastargument in favour of a skull cult is disproved92

Cannibalism

Cannibalism has already been mentioned in connection with thedeposition of human skulls Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan expresses him-self as follows ldquoDie Existenz eines religioumlsen Kannibalismus imPalaumlolithikum mag wahrscheinlich sein doch laumlszligt sich dies bei dergegenwaumlrtigen Materiallage absolut nicht beweisen Und dennochspricht kein Autor von der palaumlolithischen Religion ohne fuumlr odergegen die Kannibalismusthese Stellung zu beziehen wobei in groumlszlige-rem Umfang auf ethnographische Beispiele zuruumlckgegriffen wirdrdquo93

But particularly those ethnographic analogies give strong argumentsagainst the hypothesis of prehistoric cannibalism The anthropologis t

87 Ibid 8588 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 5389 Ibid 54-5690 May 1986 1791 Ibid 33-3492 Henke and Rothe 1994 52793 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 56

Beginning of Religion 441

Gabriele Weiss and the archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher discuss thetopic of cannibalism carefully94 They state that the ethnographic ma-terial itself is frequently not convincing because it is based mainly onsensational reports of past adventurers There are no assertions by eye-witnesses but stories of man eaters were always reported by writerswho only stated that they had heard about those customs The cus-tom of cannibalism itself was always stated to have been given upjust several years before the arrival of the traveller95 Frequently theassumption that a certain people was guilty of cannibalism was usedpropagandistically in order to be able to lead a war against this peo-ple or to force them into slavery96 On the other hand it was a wellknown rumour in Africa even up to the beginning of this century thatEuropeans fed on the esh of African children97 It is argued by HeidiPeter-Roumlcher that there is no evidence of cannibalism among recentpeoples at all98 This means that it is nonsense to search for the reasonand the origin of that custom in prehistoric times It cannot be decidedto what extent Sigmund Freud with his hypothesis of the origin of hu-man society must be blamed for evoking the idea of early man-eatersIn his Totem und Tabu he made several statements about the origin ofhuman society claiming that at the beginning of prehistory a group ofhumans was ruled by a despotic patriarch until he was killed and eatenby his sons99 The subtitle of his book ldquoEinige Uumlbereinstimmungen imSeelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotikerrdquo100 re ects however the

94 Weiss 1987 142-159 and Peter-Roumlcher 198995 Volhard 1939 36996 Gabriele Weiss (1987 152) mentions the example of a decree of Queen Isabella

in 1503 who gave permission to enslave the Caribbean Indians because they weresaid to be man-eaters

97 Ibid 15098 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 On the contrary the American anthropologist Christy Turner

is convinced that the Anasazi an Indian people who lived in the southern parts of theUnited States during historical times did human hunting See Turner 1999

99 See Weiss 1987 44-45100 Weiss 1987 44

442 Ina Wunn

opinion of many of his contemporaries and colleagues and contributesto the picture of the mentality of Neanderthal man until today101

The facts on which the theory of prehistoric cannibalism are basedare usually poor Frequently it was suf cient to assume cannibalismexisted if a skeleton was found incomplete or not in anatomical or-der102 It is still considered a strong proof for cannibalism when splithuman bones occur as were excavated at Krapina The defenders ofthe cannibalism thesis argue that the remnants of human bones lookabsolutely similar to the scattered animal bones at the same excava-tion site Therefore they come to the conclusion that Neanderthal mantreated fellow humans in the same way as he treated game This argu-ment is still stressed by the anthropologist s Tim White and Alban De- eur Scattered bones of human beings and deer in the cave of Moula-Guercy show the same scratches103 This argument presupposes how-ever that the humans as well as the animals were killed by Neanderthalman Both the humans and the animals could however have been thevictims of carnivores for example hyena or cave lion or the scratcheson human and animal bones may be due to taphonomic processes104

This thesis would explain the remains of Krapina as well as the ndingsof Moula-Guercy In any case the identical treatment of human andanimal bones and the missing of any traces of a ritual do not promotethe hypothesis of a religious custom In this case Krapina and Moula-Guercy would prove that Neanderthal man hunted other humans formeat This seems however to be unlikely because the hunters of theMousterian lived in a habitat full of game which was for sure easier tokill than humans

101 Campbell 1987 339102 Maringer 1956 81f In the excavation report of the site Weimar-Ehringsdorf

cannibalism is not mentioned at all See Feustel 1989 391-393103 De eur et al 1999 128-131104 It is still more than dif cult to decide whether scratches on bones are due to

human activities to carnivores or to taphonomic processes The topic is still debated

among scientists For an overview see Henke and Rothe 1994 19-25

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

418 Ina Wunn

early hominids was hardly suf cient to attempt a reconstruction oftheir religion4 Since then however a vast amount of literature dealingwith early religion or the origin of religion has been publishedWhereas Johannes Maringer carefully interpreted the ndings andcriticised the documentation of the excavations his successors areconvinced that religion came into being with the birth of the rsthominids several million years ago Their theories are based uponrare archaeological material interpreted with the aid of ethnographicanalogues The use of ethnographic analogues in prehistoric researchis however a source of heated debate The archaeologist AndreacuteLeroi-Gourhan emphasises the dif culties encountered in tracing thereligion of a society of which only material remnants remain Itis even more complicated to gain insight into the mentality of apeople whose culture is hardly documented and only scarcely known5

On the other hand scholars such as Peter Ucko and Lewis Binfordextensively discuss the value of ethnographic analogues to explain thebehaviour of early hunter-gatherer communities6 They have failedhowever to develop a set of mutually agreed-upon research guidelinesand de nitions that will clarify analytic approaches to the subject7

Therefore scholars continue to use ethnographic analogies to explainpossible belief systems of early man without the necessary criticaldistance As a result the presumed religion in Palaeolithic timespartly resembles the mentality of arctic peoples and partly resemblesthe belief of Australian aborigines according to the experience andresearch interests of the scholar8 The sparse archaeological materialitself hardly allows precise interpretation Sometimes there are severalpossible ways to explain the remains sometimes nothing can besaid about the context of the archaeological ndings Despite the

4 See Maringer 1956 2985 Leroi-Gourhan 19816 Binford 1984 Ucko 19777 For a recently developed guideline see Wunn 2000 (in press)8 Mircea Eliade for example is convinced that arctic shamanism was as much part

of the Palaeolithic belief system as the rites of pygmies see Eliade 1978 19

Beginning of Religion 419

controversial discussions among archaeologists it seems to be anaccepted fact in the eld of History of Religion that Palaeolithic manhad a speci c religion9 They performed rituals related to huntingand believed in a master of animals They buried the dead andacknowledged a life after death On the other hand due to tracesof cannibalism they are assumed to have been wild and primitiveModern archaeologists and palaeanthropologist s are more cautious intheir interpretations They describe only fossils and excavations andhardly ever venture to comment on the mentality of their object ofresearch10

1 Religion of Australopithecus Homo rudolfensis and Homohabilis

While scholars such as Ioan Couliano or Marija Gimbutas assumethat there is no actual proof of religious activity before 60 000 BC11

Mircea Eliade is convinced that even the rst hominids had a certainspiritual awareness For him it is essential that the upright posture ofAustralopithecus was the decisive step beyond the status of mere pri-mates Therefore this early genus of hominids is believed to have had asense of consciousness which differs only slightly from that of modernhumans For Mircea Eliade it is proven that both Australopithecus andthe rst species of the genus Homo were successful hunters He takesfor granted that these early hominids were already familiar with ritualsthat are typical of recent hunter-gatherer communities12

The commonly accepted starting point for prehistorical religion isbelieved to have been about 6 million years ago when the commonancestor of modern apes and human beings lived somewhere in theAfrican bush The fossil remnants of this common ancestor a truemissing link in the evolution of man has not been discovered until

9 See for example Gimbutas 1987 505-515 Heyden 1987 127-133 Ripinski-Naxon 1995 43-54 and Otte 1995 55-75

10 Henke and Rothe 199411 See Eliade and Couliano 1991 27 and Gimbutas 1996 3f12 Eliade 1978 15

420 Ina Wunn

recently However the nding of a new African hominid speciesin 1994 considered to be at least 44 million years old is closestto approaching the roots of the human phylogenetic tree This newspecies was rst identi ed as Australopithecu s ramidus but accordingto the latest anatomical studies it seems to belong to a differentgenus Ardipithecus13 Ardipithecus ramidus is probably the ancestorof the so-called australopithecines who lived in wooded environmentsof eastern and southern Africa14 During the following two millionyears the australopithecine s developed into several species whichdisappeared in part after a comparatively short period Only onespecies most probably the Australopithecu s afarensis developed intothe rst member of the Homo lineage Even the rst members of theearly genus Homo show considerable variability in size and shape sothat they now have been classi ed as three different species Homohabilis who is at the beginning of the phylogenetic tree of the genusHomo H rudolfensis and nally H ergaster the ancestor of themodern human15

As a result of the latest research in palaeoanthropolog y (morphol-ogy and anatomy) it is impossible to maintain that Australopithecusand the early representatives of the species Homo pursued the nutri-tion strategy of hunters When Raymond Dart published his biologi-cal analysis of a childlike skull found in the area of Taung in 1925he discovered certain anatomical features which made it necessary forhim to classify the unknown species as a new biological taxon16 Aus-tralopithecus africanus DART 1925 held in biological terms an inter-mediate position between the well-known apes and the genus HomoThese anatomical features of the skull and therefore the brain arehowever not linked to intellectual abilities meaning that the bipedal-ism of the younger Australopithecus could lead to a change of con-

13 Henke and Rothe 1999 143ff14 The phylogenetic tree of Austalopithecus and Ardipithecus is still a main topic

of discussion among scientists See Henke and Rothe 1999 143ff15 Strait et al 1997 17ff Henke and Rothe 1999 17716 See Henke and Rothe 1994 248

Beginning of Religion 421

sciousness First assumptions that Australopithecus knew how to use re were based on a false interpretation of the facts The blackishpatches which were originally interpreted as traces of re were at-tributable to manganic discoloration The hypothesis that these earlyhominids mainly fed on meat had to be revised The fossil accumula-tions of bones found in certain places of the South African savannahwere caused by lions and hyenas From a palaeanthropologica l point ofview it is impossible that the different species of Australopithecus withtheir low brain volume of 310 ccm up to 530 ccm were able to thinkin abstract terms It is true that early hominids pursued the strategyof progressive brain development and therefore managed to occupya new ecological niche as carrion-eaters This strategy proved to bequite successful during the rst steps of the evolution of man but doesnot mean that Australopithecus Homo rudolfensis Homo ergaster andHomo habilis had necessarily better intellectual facilities than modernday chimpanzees17 From a different point of view the archaeologistStephen Mithen comes to the same conclusion He pleads for a certainmodel of the mindrsquos development during evolution deduced from evo-lutionary and developmental psychology18 Hominids as well as youngchildren seem to have intuitive knowledge in four fundamental behav-ioural domains Content-rich mental modules provide young childrenand probably our ancestors with certain abilities such as social intelli-gence19 intuitive biological knowledge20 technical intelligence21 andlinguistic intelligence Those domains of the mind determine the waya young child starts learning about language other minds and theirnatural and physical surroundings During individual development andevolution the multiple specialised intelligences start working togetherso that knowledge and ideas can ow between the former modules22

17 Grzimek 1972 517 and Goodall 199018 Mithen 1996 42ff19 Whiten 199120 Atran 199021 Spelke 1991 133-16822 Mithen 1996 64

422 Ina Wunn

But the ancestor of Australopithecus and Australopithecus himself stillhad a primitive mind with only powerful general intelligence a spe-cialised domain of social intelligence and several minor mental mod-ules comparable to the mind of recent apes and monkeys23 This meansthat Australopithecus was absolutely not capable of performing rites ordeveloping any religious ideas

A further crucial step in the direction of hominisation was thepreparation and use of tools by the earliest representatives of the genusHomo as Mircea Eliade emphasises He is convinced that the veryslow advancement of the rst lithic cultures is not connected to alow intelligence24 Eliade takes for granted that early humans of thelower Palaeolithic made their living mainly by hunting As a resultthose early hunters should have developed a reference system betweenhunter and killed animal which rst led to a kind of mythical solidaritybetween hunter and game and was the origin of religiosity25

The hypothesis that early hominids already were successful huntersis attributable to Raymond Dart who suddenly found himself at thecentre of general critical interest due to his exciting discovery of anew species26 Since humans according to Raymond Dart are theonly meat-eating primates his biological conclusions regarding theclassi cation of the skull of Taung would be supported by evidenceof similar behaviour of this early hominid species27 Therefore helooked speci cally for fossil bone beds which he interpreted to bethe remnants of the prey of Australopithecus In this context he alsodiscovered densities close to the bone beds which he thought to betraces of re Today it is known that those dense areas are merelymanganese discolorations Dartrsquos thesis seemed to be con rmed by

23 Ibid 9424 Eliade 1978 1625 Eliade 1978 16 1726 Many arguments against Dartrsquos classi cation of the ldquoBaby of Taungrdquo are due to

scepticism and envy Henke and Rothe 1994 24827 Also the hypothesis of Joseph Campbell is based on Dart See Campbell 1987

359f

Beginning of Religion 423

Louis Leakey in the Tanzanian Olduvai Gorge where the famousanthropologis t found remnants of an early hominid classi ed asZinjanthropus along with primitive stone tools Although there weresubstantial doubts about Dartrsquos thesis mdash how could a delicate creatureweighing approximately 45 kg be able to kill the large ungulatesof the African savannah mdash Dartrsquos point of view became generallypopular and accepted in the sixties28 Only intensive research regardingthe behaviour of carnivores and taphonomic and sedimentologica lprocesses made it clear that the fossil bone beds were the results ofdifferent forces in an ecological system seen as a whole29 The layersof the ndings were by no means the result of the activities of only onespecies and certainly not of the weak and delicate AustralopithecusAs a result of these investigations it is certain that the rst humansincluding Homo habilis fed on fruit vegetables and carrion and werenot at all able to hunt30 On the contrary the so-called ldquoBaby ofTaungrdquo had itself become the prey of a predatory animal The rststone tools the so-called choppers did not serve to kill the prey butto crack nut-shells and split open the bones of ungulates killed bylions or hyenas in order to obtain the precious marrow That wasthe single part of the prey that was left for Australopithecus or Homohabilisrudolfensis ergaster31

Neither Australopithecus nor Homo habilis nor Homo ergaster tsinto the category of a hunter The mythical solidarity between hunterand victim claimed by Mircea Eliade for the humans of the lowerPalaeolithic results from false assumptions Eliade assumes that in-telligence imagination and the activity of the subconscious of theearly hominids differed only slightly from the intellectual abilities ofthe modern Homo sapiens The results of modern palaeoanthropolog y

28 Even in the late seventies and early eighties the archaeologist Glynn Isaacadvanced a hypothesis concerning human evolution based on the assumption that earlyHomo consumed a large quantity of meat (Isaac 1978)

29 See Binford 1984 28-57 and Henke and Rothe 1994 355f30 Binford 1984 57 and Schrenk 1997 49 and 7231 Henke and Rothe 1999 187

424 Ina Wunn

and evolutionary psychology indicate that the intellectual capability ofthose early forms of hominids is in no way comparable to that of re-cent Homo sapiens As stone tools and remains of meals prove the

rst member of the genus Homo had developed only a very small do-main for technical intelligence and several tiny mental modules forinteraction with the natural world but had not yet full natural historyintelligence32 The discrete domain of social intelligence which theancestor of early hominids had already acquired developed during the

rst steps of human evolution into a more powerful and complex partof the mind Probably even a primitive kind of linguistic intelligencehad started to develop As Steven Mithen emphasises the intellectualcapability of the Homo habilis group was already higher than that ofAustralopithecus but nevertheless ldquolittle more than an elaborate ver-

sion of the mind of the common ancestorrdquo33 Therefore Australopithe-cus Homo rudolfensis and Homo habilisergaster were at the originof a development that encouraged the growth of hominids by forcingthem to occupy the niche of meat-eaters They were competitively suc-cessful because they developed the intellectual facilities allowing them

to use stone tools to serve their needs but not to think in abstract termsMircea Eliade also assumes that early hominids were able to hunt

successfully There is no archaeological evidence for this assumptionIt is certain that both Australopithecus and early Homo occupied the

niche of carrion-eaters Eliade himself was absolutely convinced thateven the rst of the hominids had a kind of religion that resembledin one way or the other the religion of recent hunter-gatherer com-munities He called upon his critics to present evidence on the non-religiosity of early hominids34 The palaeoanthropolog y and evolution-

ary psychology has since provided this evidence

32 Mithen 1996 104ff33 Ibid 11234 Eliade 1978 17

Beginning of Religion 425

2 Religiosity of Homo erectus and his Contemporaries

Homo erectus and his immediate descendants were the rst ho-minids who succeeded in leaving the African continent and to settlealmost everywhere in the Old World35 One of the oldest known Euro-pean fossiles is a jaw of the genus Homo discovered among the peb-bles on the banks of the Neckar river at the village of Mauer near Hei-delberg This jaw of Homo erectus heidelbergensi s is approximately650 000 to 600 000 years old36 Geologically the nd belongs to theperiod of Cromer This is a period between two long-lasting ice-agesthe Guumlnz- and the Mindel-periods when a relatively warm climate en-abled humans to occupy new habitats Primitive stone tools from theNeuwieder Becken and the latest excavations at Burgos in Spain provethat the European continent was inhabited at least 800 000 years ago oreven earlier Information on the life style of Homo erectus could onlybe gained from excavations at Bilzingsleben where an early settlementof Homo erectus could be found Geologically Bilzingsleben belongsto the Holstein period This means that the ndings at this place are notonly 200 000 years younger than the jaw from Mauer but completelyindependent of the rst appearance of a specimen of Homo erectus as aresult of an entire ice-age This period led to a characteristic change of ora and fauna which formed the landscape and ecosystem during the

35 The oldest human fossil of Europe was detected in 1994 in the Gran Dolina ofAtapuerca in Spain These early humans are about 780 000 years old These hominidsnamed Homo antecessor seem to differ signi cantly from the well known (Asian)Homo erectus and the African Homo ergaster which means that the early hominidsof Africa Asia and Europe belong to different species Several scientists emphasisethe following phylogenetic tree Homo antecessor developed from the African Homoergaster and succeeded to settle in Europe Here he became the ancestor of Homoheidelbergensis who himself developed into the European Homo neanderthalensisSee Henke and Rothe 1999 204-217

36 The remnants of four individuals of the species Homo antecessor which weredetected at the excavation site ldquoLa Gran Dolinardquo near Burgos belong to the eldestmembers of the genus Homo in Europe An isolated skull found near Isneria Italyis nearly as old Early tools from France have an age of between one million and twomillion years and prove that Europe was inhabited very early

426 Ina Wunn

rst conquest of Europe by a hominid The distance in time betweenthe ndings of Mauer and Bilzingsleben is re ected in the developmentof the culture While the tools of Homo erectus heidelbergensis werestill simple handaxes the Homo erectus bilzingslebensi s was alreadycapable of manufacturing developed weapons and tools Theoreticallythis made him capable of hunting for game

Anatomically H erectus bilzingslebensi s was more developed thanhis predecessor Therefore the way of life of H erectus heidelbergensismust have been even simpler and less advanced37 The excavation ofthe settlement at Bilzingsleben provides insight into the way of lifeof the younger Homo erectus The archaeological ndings of earlyman prove the following facts At Bilzingsleben a small group of earlyhumans camped at the shore of a small lake in not more than two orthree tents Here they seemed to have occasionally hunted a beaveror other small animals Their stone tools were suitable for huntingsmaller prey whereas no weapon was found which would have beeneffective enough to kill an elephant or a bison The distribution of theelements of the fauna supports this point of view38 Additionally theymay have fed on the corpses of dead animals which were probablyfound frequently along the shore of the lake Surely elephant and rhinobones which were found at the working sites and served as supportor work material originated from dead animals that were not killedby H erectus bilzingslebensi s One could conclude that they also ate sh eggs and vegetables and that the food was most likely cookedThe people of Bilzingsleben were already aware of a certain code ofsocial behaviour and it is also clear that there was some degree ofemotional exchange between certain members of the group There areno indications of any religious activities The comparison of Homoerectus bilzingslebensi s with recent hunter-gatherer communities isnot convincing due to the following facts The popular belief thatH erectus successfully hunted larger game has been disproved Manyof the ndings of fossil bone beds which were said to be due to

37 See Henke and Rothe 1994 407f38 Mania and Weber 1986 20ff

Beginning of Religion 427

the hunting activities of the H erectus are in the near vicinity ofwatering places Here the ungulates frequently became the prey ofpredatory animals Analysis of the individual age of the bones offossil mammals at Bilzingsleben and other Palaeolithic settlements ledto the conclusion that many of those animals died naturally39 The rst evidence that at least the younger Homo erectus was capable ofhunting larger prey came from Schoumlningen near Helmstedt Germanywhere a wooden spear about 15 meters long was found in a huntingcamp inhabited about 400 000 years ago40 Homo erectus had a brainvolume which was still quite small compared to the brain of recentHomo sapiens Only the younger H erectus is supposed to havebeen capable of verbal communication as anatomical investigation shave proven Though there is no direct relationship between brainvolume and intelligence behaviour or certain abilities scholars areconvinced that H erectus was quite primitive compared to H sapiensas the archaeological ndings related to his culture have revealed41

The results of evolutionary psychology seem to prove the followingfacts Obviously technical skills increased dramatically over those ofH habilis Natural history intelligence and social intelligence werealso well developed On the other hand the technical conservatismof Homo erectus over a period of about one million years is strikingThe only explanation for this contradictory evidence is to assume thatthe well developed multiple intelligences of the H erectus were stillcommitted to speci c domains of behaviour with very little interactionbetween them42 Thinking and communication in abstract terms whichare essential for religious awareness probably developed quite late

Though excavations like the camp of Bilzingsleben MarkleebergKaumlrlich or Bad Cannstadt and the results of archaeological psychologydo not support the hypothesis that early man performed any religiousrites and though the discussion of palaeanthropologica l facts prove

39 Henke and Rothe 1994 42840 Thieme 1997 807-81041 See Henke and Rothe1994 42442 Mithen 1996 115ff

428 Ina Wunn

that H erectus was not at all capable of performing complicated rit-uals it is still the opinion among scholars of the History of Religionand several archaeologists that ritual cannibalism was common amongearly human populations Thus Alfred Rust writes ldquoUnique nds fromAsia prove that cannibalism was exercised in the whole worldrdquo43 Al-fred Rust refers to nds of Homo erectus in the caves of Zhoukoudianwhich reveal many similarities to Bilzingsleben44 While Alfred Rustis convinced that the presence of several ldquosmashedrdquo human skulls isa clear sign of ritual cannibalism Johannes Maringer presumes thatskulls and lower jaws are the remnants of the deceased which had beenkept and worshipped by their family Similar customs are still evidentamong members of primitive cultures in Africa or Asia45 The palaean-thropologist s Winfried Henke and Hartmut Rothe express strong andjusti ed doubt about this assertion The analysis of several craniumsof early man gave evidence that the destruction of the skulls was dueto the activities of ancient hyena and normal taphonomic processes46

The archaeologist Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan had already noted in the six-ties ldquoThe conditions of the former excavations of Chou Kou Tien makeit dif cult to even nd a map of the site of skulls The skulls were ex-tracted from solid limestone and not even one of them is near to beingcomplete After decomposing into tiny sections they entered the gen-eral category of the animal remains It is dif cult to understand how themyth of head-collecting Sinanthropus could have assumed a de niteformrdquo47 Another victim of such prejudice is Karl Dietrich Adam withhis hypothesis that the skull of Homo erectus steinheimensis showstraces of having been subjected to postmortal manipulations48 Thedestruction of the base of the skull is his only criterion for the hy-pothesis that stone-age man was frequently the victim of ritual prac-

43 Rust 1991 17544 Ibid 17845 Maringer 1956 64-7146 Rust 1991 178f and Henke and Rothe 1994 42847 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 4948 Adam 1991 218

Beginning of Religion 429

tices Between the death of the individual and the later recovery ofthe fossil a number of taphonomic processes take place which havesigni cant effects on the later fossil One of those effects is the modi- cation of organic matter and its decay the assortment or destructionof hard sections as well as sedimentologica l processes Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan was able to show that the cranium and lower jaws are usuallywell preserved Therefore it is only due to taphonomic processes thatthese individual body parts survive and not at all due to human ac-tivities or postmortal manipulation49 In this connection it is necessaryto emphasise that scholars can only come to a decision based on a se-ries of complex investigations using a scanning electron microscopeas to whether scratches on fossil bones are due to violence caused bya stone tool or the teeth of a predatory animal Since there are no ar-chaeological ndings for the entire Palaeolithic or Neolithic period toprove the opening of the skull by humans none of the speculationsabout possible cult practice connected with human skulls is based onfacts50

3 Religion in the Middle Palaeolithic

From an anthropologica l point of view the European middle Palae-olithic is characterised by Homo neanderthalensi s51 This early form ofHomo sapiens or descendant of Homo heidelbergensis lived over a pe-

49 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 45 5550 Experiments with animal bones have shown that scratches made by stone tools

are absolutely equal to scratches caused by sand Those scratches occur frequentlyduring the process of embedding It is still dif cult to distinguish between traces ofhuman activities and traces of animal bites An examination is only possible with thehelp of a scanning electron microscope See Henke and Rothe 1994 20-24

51 The so-called Neanderthal-problem is however a source of heated debateOnly ten years ago many palaeanthropologists were convinced that Neanderthalman belonged to our species H sapiens His characteristic features were supposedto be due to the extreme climate of the ice-age In the meantime most scientistshave been convinced that Homo neanderthalensis developed directly from Homoheidelbergensis while the modern Homo sapiens developed during the same timein Africa and conquered Europe about 40 000 years ago See Henke and Rothe 1994433ff and Henke and Rothe 1999 272f

430 Ina Wunn

riod of nearly 100 000 years during which the landscape climate andliving conditions changed dramatically These environmental changesmight have contributed to the special anatomical features of the Nean-derthal man Surely the need to adapt to a frequently changing habitatforced H neanderthalensi s to develop sociocultural abilities that wereclosely related to the progressive evolution of intelligence and psycho-logical abilities52 The frequent environmental changes to which H ne-anderthalensis had to adapt made life immensely challenging In thewarmer and humid periods of the Eem period dense forests coveredthe landscape Population migration was only possible in the valleysThe fauna consisted of elephant deer stag aurochs bear and othersSuf cient food-supply in the direct surroundings allows one to believethat Neanderthal man was relatively stationary during this climatic pe-riod The excavated settlement of Weimar-Ehringsdorf was inhabitedduring this time During the initial phase of cooler climate the orachanged Fir and pine trees were common and formed large and humidforests The winters were cold and snow was plentiful even in sum-mertime the temperature remained low Not only non-migrating ani-mals were hunted by Neanderthal man herds of reindeer wild horsebison and mammoth provided suf cient opportunity for hunting Dur-ing the coldest periods the forests disappeared and made room for

52 Steven Mithen emphasises that natural history intelligence technical intelli-gence social and linguistic intelligence of Neanderthal man were all well developedbut there was still a lack of interaction between the four domains of the mind Cogni-tive uidity took place only between the domains of social and linguistic intelligence(Mithen 1996 143 and 147ff) The author of this article has a different opinion In gen-eral the lithic culture of Neanderthal man is the Mousterian which is still simple com-pared to the technology of the upper Palaeolithic On the other hand the lithic culturesare not strictly related to the one or the other human species Homo neanderthalensistoo was found together with the more advanced tools of the upper Palaeolithic whileHomo sapiens was found with the simple tools of the Mousterian culture Thereforedirect connections between a certain human species and its lithic culture cannot beproved The technical skills of the younger H neanderthalensis and early H sapiensobviously did not differ That means that there is no palaeanthropological evidence forthe assumption of fundamental difference between the minds of H neanderthalensisand H sapiens (Henke and Rothe 1999 275 Reynolds 1990 263ff)

Beginning of Religion 431

prairies and tundra The climate became dry with extremely cold win-ters and relatively mild but short summers The prairies were full ofgame which migrated with the seasons53

The Magic of Hunting in the Middle Palaeolithic

The hunting activities of the Palaeolithic man which Mircea Eliadeand other scholars take for granted are only able to be proved with ref-erence to later periods of ice-age At the town of Lehringen near Ver-den an der Aller the skeleton of an elephant had been preserved thathad been killed with the aid of a wooden spear found between the ribsof the animal This is impressive evidence of the fact that Homo nean-derthalensis was able to successfully hunt big game Therefore it canbe assumed that Mircea Eliadersquos precise conceptions of religion duringprehistoric times may at least be correct with regard to the people of theMousterian He describes this religion as ldquomagic-religious conceptionsof Palaeolithic manrdquo as follows54 The documents regarding the reli-gion of the Palaeolithic man are obscure he says but available Theirmeaning can be deciphered if the scholar succeeds in inserting thesedocuments into a semantic system55 This semantic system is alreadygiven by the results of investigations of recent hunter-gatherer commu-nities Their similar lifestyle offers suf cient certainty for identical orvery similar religions of recent hunter-gatherers and Palaeolithic manTherefore Homo neanderthalensi s believed that the animal is a beingquite similar to man but talented with supernatural forces He wasconvinced that gods such as the ldquoMaster of the Animalsrdquo or ldquoSupremeBeingrdquo existed The kill of the animal took place after a complicatedritual On the other hand rites must have existed which were linkedwith a skull-cult and deposits of long bones Similarly Ioan Coulianoargues that ldquoeither similar models of well-known primitive peoplesare referred to or one dispenses with any model The History of Reli-gion can only use the rst option as imperfect as it may be Scholars

53 See Henke and Rothe 1994 52554 Eliade 1978 15ff55 Ibid 18

432 Ina Wunn

have to endeavour to decipher the mental horizon of the people of pre-historic times by using the results of ethnographic and archaeologicalstudiesrdquo56 John Campbell concludes from the myths of known peoplesthat there must be close connections between the religions of Palae-olithic man and recent hunter-gatherers The following conviction isboth precondition and result of his investigations ldquoI nd that its mainresult has been its con rmation of a thought I have long and faithfullyentertained of the unity of the race of man not only in its biology butalso in its spiritual historyrdquo57 He proves his assumption with the helpof a comparison Under the title ldquoThe Stage of Neanderthal Manrdquo thereader nds the detailed description of the life habits of the small anddelicate Negritos of the Andaman Islands in the Gulf of Bengal butCampbell fails to prove the connections between the habits of a peopleof recent tropical Asia and an anatomically different prehistoric peo-ple which lived in boreal climates 100 000 years ago58 Another argu-ment of John Campbellrsquos is founded on archaeological facts The stoneblades of the Mousterian (the material culture of Neanderthal man ismainly Mousterian) are still very similar a wider range of differenttools was unknown at that time This means for Campbell that thecustom of tool-making was carefully handed down from one genera-tion to another comparably to customs of recent bushman culture Thisextraordinary attention is due to a certain feeling of the holy whichwas connected with the manufacturing and use of the tool59 The pass-ing on of Palaeolithic religion to religions of recent hunter-gatherercommunities serves as a proof that the myths of recent peoples origi-nated in the Palaeolithic and have been handed down till today withoutany changes This means that Joseph Campbell constructed a typicalcircular argument Todayrsquos behaviours and myths are taken as proofin order to postulate the existence of the same behaviours and mythsas practised by Palaeolithic man Then the postulate itself is taken as

56 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2757 Campbell 1987 v58 Ibid 365ff59 Ibid 364f

Beginning of Religion 433

a voucher to prove the unchanged existence of those myths from thePalaeolithic up to now

The opinion that Palaeolithic man already had a complicated reli-gion with certain notions of the holy and various rituals can be foundin nearly every religious reference work Fritz Hartmann writes forexample ldquoThe magic of the hunt belongs to this typically human con-ception of the worldrdquo60

Even if the consequences drawn from the archaeologically securedfacts in the past seem frequently exaggerated several sentences in thevolume of Johannes Maringer explain the intention of the authors Itwas the common statement that prehistoric man was a mere beast with-out a developed mind that made the opponents of this point of viewlook for counter-arguments which are no longer defendable in the lightof modern research results61 The use of ethnographic analogies to re-construct prehistoric religion is based on a speci c understanding ofthe evolution of religion In the nineteenth century Charles Darwinrsquostheory of biological evolution in uenced nearly all branches of sci-ence In the elds of the study of religion and anthropology scholarslike Edward Burnett Tylor or James George Frazer developed concep-tions of religious evolution which have strongly determined researchuntil today Tylor as well as Frazer were convinced that they couldprove an ascending development of religion from primitive origins tothe modern religions of the industrial age According to this theory thereligions of recent hunter-gatherer communities can be classi ed asrelics from ancient times62 This means on the contrary that it is pos-sible to reconstruct the consciousness of ancient people with the helpof knowledge about the religion of todayrsquos hunter-gatherer communi-ties However only a brief insight into the multiplicity of so-calledprimitive religions reveals that their contents and symbols are not sim-ilar by any means According to Max Raphael the faith-conceptions of

60 Hartmann 1957 403 Among the latest literature see for example Grim 19981107-1108 and Hultkrantz 1998 746-752

61 Maringer 1956 59ff62 Michaels (ed) 1997 41-60 and 77-89

434 Ina Wunn

recent hunter-gatherer communities cannot be consulted in order to de-rive from them a certain belief of prehistoric man Even people livingon a relatively primitive economical level up to the present day havebeen affected by their past which has in uenced their state of mindAs a result their ideas and religious conceptions changed in the samemanner as the belief system of modern communities did63 The an-thropologist Wilhelm Emil Muumlhlmann acknowledges the arguments ofMax Raphael when he emphasises that all known primitive religionsare younger than theological religions64 Even if ecological and eco-nomical prerequisites of different societies are the same they do notnecessarily have the same or a similar belief system identical ritualssymbols and practices Hermann Schulz emphasises ldquoKulturell aufdas engste verwandte Gruppen koumlnnen einen religioumls-symbolisch undartefaktreichen Ritualismus entwickeln (Sepik-Gebiet) oder innerhalbder elaborierten ritualsymbolische n Medien tendentiell nichtreligioumlseartefakt-arme Programme elaborieren (Kapauku)rdquo65

The arguments show that it is by no means suf cient to nd prooffor the hunting practices of Neanderthal man in order to imply any kindof religion and especially not a de nite and well-known religion

Bear-cult

The existence of the cult of the bear in the middle Palaeolithic pe-riod is taken for granted Aringke Hultkrantz writes ldquoDie Kulturen des ark-

63 Max Raphael writes ldquoMan hat diese Schwierigkeit umgehen wollen durchHeranziehen von Aussagen sogenannter primitiver Kulturvoumllker Diese nur in sehrengen Grenzen moumlgliche Analogie uumlbersieht daszlig auch diese Staumlmme eine Geschichtegehabt haben mdash eine regressive statt der progressiven der Kulturvoumllker Es liegt einunberechtigtes Vorurteil in der Annahme der Einfrierung des Gewesenen denn dielsquoPrimitivenrsquo nden sich selbst wo sie auf dem Stadium der Jagdwirtschaft stehengeblieben sind mit den alten Werkzeugen und Waffen einer anderen Umgebunggegenuumlber die starken den Einzelmenschen an Maumlchtigkeit uumlberragenden Tiere sindersetzt durch wesentlich kleinere und schwaumlchererdquo (Raphael 1978 78)

64 Muumlhlmann 1957 119865 Schulz 1993 189

Beginning of Religion 435

tischen Raumes sind Bruchstuumlcke einer palaumlolithischen Jagdkulturrdquo66

Friedrich Heiler67 refers to similar ideas as those expressed by JosephCampbell who describes the cult of the bear in an interesting buthardly well-grounded manner First Campbell refers to a bear-festivalamong the Ainu After the killing of the captured bear and during theceremonies the skull of the animal is put at the top of a long stick68

In a second step Campbell portrays Neanderthal man in impressiveterms ldquo when the remains of a strangely brutish yet manlike skele-ton were found in a limestone quarry not far from Duumlsseldorf in theValley of Neanderrdquo69 The following descriptions shortly mention thecaves of the Alps where the remains of the bears were detected Theexcavators had the impression that the arrangement of the fossil bonescould hardly be due to nature so they attributed this to the activitiesof H neanderthalensi s who were assumed to have killed the animalsand arranged their bones during certain ceremonies70 It is true thatnearly everywhere in the Arctic primitive peoples know certain ritu-als connected with the hunting of the bear71 The excavators of thecaves Emil Baumlchler and Karl Houmlrmann took these ceremonies of cir-cumpolar peoples to prove their hypothesis of an ancient bear-cult inprehistoric times72 In the following years several discoveries of simi-lar bear-caves seemed to support the hypothesis of cave bear worshipEmil Baumlchler himself discovered bear bone deposits at the Wilden-mannlisloch in Switzerland and in Sloveniarsquos Mornova Cave In 1946Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan excavated seven cave bear skulls arranged in acircle in Furtins Cave Saocircne-et-Loire In 1950 Kurt Ehrenberg secured

66 Hultkrantz 1998 75167 See Heiler 1979 7868 Campbell 1987 334ff69 Ibid 33970 Ibid 341f71 Edsman 1957 84172 Maringer 1956 95ff

436 Ina Wunn

a deposit of long bones arranged together with cave bear skulls in theSalzhofen Cave in the Austrian Alps73

The latest nd of supposed traces of prehistoric cave bear worshipwas published in 1996 In the Rumanian Bihor-Mountains ChristianLascu et al discovered a cave rich in palaeontologica l cave beardeposits74 Scholars such as Johannes Maringer or Aringke Hultkrantzrefer to the reports of the excavators when they interpret the depositsas the remainder of cult practice The historian Karl Narr also gives anaccount of the deposits of cave bear skulls and long bones but remainssceptical75

A detailed discussion of the nds of cave bear bones from a palaeon-tological and ethnographic point of view led to completely differentresults76 The careful and critical use of ethnographic analogues onwhich the theories of a cave bear cult is founded in the end leads toeven contrary results If H neanderthalensi s had known cave bear wor-ship its traces would have been found inside the settlements The re-mains of such a cult would have been the bone deposits of Neanderthalmanrsquos favourite and most dangerous game among which howeverthe bear did not rank Recent peoples who know the bear cult catchor kill a bear in his winter accommodation and bring it to their settle-ment There it is killed and eaten by the villagers under different ritualregulations The bones of the dead game are put into a holy place orare carefully buried near the village but never brought back again tothe dwelling of the bear

The most impressive arguments against cave bear worship comenevertheless from the bone deposits itself Crucial palaeontologica lobjections are to be stated rst of all Both the cave bear (Ursusspelaeus) which was extinct at the end of the last ice age and thebrown bear (Ursus arctos) which spread all over Eurasia since theEem period show a strong preference for cave accommodation There

73 See Lascu et al 1996 19-20 and Maringer 1956 91-9674 See Lascu et al 199675 Narr 1957 1076 Wunn 1999a 3-23

Beginning of Religion 437

they hide during wintertime and give birth to their young The caveswhere the relics of alleged bear worship were found are the naturalhabitat of the animals where they spend the long winters and hidetheir young At those places the bears sometimes died for severalreasons for example age illness lack of food Therefore their bonefossils are bound to be found in those places if they were not carriedoff by carrion eaters or removed by sedimentologica l processes Theoccurrence of cave bear bones in the caves of the ice age which servedgenerations of bear families as shelter is just what a palaeontologis twould expect

The proponents of Palaeolithic bear worship did not only think themere occurrence of bear bones in the caves to be remarkable butalso their alleged assortment and arrangement in which they werefound However there rst takes place an amassment of bear bones incertain places by the activities of the bears themselves as Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan correctly noticed The parts of skeletons of the deceasedanimals which originally are in their anatomical order are thrownin disorder or scattered by later generations of bears Sometimes theyare pressed to the walls where they are relatively protected againstfurther decay77 Also the outweighing of skulls and long bones is aresult of a process of natural decay and not due to human activitiesThe mentioned parts of the skeleton are relatively heavy and compactso that they are more able to resist decomposition processes thanthe small vertebrae ribs foot-bones or hand-bones A result of thoseprocesses is the natural selection of the bone material78 But notonly decomposition in uences the state of the bones During theirhistory the caves were ooded several times as the accumulatedsediments prove Such oodings do not remain without in uence onthe fossil material With high water level and stronger current all loosematerial is either rinsed away or carried for a certain distance andthen dropped at a place where there is a weaker current During theseprocesses the anatomical bone order is radically altered Therefore

77 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 3978 Ziegler 1975 44-45

438 Ina Wunn

the accumulation of several skulls in one place and the absenceof other bones is due to geological and sedimentologica l processesand not to human intervention The oating ability of sediments canbe reduced by prominent parts of the walls or unevenness of the oor resulting in some bone parts being deposited in the proximityof obstacles A concrete example of this effect is the discovery ofseveral skulls deposited in a crosslike pattern in the Cold Cave ofthe Bihor Mountains The obstacle which reduced the transportabilityof the skulls crucially was a stone at which the fossil skulls weredeposited79 Just as little as the assortment of the bone material isproof of human activities so the adjustment of the fossils is anunnatural process The movements of a transport medium be it windsediment or water are transferred to the material to be transportedso that the movement in a special direction leads to its assortmentTherefore the assortment of bear skulls is not due to human activitiesbut to the owing water or other transport mediums in the caves Itcannot be said clearly enough There was no cave bear worship inthe middle Palaeolithic period at all The bear caves show exactlywhat a palaeontologis t would expect Nothing suggests that the naturalprocess of decay and sedimentation was at any time interrupted ordisturbed80

Combined burials of man and cave bear

In connection with assumed bear worship the opinion was heldthat sometimes men and bear were buried together in one grave81 Asevidence served the excavations at Le Reacutegourdou near Lascaux whereunder a hill of debris both the remains of a bear and a Neanderthal manwere preserved The French archaeologist Fabienne May demonstratedthat the remains of the bear bore no connection with the human

79 See Lascu et al 1996 30 plate 380 Wunn 1999a 6ff81 Rust 1986 15

Beginning of Religion 439

skeleton and questioned whether there was a funeral at Le Reacutegourdouat all82

Skull deposits and skull worship

Just as the bear worship was regarded as irrefutable fact there washardly any doubt that Neanderthal man subjected the heads of thedeceased to a special treatment and set them up for ritual purposesOther scholars are convinced that Neanderthal man hunted fellowhumans to kill and eat them83 It is said that the skulls of the killedlater became the focal point of a ritual This hypothesis is suggestedby Ioan Couliano ldquoEinige Schaumldel sind in einer Weise verformtdie den Gedanken an ein Herausloumlsen des Gehirns nahelegenrdquo84

Alfred Rust expresses himself absolutely clearly He is sure that the nds of isolated lower jaws and craniums are closely connected withreligious customs85 Detailed and critically Johannes Maringer arguesthe question of the skull cult He discusses the nds which wereconsidered as proof of the presence of the alleged practices Thereis for example the crushed childlike skull from Gibraltar or the nds of human remains at Weimar-Ehringsdorf and particularly theoutstanding nd of the skull of Monte Circeo which is mentionedby every author as evidence of the described ritual practice Finallyhe comes to the following result ldquoDas Fundbild der Guattari-Grottespricht klar fuumlr einen Kult in dessen Mittelpunkt der Schaumldel standUrspruumlnglich scheint er auf einem Stock aufgesteckt gewesen zusein Einem heiligen Bannkreis gleich umgab ihn der Kranz vonSteinen Der ganze Houmlhlenteil erweckt den Eindruck als habe er den inder vorderen Houmlhle wohnenden Urmenschen als Heiligtum gedientrdquo86

and further ldquoDie Schaumldelsetzungen duumlrften aller Wahrscheinlichkeitnach eine Art Schaumldelkult darstellen in dem das Gedaumlchtnis der

82 Ibid 1583 Ullrich 1978 293ff See also the overview in Henke and Rothe 1999 27784 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2885 Rust 1991 19486 Maringer 1956 80

440 Ina Wunn

Verstorbenen gep egt und ihre Hilfe wie auch ihr Schutz fuumlr die Sippeer eht wurderdquo87 Even Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan agrees that the skull ofMonte Circeo is an intentional deposition of a skull but he refusesto draw any conclusions concerning religious customs88 On the otherhand he can prove that all other nds of isolated heads or jaws arethe result of taphonomic processes89 After a careful re-examinationof the original reports of the excavations Fabienne May states thatnone of the descriptions of the excavations is suf cient to con rm ordisprove the hypothesis of a ritual90 The discovery of a supposed cultsite at Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan where the skull of a child was set upbetween several skulls of ibex does not prove the hypothesis of a cultIn this case the remnants of ibexes and the skull of the child have noconnection at all91 Since it could be shown that even the skull depositof Monte Circeo was not the result of human activities but that thedamages of the skull were due to the work of hungry hyenas the lastargument in favour of a skull cult is disproved92

Cannibalism

Cannibalism has already been mentioned in connection with thedeposition of human skulls Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan expresses him-self as follows ldquoDie Existenz eines religioumlsen Kannibalismus imPalaumlolithikum mag wahrscheinlich sein doch laumlszligt sich dies bei dergegenwaumlrtigen Materiallage absolut nicht beweisen Und dennochspricht kein Autor von der palaumlolithischen Religion ohne fuumlr odergegen die Kannibalismusthese Stellung zu beziehen wobei in groumlszlige-rem Umfang auf ethnographische Beispiele zuruumlckgegriffen wirdrdquo93

But particularly those ethnographic analogies give strong argumentsagainst the hypothesis of prehistoric cannibalism The anthropologis t

87 Ibid 8588 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 5389 Ibid 54-5690 May 1986 1791 Ibid 33-3492 Henke and Rothe 1994 52793 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 56

Beginning of Religion 441

Gabriele Weiss and the archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher discuss thetopic of cannibalism carefully94 They state that the ethnographic ma-terial itself is frequently not convincing because it is based mainly onsensational reports of past adventurers There are no assertions by eye-witnesses but stories of man eaters were always reported by writerswho only stated that they had heard about those customs The cus-tom of cannibalism itself was always stated to have been given upjust several years before the arrival of the traveller95 Frequently theassumption that a certain people was guilty of cannibalism was usedpropagandistically in order to be able to lead a war against this peo-ple or to force them into slavery96 On the other hand it was a wellknown rumour in Africa even up to the beginning of this century thatEuropeans fed on the esh of African children97 It is argued by HeidiPeter-Roumlcher that there is no evidence of cannibalism among recentpeoples at all98 This means that it is nonsense to search for the reasonand the origin of that custom in prehistoric times It cannot be decidedto what extent Sigmund Freud with his hypothesis of the origin of hu-man society must be blamed for evoking the idea of early man-eatersIn his Totem und Tabu he made several statements about the origin ofhuman society claiming that at the beginning of prehistory a group ofhumans was ruled by a despotic patriarch until he was killed and eatenby his sons99 The subtitle of his book ldquoEinige Uumlbereinstimmungen imSeelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotikerrdquo100 re ects however the

94 Weiss 1987 142-159 and Peter-Roumlcher 198995 Volhard 1939 36996 Gabriele Weiss (1987 152) mentions the example of a decree of Queen Isabella

in 1503 who gave permission to enslave the Caribbean Indians because they weresaid to be man-eaters

97 Ibid 15098 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 On the contrary the American anthropologist Christy Turner

is convinced that the Anasazi an Indian people who lived in the southern parts of theUnited States during historical times did human hunting See Turner 1999

99 See Weiss 1987 44-45100 Weiss 1987 44

442 Ina Wunn

opinion of many of his contemporaries and colleagues and contributesto the picture of the mentality of Neanderthal man until today101

The facts on which the theory of prehistoric cannibalism are basedare usually poor Frequently it was suf cient to assume cannibalismexisted if a skeleton was found incomplete or not in anatomical or-der102 It is still considered a strong proof for cannibalism when splithuman bones occur as were excavated at Krapina The defenders ofthe cannibalism thesis argue that the remnants of human bones lookabsolutely similar to the scattered animal bones at the same excava-tion site Therefore they come to the conclusion that Neanderthal mantreated fellow humans in the same way as he treated game This argu-ment is still stressed by the anthropologist s Tim White and Alban De- eur Scattered bones of human beings and deer in the cave of Moula-Guercy show the same scratches103 This argument presupposes how-ever that the humans as well as the animals were killed by Neanderthalman Both the humans and the animals could however have been thevictims of carnivores for example hyena or cave lion or the scratcheson human and animal bones may be due to taphonomic processes104

This thesis would explain the remains of Krapina as well as the ndingsof Moula-Guercy In any case the identical treatment of human andanimal bones and the missing of any traces of a ritual do not promotethe hypothesis of a religious custom In this case Krapina and Moula-Guercy would prove that Neanderthal man hunted other humans formeat This seems however to be unlikely because the hunters of theMousterian lived in a habitat full of game which was for sure easier tokill than humans

101 Campbell 1987 339102 Maringer 1956 81f In the excavation report of the site Weimar-Ehringsdorf

cannibalism is not mentioned at all See Feustel 1989 391-393103 De eur et al 1999 128-131104 It is still more than dif cult to decide whether scratches on bones are due to

human activities to carnivores or to taphonomic processes The topic is still debated

among scientists For an overview see Henke and Rothe 1994 19-25

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

Beginning of Religion 419

controversial discussions among archaeologists it seems to be anaccepted fact in the eld of History of Religion that Palaeolithic manhad a speci c religion9 They performed rituals related to huntingand believed in a master of animals They buried the dead andacknowledged a life after death On the other hand due to tracesof cannibalism they are assumed to have been wild and primitiveModern archaeologists and palaeanthropologist s are more cautious intheir interpretations They describe only fossils and excavations andhardly ever venture to comment on the mentality of their object ofresearch10

1 Religion of Australopithecus Homo rudolfensis and Homohabilis

While scholars such as Ioan Couliano or Marija Gimbutas assumethat there is no actual proof of religious activity before 60 000 BC11

Mircea Eliade is convinced that even the rst hominids had a certainspiritual awareness For him it is essential that the upright posture ofAustralopithecus was the decisive step beyond the status of mere pri-mates Therefore this early genus of hominids is believed to have had asense of consciousness which differs only slightly from that of modernhumans For Mircea Eliade it is proven that both Australopithecus andthe rst species of the genus Homo were successful hunters He takesfor granted that these early hominids were already familiar with ritualsthat are typical of recent hunter-gatherer communities12

The commonly accepted starting point for prehistorical religion isbelieved to have been about 6 million years ago when the commonancestor of modern apes and human beings lived somewhere in theAfrican bush The fossil remnants of this common ancestor a truemissing link in the evolution of man has not been discovered until

9 See for example Gimbutas 1987 505-515 Heyden 1987 127-133 Ripinski-Naxon 1995 43-54 and Otte 1995 55-75

10 Henke and Rothe 199411 See Eliade and Couliano 1991 27 and Gimbutas 1996 3f12 Eliade 1978 15

420 Ina Wunn

recently However the nding of a new African hominid speciesin 1994 considered to be at least 44 million years old is closestto approaching the roots of the human phylogenetic tree This newspecies was rst identi ed as Australopithecu s ramidus but accordingto the latest anatomical studies it seems to belong to a differentgenus Ardipithecus13 Ardipithecus ramidus is probably the ancestorof the so-called australopithecines who lived in wooded environmentsof eastern and southern Africa14 During the following two millionyears the australopithecine s developed into several species whichdisappeared in part after a comparatively short period Only onespecies most probably the Australopithecu s afarensis developed intothe rst member of the Homo lineage Even the rst members of theearly genus Homo show considerable variability in size and shape sothat they now have been classi ed as three different species Homohabilis who is at the beginning of the phylogenetic tree of the genusHomo H rudolfensis and nally H ergaster the ancestor of themodern human15

As a result of the latest research in palaeoanthropolog y (morphol-ogy and anatomy) it is impossible to maintain that Australopithecusand the early representatives of the species Homo pursued the nutri-tion strategy of hunters When Raymond Dart published his biologi-cal analysis of a childlike skull found in the area of Taung in 1925he discovered certain anatomical features which made it necessary forhim to classify the unknown species as a new biological taxon16 Aus-tralopithecus africanus DART 1925 held in biological terms an inter-mediate position between the well-known apes and the genus HomoThese anatomical features of the skull and therefore the brain arehowever not linked to intellectual abilities meaning that the bipedal-ism of the younger Australopithecus could lead to a change of con-

13 Henke and Rothe 1999 143ff14 The phylogenetic tree of Austalopithecus and Ardipithecus is still a main topic

of discussion among scientists See Henke and Rothe 1999 143ff15 Strait et al 1997 17ff Henke and Rothe 1999 17716 See Henke and Rothe 1994 248

Beginning of Religion 421

sciousness First assumptions that Australopithecus knew how to use re were based on a false interpretation of the facts The blackishpatches which were originally interpreted as traces of re were at-tributable to manganic discoloration The hypothesis that these earlyhominids mainly fed on meat had to be revised The fossil accumula-tions of bones found in certain places of the South African savannahwere caused by lions and hyenas From a palaeanthropologica l point ofview it is impossible that the different species of Australopithecus withtheir low brain volume of 310 ccm up to 530 ccm were able to thinkin abstract terms It is true that early hominids pursued the strategyof progressive brain development and therefore managed to occupya new ecological niche as carrion-eaters This strategy proved to bequite successful during the rst steps of the evolution of man but doesnot mean that Australopithecus Homo rudolfensis Homo ergaster andHomo habilis had necessarily better intellectual facilities than modernday chimpanzees17 From a different point of view the archaeologistStephen Mithen comes to the same conclusion He pleads for a certainmodel of the mindrsquos development during evolution deduced from evo-lutionary and developmental psychology18 Hominids as well as youngchildren seem to have intuitive knowledge in four fundamental behav-ioural domains Content-rich mental modules provide young childrenand probably our ancestors with certain abilities such as social intelli-gence19 intuitive biological knowledge20 technical intelligence21 andlinguistic intelligence Those domains of the mind determine the waya young child starts learning about language other minds and theirnatural and physical surroundings During individual development andevolution the multiple specialised intelligences start working togetherso that knowledge and ideas can ow between the former modules22

17 Grzimek 1972 517 and Goodall 199018 Mithen 1996 42ff19 Whiten 199120 Atran 199021 Spelke 1991 133-16822 Mithen 1996 64

422 Ina Wunn

But the ancestor of Australopithecus and Australopithecus himself stillhad a primitive mind with only powerful general intelligence a spe-cialised domain of social intelligence and several minor mental mod-ules comparable to the mind of recent apes and monkeys23 This meansthat Australopithecus was absolutely not capable of performing rites ordeveloping any religious ideas

A further crucial step in the direction of hominisation was thepreparation and use of tools by the earliest representatives of the genusHomo as Mircea Eliade emphasises He is convinced that the veryslow advancement of the rst lithic cultures is not connected to alow intelligence24 Eliade takes for granted that early humans of thelower Palaeolithic made their living mainly by hunting As a resultthose early hunters should have developed a reference system betweenhunter and killed animal which rst led to a kind of mythical solidaritybetween hunter and game and was the origin of religiosity25

The hypothesis that early hominids already were successful huntersis attributable to Raymond Dart who suddenly found himself at thecentre of general critical interest due to his exciting discovery of anew species26 Since humans according to Raymond Dart are theonly meat-eating primates his biological conclusions regarding theclassi cation of the skull of Taung would be supported by evidenceof similar behaviour of this early hominid species27 Therefore helooked speci cally for fossil bone beds which he interpreted to bethe remnants of the prey of Australopithecus In this context he alsodiscovered densities close to the bone beds which he thought to betraces of re Today it is known that those dense areas are merelymanganese discolorations Dartrsquos thesis seemed to be con rmed by

23 Ibid 9424 Eliade 1978 1625 Eliade 1978 16 1726 Many arguments against Dartrsquos classi cation of the ldquoBaby of Taungrdquo are due to

scepticism and envy Henke and Rothe 1994 24827 Also the hypothesis of Joseph Campbell is based on Dart See Campbell 1987

359f

Beginning of Religion 423

Louis Leakey in the Tanzanian Olduvai Gorge where the famousanthropologis t found remnants of an early hominid classi ed asZinjanthropus along with primitive stone tools Although there weresubstantial doubts about Dartrsquos thesis mdash how could a delicate creatureweighing approximately 45 kg be able to kill the large ungulatesof the African savannah mdash Dartrsquos point of view became generallypopular and accepted in the sixties28 Only intensive research regardingthe behaviour of carnivores and taphonomic and sedimentologica lprocesses made it clear that the fossil bone beds were the results ofdifferent forces in an ecological system seen as a whole29 The layersof the ndings were by no means the result of the activities of only onespecies and certainly not of the weak and delicate AustralopithecusAs a result of these investigations it is certain that the rst humansincluding Homo habilis fed on fruit vegetables and carrion and werenot at all able to hunt30 On the contrary the so-called ldquoBaby ofTaungrdquo had itself become the prey of a predatory animal The rststone tools the so-called choppers did not serve to kill the prey butto crack nut-shells and split open the bones of ungulates killed bylions or hyenas in order to obtain the precious marrow That wasthe single part of the prey that was left for Australopithecus or Homohabilisrudolfensis ergaster31

Neither Australopithecus nor Homo habilis nor Homo ergaster tsinto the category of a hunter The mythical solidarity between hunterand victim claimed by Mircea Eliade for the humans of the lowerPalaeolithic results from false assumptions Eliade assumes that in-telligence imagination and the activity of the subconscious of theearly hominids differed only slightly from the intellectual abilities ofthe modern Homo sapiens The results of modern palaeoanthropolog y

28 Even in the late seventies and early eighties the archaeologist Glynn Isaacadvanced a hypothesis concerning human evolution based on the assumption that earlyHomo consumed a large quantity of meat (Isaac 1978)

29 See Binford 1984 28-57 and Henke and Rothe 1994 355f30 Binford 1984 57 and Schrenk 1997 49 and 7231 Henke and Rothe 1999 187

424 Ina Wunn

and evolutionary psychology indicate that the intellectual capability ofthose early forms of hominids is in no way comparable to that of re-cent Homo sapiens As stone tools and remains of meals prove the

rst member of the genus Homo had developed only a very small do-main for technical intelligence and several tiny mental modules forinteraction with the natural world but had not yet full natural historyintelligence32 The discrete domain of social intelligence which theancestor of early hominids had already acquired developed during the

rst steps of human evolution into a more powerful and complex partof the mind Probably even a primitive kind of linguistic intelligencehad started to develop As Steven Mithen emphasises the intellectualcapability of the Homo habilis group was already higher than that ofAustralopithecus but nevertheless ldquolittle more than an elaborate ver-

sion of the mind of the common ancestorrdquo33 Therefore Australopithe-cus Homo rudolfensis and Homo habilisergaster were at the originof a development that encouraged the growth of hominids by forcingthem to occupy the niche of meat-eaters They were competitively suc-cessful because they developed the intellectual facilities allowing them

to use stone tools to serve their needs but not to think in abstract termsMircea Eliade also assumes that early hominids were able to hunt

successfully There is no archaeological evidence for this assumptionIt is certain that both Australopithecus and early Homo occupied the

niche of carrion-eaters Eliade himself was absolutely convinced thateven the rst of the hominids had a kind of religion that resembledin one way or the other the religion of recent hunter-gatherer com-munities He called upon his critics to present evidence on the non-religiosity of early hominids34 The palaeoanthropolog y and evolution-

ary psychology has since provided this evidence

32 Mithen 1996 104ff33 Ibid 11234 Eliade 1978 17

Beginning of Religion 425

2 Religiosity of Homo erectus and his Contemporaries

Homo erectus and his immediate descendants were the rst ho-minids who succeeded in leaving the African continent and to settlealmost everywhere in the Old World35 One of the oldest known Euro-pean fossiles is a jaw of the genus Homo discovered among the peb-bles on the banks of the Neckar river at the village of Mauer near Hei-delberg This jaw of Homo erectus heidelbergensi s is approximately650 000 to 600 000 years old36 Geologically the nd belongs to theperiod of Cromer This is a period between two long-lasting ice-agesthe Guumlnz- and the Mindel-periods when a relatively warm climate en-abled humans to occupy new habitats Primitive stone tools from theNeuwieder Becken and the latest excavations at Burgos in Spain provethat the European continent was inhabited at least 800 000 years ago oreven earlier Information on the life style of Homo erectus could onlybe gained from excavations at Bilzingsleben where an early settlementof Homo erectus could be found Geologically Bilzingsleben belongsto the Holstein period This means that the ndings at this place are notonly 200 000 years younger than the jaw from Mauer but completelyindependent of the rst appearance of a specimen of Homo erectus as aresult of an entire ice-age This period led to a characteristic change of ora and fauna which formed the landscape and ecosystem during the

35 The oldest human fossil of Europe was detected in 1994 in the Gran Dolina ofAtapuerca in Spain These early humans are about 780 000 years old These hominidsnamed Homo antecessor seem to differ signi cantly from the well known (Asian)Homo erectus and the African Homo ergaster which means that the early hominidsof Africa Asia and Europe belong to different species Several scientists emphasisethe following phylogenetic tree Homo antecessor developed from the African Homoergaster and succeeded to settle in Europe Here he became the ancestor of Homoheidelbergensis who himself developed into the European Homo neanderthalensisSee Henke and Rothe 1999 204-217

36 The remnants of four individuals of the species Homo antecessor which weredetected at the excavation site ldquoLa Gran Dolinardquo near Burgos belong to the eldestmembers of the genus Homo in Europe An isolated skull found near Isneria Italyis nearly as old Early tools from France have an age of between one million and twomillion years and prove that Europe was inhabited very early

426 Ina Wunn

rst conquest of Europe by a hominid The distance in time betweenthe ndings of Mauer and Bilzingsleben is re ected in the developmentof the culture While the tools of Homo erectus heidelbergensis werestill simple handaxes the Homo erectus bilzingslebensi s was alreadycapable of manufacturing developed weapons and tools Theoreticallythis made him capable of hunting for game

Anatomically H erectus bilzingslebensi s was more developed thanhis predecessor Therefore the way of life of H erectus heidelbergensismust have been even simpler and less advanced37 The excavation ofthe settlement at Bilzingsleben provides insight into the way of lifeof the younger Homo erectus The archaeological ndings of earlyman prove the following facts At Bilzingsleben a small group of earlyhumans camped at the shore of a small lake in not more than two orthree tents Here they seemed to have occasionally hunted a beaveror other small animals Their stone tools were suitable for huntingsmaller prey whereas no weapon was found which would have beeneffective enough to kill an elephant or a bison The distribution of theelements of the fauna supports this point of view38 Additionally theymay have fed on the corpses of dead animals which were probablyfound frequently along the shore of the lake Surely elephant and rhinobones which were found at the working sites and served as supportor work material originated from dead animals that were not killedby H erectus bilzingslebensi s One could conclude that they also ate sh eggs and vegetables and that the food was most likely cookedThe people of Bilzingsleben were already aware of a certain code ofsocial behaviour and it is also clear that there was some degree ofemotional exchange between certain members of the group There areno indications of any religious activities The comparison of Homoerectus bilzingslebensi s with recent hunter-gatherer communities isnot convincing due to the following facts The popular belief thatH erectus successfully hunted larger game has been disproved Manyof the ndings of fossil bone beds which were said to be due to

37 See Henke and Rothe 1994 407f38 Mania and Weber 1986 20ff

Beginning of Religion 427

the hunting activities of the H erectus are in the near vicinity ofwatering places Here the ungulates frequently became the prey ofpredatory animals Analysis of the individual age of the bones offossil mammals at Bilzingsleben and other Palaeolithic settlements ledto the conclusion that many of those animals died naturally39 The rst evidence that at least the younger Homo erectus was capable ofhunting larger prey came from Schoumlningen near Helmstedt Germanywhere a wooden spear about 15 meters long was found in a huntingcamp inhabited about 400 000 years ago40 Homo erectus had a brainvolume which was still quite small compared to the brain of recentHomo sapiens Only the younger H erectus is supposed to havebeen capable of verbal communication as anatomical investigation shave proven Though there is no direct relationship between brainvolume and intelligence behaviour or certain abilities scholars areconvinced that H erectus was quite primitive compared to H sapiensas the archaeological ndings related to his culture have revealed41

The results of evolutionary psychology seem to prove the followingfacts Obviously technical skills increased dramatically over those ofH habilis Natural history intelligence and social intelligence werealso well developed On the other hand the technical conservatismof Homo erectus over a period of about one million years is strikingThe only explanation for this contradictory evidence is to assume thatthe well developed multiple intelligences of the H erectus were stillcommitted to speci c domains of behaviour with very little interactionbetween them42 Thinking and communication in abstract terms whichare essential for religious awareness probably developed quite late

Though excavations like the camp of Bilzingsleben MarkleebergKaumlrlich or Bad Cannstadt and the results of archaeological psychologydo not support the hypothesis that early man performed any religiousrites and though the discussion of palaeanthropologica l facts prove

39 Henke and Rothe 1994 42840 Thieme 1997 807-81041 See Henke and Rothe1994 42442 Mithen 1996 115ff

428 Ina Wunn

that H erectus was not at all capable of performing complicated rit-uals it is still the opinion among scholars of the History of Religionand several archaeologists that ritual cannibalism was common amongearly human populations Thus Alfred Rust writes ldquoUnique nds fromAsia prove that cannibalism was exercised in the whole worldrdquo43 Al-fred Rust refers to nds of Homo erectus in the caves of Zhoukoudianwhich reveal many similarities to Bilzingsleben44 While Alfred Rustis convinced that the presence of several ldquosmashedrdquo human skulls isa clear sign of ritual cannibalism Johannes Maringer presumes thatskulls and lower jaws are the remnants of the deceased which had beenkept and worshipped by their family Similar customs are still evidentamong members of primitive cultures in Africa or Asia45 The palaean-thropologist s Winfried Henke and Hartmut Rothe express strong andjusti ed doubt about this assertion The analysis of several craniumsof early man gave evidence that the destruction of the skulls was dueto the activities of ancient hyena and normal taphonomic processes46

The archaeologist Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan had already noted in the six-ties ldquoThe conditions of the former excavations of Chou Kou Tien makeit dif cult to even nd a map of the site of skulls The skulls were ex-tracted from solid limestone and not even one of them is near to beingcomplete After decomposing into tiny sections they entered the gen-eral category of the animal remains It is dif cult to understand how themyth of head-collecting Sinanthropus could have assumed a de niteformrdquo47 Another victim of such prejudice is Karl Dietrich Adam withhis hypothesis that the skull of Homo erectus steinheimensis showstraces of having been subjected to postmortal manipulations48 Thedestruction of the base of the skull is his only criterion for the hy-pothesis that stone-age man was frequently the victim of ritual prac-

43 Rust 1991 17544 Ibid 17845 Maringer 1956 64-7146 Rust 1991 178f and Henke and Rothe 1994 42847 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 4948 Adam 1991 218

Beginning of Religion 429

tices Between the death of the individual and the later recovery ofthe fossil a number of taphonomic processes take place which havesigni cant effects on the later fossil One of those effects is the modi- cation of organic matter and its decay the assortment or destructionof hard sections as well as sedimentologica l processes Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan was able to show that the cranium and lower jaws are usuallywell preserved Therefore it is only due to taphonomic processes thatthese individual body parts survive and not at all due to human ac-tivities or postmortal manipulation49 In this connection it is necessaryto emphasise that scholars can only come to a decision based on a se-ries of complex investigations using a scanning electron microscopeas to whether scratches on fossil bones are due to violence caused bya stone tool or the teeth of a predatory animal Since there are no ar-chaeological ndings for the entire Palaeolithic or Neolithic period toprove the opening of the skull by humans none of the speculationsabout possible cult practice connected with human skulls is based onfacts50

3 Religion in the Middle Palaeolithic

From an anthropologica l point of view the European middle Palae-olithic is characterised by Homo neanderthalensi s51 This early form ofHomo sapiens or descendant of Homo heidelbergensis lived over a pe-

49 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 45 5550 Experiments with animal bones have shown that scratches made by stone tools

are absolutely equal to scratches caused by sand Those scratches occur frequentlyduring the process of embedding It is still dif cult to distinguish between traces ofhuman activities and traces of animal bites An examination is only possible with thehelp of a scanning electron microscope See Henke and Rothe 1994 20-24

51 The so-called Neanderthal-problem is however a source of heated debateOnly ten years ago many palaeanthropologists were convinced that Neanderthalman belonged to our species H sapiens His characteristic features were supposedto be due to the extreme climate of the ice-age In the meantime most scientistshave been convinced that Homo neanderthalensis developed directly from Homoheidelbergensis while the modern Homo sapiens developed during the same timein Africa and conquered Europe about 40 000 years ago See Henke and Rothe 1994433ff and Henke and Rothe 1999 272f

430 Ina Wunn

riod of nearly 100 000 years during which the landscape climate andliving conditions changed dramatically These environmental changesmight have contributed to the special anatomical features of the Nean-derthal man Surely the need to adapt to a frequently changing habitatforced H neanderthalensi s to develop sociocultural abilities that wereclosely related to the progressive evolution of intelligence and psycho-logical abilities52 The frequent environmental changes to which H ne-anderthalensis had to adapt made life immensely challenging In thewarmer and humid periods of the Eem period dense forests coveredthe landscape Population migration was only possible in the valleysThe fauna consisted of elephant deer stag aurochs bear and othersSuf cient food-supply in the direct surroundings allows one to believethat Neanderthal man was relatively stationary during this climatic pe-riod The excavated settlement of Weimar-Ehringsdorf was inhabitedduring this time During the initial phase of cooler climate the orachanged Fir and pine trees were common and formed large and humidforests The winters were cold and snow was plentiful even in sum-mertime the temperature remained low Not only non-migrating ani-mals were hunted by Neanderthal man herds of reindeer wild horsebison and mammoth provided suf cient opportunity for hunting Dur-ing the coldest periods the forests disappeared and made room for

52 Steven Mithen emphasises that natural history intelligence technical intelli-gence social and linguistic intelligence of Neanderthal man were all well developedbut there was still a lack of interaction between the four domains of the mind Cogni-tive uidity took place only between the domains of social and linguistic intelligence(Mithen 1996 143 and 147ff) The author of this article has a different opinion In gen-eral the lithic culture of Neanderthal man is the Mousterian which is still simple com-pared to the technology of the upper Palaeolithic On the other hand the lithic culturesare not strictly related to the one or the other human species Homo neanderthalensistoo was found together with the more advanced tools of the upper Palaeolithic whileHomo sapiens was found with the simple tools of the Mousterian culture Thereforedirect connections between a certain human species and its lithic culture cannot beproved The technical skills of the younger H neanderthalensis and early H sapiensobviously did not differ That means that there is no palaeanthropological evidence forthe assumption of fundamental difference between the minds of H neanderthalensisand H sapiens (Henke and Rothe 1999 275 Reynolds 1990 263ff)

Beginning of Religion 431

prairies and tundra The climate became dry with extremely cold win-ters and relatively mild but short summers The prairies were full ofgame which migrated with the seasons53

The Magic of Hunting in the Middle Palaeolithic

The hunting activities of the Palaeolithic man which Mircea Eliadeand other scholars take for granted are only able to be proved with ref-erence to later periods of ice-age At the town of Lehringen near Ver-den an der Aller the skeleton of an elephant had been preserved thathad been killed with the aid of a wooden spear found between the ribsof the animal This is impressive evidence of the fact that Homo nean-derthalensis was able to successfully hunt big game Therefore it canbe assumed that Mircea Eliadersquos precise conceptions of religion duringprehistoric times may at least be correct with regard to the people of theMousterian He describes this religion as ldquomagic-religious conceptionsof Palaeolithic manrdquo as follows54 The documents regarding the reli-gion of the Palaeolithic man are obscure he says but available Theirmeaning can be deciphered if the scholar succeeds in inserting thesedocuments into a semantic system55 This semantic system is alreadygiven by the results of investigations of recent hunter-gatherer commu-nities Their similar lifestyle offers suf cient certainty for identical orvery similar religions of recent hunter-gatherers and Palaeolithic manTherefore Homo neanderthalensi s believed that the animal is a beingquite similar to man but talented with supernatural forces He wasconvinced that gods such as the ldquoMaster of the Animalsrdquo or ldquoSupremeBeingrdquo existed The kill of the animal took place after a complicatedritual On the other hand rites must have existed which were linkedwith a skull-cult and deposits of long bones Similarly Ioan Coulianoargues that ldquoeither similar models of well-known primitive peoplesare referred to or one dispenses with any model The History of Reli-gion can only use the rst option as imperfect as it may be Scholars

53 See Henke and Rothe 1994 52554 Eliade 1978 15ff55 Ibid 18

432 Ina Wunn

have to endeavour to decipher the mental horizon of the people of pre-historic times by using the results of ethnographic and archaeologicalstudiesrdquo56 John Campbell concludes from the myths of known peoplesthat there must be close connections between the religions of Palae-olithic man and recent hunter-gatherers The following conviction isboth precondition and result of his investigations ldquoI nd that its mainresult has been its con rmation of a thought I have long and faithfullyentertained of the unity of the race of man not only in its biology butalso in its spiritual historyrdquo57 He proves his assumption with the helpof a comparison Under the title ldquoThe Stage of Neanderthal Manrdquo thereader nds the detailed description of the life habits of the small anddelicate Negritos of the Andaman Islands in the Gulf of Bengal butCampbell fails to prove the connections between the habits of a peopleof recent tropical Asia and an anatomically different prehistoric peo-ple which lived in boreal climates 100 000 years ago58 Another argu-ment of John Campbellrsquos is founded on archaeological facts The stoneblades of the Mousterian (the material culture of Neanderthal man ismainly Mousterian) are still very similar a wider range of differenttools was unknown at that time This means for Campbell that thecustom of tool-making was carefully handed down from one genera-tion to another comparably to customs of recent bushman culture Thisextraordinary attention is due to a certain feeling of the holy whichwas connected with the manufacturing and use of the tool59 The pass-ing on of Palaeolithic religion to religions of recent hunter-gatherercommunities serves as a proof that the myths of recent peoples origi-nated in the Palaeolithic and have been handed down till today withoutany changes This means that Joseph Campbell constructed a typicalcircular argument Todayrsquos behaviours and myths are taken as proofin order to postulate the existence of the same behaviours and mythsas practised by Palaeolithic man Then the postulate itself is taken as

56 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2757 Campbell 1987 v58 Ibid 365ff59 Ibid 364f

Beginning of Religion 433

a voucher to prove the unchanged existence of those myths from thePalaeolithic up to now

The opinion that Palaeolithic man already had a complicated reli-gion with certain notions of the holy and various rituals can be foundin nearly every religious reference work Fritz Hartmann writes forexample ldquoThe magic of the hunt belongs to this typically human con-ception of the worldrdquo60

Even if the consequences drawn from the archaeologically securedfacts in the past seem frequently exaggerated several sentences in thevolume of Johannes Maringer explain the intention of the authors Itwas the common statement that prehistoric man was a mere beast with-out a developed mind that made the opponents of this point of viewlook for counter-arguments which are no longer defendable in the lightof modern research results61 The use of ethnographic analogies to re-construct prehistoric religion is based on a speci c understanding ofthe evolution of religion In the nineteenth century Charles Darwinrsquostheory of biological evolution in uenced nearly all branches of sci-ence In the elds of the study of religion and anthropology scholarslike Edward Burnett Tylor or James George Frazer developed concep-tions of religious evolution which have strongly determined researchuntil today Tylor as well as Frazer were convinced that they couldprove an ascending development of religion from primitive origins tothe modern religions of the industrial age According to this theory thereligions of recent hunter-gatherer communities can be classi ed asrelics from ancient times62 This means on the contrary that it is pos-sible to reconstruct the consciousness of ancient people with the helpof knowledge about the religion of todayrsquos hunter-gatherer communi-ties However only a brief insight into the multiplicity of so-calledprimitive religions reveals that their contents and symbols are not sim-ilar by any means According to Max Raphael the faith-conceptions of

60 Hartmann 1957 403 Among the latest literature see for example Grim 19981107-1108 and Hultkrantz 1998 746-752

61 Maringer 1956 59ff62 Michaels (ed) 1997 41-60 and 77-89

434 Ina Wunn

recent hunter-gatherer communities cannot be consulted in order to de-rive from them a certain belief of prehistoric man Even people livingon a relatively primitive economical level up to the present day havebeen affected by their past which has in uenced their state of mindAs a result their ideas and religious conceptions changed in the samemanner as the belief system of modern communities did63 The an-thropologist Wilhelm Emil Muumlhlmann acknowledges the arguments ofMax Raphael when he emphasises that all known primitive religionsare younger than theological religions64 Even if ecological and eco-nomical prerequisites of different societies are the same they do notnecessarily have the same or a similar belief system identical ritualssymbols and practices Hermann Schulz emphasises ldquoKulturell aufdas engste verwandte Gruppen koumlnnen einen religioumls-symbolisch undartefaktreichen Ritualismus entwickeln (Sepik-Gebiet) oder innerhalbder elaborierten ritualsymbolische n Medien tendentiell nichtreligioumlseartefakt-arme Programme elaborieren (Kapauku)rdquo65

The arguments show that it is by no means suf cient to nd prooffor the hunting practices of Neanderthal man in order to imply any kindof religion and especially not a de nite and well-known religion

Bear-cult

The existence of the cult of the bear in the middle Palaeolithic pe-riod is taken for granted Aringke Hultkrantz writes ldquoDie Kulturen des ark-

63 Max Raphael writes ldquoMan hat diese Schwierigkeit umgehen wollen durchHeranziehen von Aussagen sogenannter primitiver Kulturvoumllker Diese nur in sehrengen Grenzen moumlgliche Analogie uumlbersieht daszlig auch diese Staumlmme eine Geschichtegehabt haben mdash eine regressive statt der progressiven der Kulturvoumllker Es liegt einunberechtigtes Vorurteil in der Annahme der Einfrierung des Gewesenen denn dielsquoPrimitivenrsquo nden sich selbst wo sie auf dem Stadium der Jagdwirtschaft stehengeblieben sind mit den alten Werkzeugen und Waffen einer anderen Umgebunggegenuumlber die starken den Einzelmenschen an Maumlchtigkeit uumlberragenden Tiere sindersetzt durch wesentlich kleinere und schwaumlchererdquo (Raphael 1978 78)

64 Muumlhlmann 1957 119865 Schulz 1993 189

Beginning of Religion 435

tischen Raumes sind Bruchstuumlcke einer palaumlolithischen Jagdkulturrdquo66

Friedrich Heiler67 refers to similar ideas as those expressed by JosephCampbell who describes the cult of the bear in an interesting buthardly well-grounded manner First Campbell refers to a bear-festivalamong the Ainu After the killing of the captured bear and during theceremonies the skull of the animal is put at the top of a long stick68

In a second step Campbell portrays Neanderthal man in impressiveterms ldquo when the remains of a strangely brutish yet manlike skele-ton were found in a limestone quarry not far from Duumlsseldorf in theValley of Neanderrdquo69 The following descriptions shortly mention thecaves of the Alps where the remains of the bears were detected Theexcavators had the impression that the arrangement of the fossil bonescould hardly be due to nature so they attributed this to the activitiesof H neanderthalensi s who were assumed to have killed the animalsand arranged their bones during certain ceremonies70 It is true thatnearly everywhere in the Arctic primitive peoples know certain ritu-als connected with the hunting of the bear71 The excavators of thecaves Emil Baumlchler and Karl Houmlrmann took these ceremonies of cir-cumpolar peoples to prove their hypothesis of an ancient bear-cult inprehistoric times72 In the following years several discoveries of simi-lar bear-caves seemed to support the hypothesis of cave bear worshipEmil Baumlchler himself discovered bear bone deposits at the Wilden-mannlisloch in Switzerland and in Sloveniarsquos Mornova Cave In 1946Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan excavated seven cave bear skulls arranged in acircle in Furtins Cave Saocircne-et-Loire In 1950 Kurt Ehrenberg secured

66 Hultkrantz 1998 75167 See Heiler 1979 7868 Campbell 1987 334ff69 Ibid 33970 Ibid 341f71 Edsman 1957 84172 Maringer 1956 95ff

436 Ina Wunn

a deposit of long bones arranged together with cave bear skulls in theSalzhofen Cave in the Austrian Alps73

The latest nd of supposed traces of prehistoric cave bear worshipwas published in 1996 In the Rumanian Bihor-Mountains ChristianLascu et al discovered a cave rich in palaeontologica l cave beardeposits74 Scholars such as Johannes Maringer or Aringke Hultkrantzrefer to the reports of the excavators when they interpret the depositsas the remainder of cult practice The historian Karl Narr also gives anaccount of the deposits of cave bear skulls and long bones but remainssceptical75

A detailed discussion of the nds of cave bear bones from a palaeon-tological and ethnographic point of view led to completely differentresults76 The careful and critical use of ethnographic analogues onwhich the theories of a cave bear cult is founded in the end leads toeven contrary results If H neanderthalensi s had known cave bear wor-ship its traces would have been found inside the settlements The re-mains of such a cult would have been the bone deposits of Neanderthalmanrsquos favourite and most dangerous game among which howeverthe bear did not rank Recent peoples who know the bear cult catchor kill a bear in his winter accommodation and bring it to their settle-ment There it is killed and eaten by the villagers under different ritualregulations The bones of the dead game are put into a holy place orare carefully buried near the village but never brought back again tothe dwelling of the bear

The most impressive arguments against cave bear worship comenevertheless from the bone deposits itself Crucial palaeontologica lobjections are to be stated rst of all Both the cave bear (Ursusspelaeus) which was extinct at the end of the last ice age and thebrown bear (Ursus arctos) which spread all over Eurasia since theEem period show a strong preference for cave accommodation There

73 See Lascu et al 1996 19-20 and Maringer 1956 91-9674 See Lascu et al 199675 Narr 1957 1076 Wunn 1999a 3-23

Beginning of Religion 437

they hide during wintertime and give birth to their young The caveswhere the relics of alleged bear worship were found are the naturalhabitat of the animals where they spend the long winters and hidetheir young At those places the bears sometimes died for severalreasons for example age illness lack of food Therefore their bonefossils are bound to be found in those places if they were not carriedoff by carrion eaters or removed by sedimentologica l processes Theoccurrence of cave bear bones in the caves of the ice age which servedgenerations of bear families as shelter is just what a palaeontologis twould expect

The proponents of Palaeolithic bear worship did not only think themere occurrence of bear bones in the caves to be remarkable butalso their alleged assortment and arrangement in which they werefound However there rst takes place an amassment of bear bones incertain places by the activities of the bears themselves as Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan correctly noticed The parts of skeletons of the deceasedanimals which originally are in their anatomical order are thrownin disorder or scattered by later generations of bears Sometimes theyare pressed to the walls where they are relatively protected againstfurther decay77 Also the outweighing of skulls and long bones is aresult of a process of natural decay and not due to human activitiesThe mentioned parts of the skeleton are relatively heavy and compactso that they are more able to resist decomposition processes thanthe small vertebrae ribs foot-bones or hand-bones A result of thoseprocesses is the natural selection of the bone material78 But notonly decomposition in uences the state of the bones During theirhistory the caves were ooded several times as the accumulatedsediments prove Such oodings do not remain without in uence onthe fossil material With high water level and stronger current all loosematerial is either rinsed away or carried for a certain distance andthen dropped at a place where there is a weaker current During theseprocesses the anatomical bone order is radically altered Therefore

77 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 3978 Ziegler 1975 44-45

438 Ina Wunn

the accumulation of several skulls in one place and the absenceof other bones is due to geological and sedimentologica l processesand not to human intervention The oating ability of sediments canbe reduced by prominent parts of the walls or unevenness of the oor resulting in some bone parts being deposited in the proximityof obstacles A concrete example of this effect is the discovery ofseveral skulls deposited in a crosslike pattern in the Cold Cave ofthe Bihor Mountains The obstacle which reduced the transportabilityof the skulls crucially was a stone at which the fossil skulls weredeposited79 Just as little as the assortment of the bone material isproof of human activities so the adjustment of the fossils is anunnatural process The movements of a transport medium be it windsediment or water are transferred to the material to be transportedso that the movement in a special direction leads to its assortmentTherefore the assortment of bear skulls is not due to human activitiesbut to the owing water or other transport mediums in the caves Itcannot be said clearly enough There was no cave bear worship inthe middle Palaeolithic period at all The bear caves show exactlywhat a palaeontologis t would expect Nothing suggests that the naturalprocess of decay and sedimentation was at any time interrupted ordisturbed80

Combined burials of man and cave bear

In connection with assumed bear worship the opinion was heldthat sometimes men and bear were buried together in one grave81 Asevidence served the excavations at Le Reacutegourdou near Lascaux whereunder a hill of debris both the remains of a bear and a Neanderthal manwere preserved The French archaeologist Fabienne May demonstratedthat the remains of the bear bore no connection with the human

79 See Lascu et al 1996 30 plate 380 Wunn 1999a 6ff81 Rust 1986 15

Beginning of Religion 439

skeleton and questioned whether there was a funeral at Le Reacutegourdouat all82

Skull deposits and skull worship

Just as the bear worship was regarded as irrefutable fact there washardly any doubt that Neanderthal man subjected the heads of thedeceased to a special treatment and set them up for ritual purposesOther scholars are convinced that Neanderthal man hunted fellowhumans to kill and eat them83 It is said that the skulls of the killedlater became the focal point of a ritual This hypothesis is suggestedby Ioan Couliano ldquoEinige Schaumldel sind in einer Weise verformtdie den Gedanken an ein Herausloumlsen des Gehirns nahelegenrdquo84

Alfred Rust expresses himself absolutely clearly He is sure that the nds of isolated lower jaws and craniums are closely connected withreligious customs85 Detailed and critically Johannes Maringer arguesthe question of the skull cult He discusses the nds which wereconsidered as proof of the presence of the alleged practices Thereis for example the crushed childlike skull from Gibraltar or the nds of human remains at Weimar-Ehringsdorf and particularly theoutstanding nd of the skull of Monte Circeo which is mentionedby every author as evidence of the described ritual practice Finallyhe comes to the following result ldquoDas Fundbild der Guattari-Grottespricht klar fuumlr einen Kult in dessen Mittelpunkt der Schaumldel standUrspruumlnglich scheint er auf einem Stock aufgesteckt gewesen zusein Einem heiligen Bannkreis gleich umgab ihn der Kranz vonSteinen Der ganze Houmlhlenteil erweckt den Eindruck als habe er den inder vorderen Houmlhle wohnenden Urmenschen als Heiligtum gedientrdquo86

and further ldquoDie Schaumldelsetzungen duumlrften aller Wahrscheinlichkeitnach eine Art Schaumldelkult darstellen in dem das Gedaumlchtnis der

82 Ibid 1583 Ullrich 1978 293ff See also the overview in Henke and Rothe 1999 27784 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2885 Rust 1991 19486 Maringer 1956 80

440 Ina Wunn

Verstorbenen gep egt und ihre Hilfe wie auch ihr Schutz fuumlr die Sippeer eht wurderdquo87 Even Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan agrees that the skull ofMonte Circeo is an intentional deposition of a skull but he refusesto draw any conclusions concerning religious customs88 On the otherhand he can prove that all other nds of isolated heads or jaws arethe result of taphonomic processes89 After a careful re-examinationof the original reports of the excavations Fabienne May states thatnone of the descriptions of the excavations is suf cient to con rm ordisprove the hypothesis of a ritual90 The discovery of a supposed cultsite at Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan where the skull of a child was set upbetween several skulls of ibex does not prove the hypothesis of a cultIn this case the remnants of ibexes and the skull of the child have noconnection at all91 Since it could be shown that even the skull depositof Monte Circeo was not the result of human activities but that thedamages of the skull were due to the work of hungry hyenas the lastargument in favour of a skull cult is disproved92

Cannibalism

Cannibalism has already been mentioned in connection with thedeposition of human skulls Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan expresses him-self as follows ldquoDie Existenz eines religioumlsen Kannibalismus imPalaumlolithikum mag wahrscheinlich sein doch laumlszligt sich dies bei dergegenwaumlrtigen Materiallage absolut nicht beweisen Und dennochspricht kein Autor von der palaumlolithischen Religion ohne fuumlr odergegen die Kannibalismusthese Stellung zu beziehen wobei in groumlszlige-rem Umfang auf ethnographische Beispiele zuruumlckgegriffen wirdrdquo93

But particularly those ethnographic analogies give strong argumentsagainst the hypothesis of prehistoric cannibalism The anthropologis t

87 Ibid 8588 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 5389 Ibid 54-5690 May 1986 1791 Ibid 33-3492 Henke and Rothe 1994 52793 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 56

Beginning of Religion 441

Gabriele Weiss and the archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher discuss thetopic of cannibalism carefully94 They state that the ethnographic ma-terial itself is frequently not convincing because it is based mainly onsensational reports of past adventurers There are no assertions by eye-witnesses but stories of man eaters were always reported by writerswho only stated that they had heard about those customs The cus-tom of cannibalism itself was always stated to have been given upjust several years before the arrival of the traveller95 Frequently theassumption that a certain people was guilty of cannibalism was usedpropagandistically in order to be able to lead a war against this peo-ple or to force them into slavery96 On the other hand it was a wellknown rumour in Africa even up to the beginning of this century thatEuropeans fed on the esh of African children97 It is argued by HeidiPeter-Roumlcher that there is no evidence of cannibalism among recentpeoples at all98 This means that it is nonsense to search for the reasonand the origin of that custom in prehistoric times It cannot be decidedto what extent Sigmund Freud with his hypothesis of the origin of hu-man society must be blamed for evoking the idea of early man-eatersIn his Totem und Tabu he made several statements about the origin ofhuman society claiming that at the beginning of prehistory a group ofhumans was ruled by a despotic patriarch until he was killed and eatenby his sons99 The subtitle of his book ldquoEinige Uumlbereinstimmungen imSeelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotikerrdquo100 re ects however the

94 Weiss 1987 142-159 and Peter-Roumlcher 198995 Volhard 1939 36996 Gabriele Weiss (1987 152) mentions the example of a decree of Queen Isabella

in 1503 who gave permission to enslave the Caribbean Indians because they weresaid to be man-eaters

97 Ibid 15098 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 On the contrary the American anthropologist Christy Turner

is convinced that the Anasazi an Indian people who lived in the southern parts of theUnited States during historical times did human hunting See Turner 1999

99 See Weiss 1987 44-45100 Weiss 1987 44

442 Ina Wunn

opinion of many of his contemporaries and colleagues and contributesto the picture of the mentality of Neanderthal man until today101

The facts on which the theory of prehistoric cannibalism are basedare usually poor Frequently it was suf cient to assume cannibalismexisted if a skeleton was found incomplete or not in anatomical or-der102 It is still considered a strong proof for cannibalism when splithuman bones occur as were excavated at Krapina The defenders ofthe cannibalism thesis argue that the remnants of human bones lookabsolutely similar to the scattered animal bones at the same excava-tion site Therefore they come to the conclusion that Neanderthal mantreated fellow humans in the same way as he treated game This argu-ment is still stressed by the anthropologist s Tim White and Alban De- eur Scattered bones of human beings and deer in the cave of Moula-Guercy show the same scratches103 This argument presupposes how-ever that the humans as well as the animals were killed by Neanderthalman Both the humans and the animals could however have been thevictims of carnivores for example hyena or cave lion or the scratcheson human and animal bones may be due to taphonomic processes104

This thesis would explain the remains of Krapina as well as the ndingsof Moula-Guercy In any case the identical treatment of human andanimal bones and the missing of any traces of a ritual do not promotethe hypothesis of a religious custom In this case Krapina and Moula-Guercy would prove that Neanderthal man hunted other humans formeat This seems however to be unlikely because the hunters of theMousterian lived in a habitat full of game which was for sure easier tokill than humans

101 Campbell 1987 339102 Maringer 1956 81f In the excavation report of the site Weimar-Ehringsdorf

cannibalism is not mentioned at all See Feustel 1989 391-393103 De eur et al 1999 128-131104 It is still more than dif cult to decide whether scratches on bones are due to

human activities to carnivores or to taphonomic processes The topic is still debated

among scientists For an overview see Henke and Rothe 1994 19-25

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

420 Ina Wunn

recently However the nding of a new African hominid speciesin 1994 considered to be at least 44 million years old is closestto approaching the roots of the human phylogenetic tree This newspecies was rst identi ed as Australopithecu s ramidus but accordingto the latest anatomical studies it seems to belong to a differentgenus Ardipithecus13 Ardipithecus ramidus is probably the ancestorof the so-called australopithecines who lived in wooded environmentsof eastern and southern Africa14 During the following two millionyears the australopithecine s developed into several species whichdisappeared in part after a comparatively short period Only onespecies most probably the Australopithecu s afarensis developed intothe rst member of the Homo lineage Even the rst members of theearly genus Homo show considerable variability in size and shape sothat they now have been classi ed as three different species Homohabilis who is at the beginning of the phylogenetic tree of the genusHomo H rudolfensis and nally H ergaster the ancestor of themodern human15

As a result of the latest research in palaeoanthropolog y (morphol-ogy and anatomy) it is impossible to maintain that Australopithecusand the early representatives of the species Homo pursued the nutri-tion strategy of hunters When Raymond Dart published his biologi-cal analysis of a childlike skull found in the area of Taung in 1925he discovered certain anatomical features which made it necessary forhim to classify the unknown species as a new biological taxon16 Aus-tralopithecus africanus DART 1925 held in biological terms an inter-mediate position between the well-known apes and the genus HomoThese anatomical features of the skull and therefore the brain arehowever not linked to intellectual abilities meaning that the bipedal-ism of the younger Australopithecus could lead to a change of con-

13 Henke and Rothe 1999 143ff14 The phylogenetic tree of Austalopithecus and Ardipithecus is still a main topic

of discussion among scientists See Henke and Rothe 1999 143ff15 Strait et al 1997 17ff Henke and Rothe 1999 17716 See Henke and Rothe 1994 248

Beginning of Religion 421

sciousness First assumptions that Australopithecus knew how to use re were based on a false interpretation of the facts The blackishpatches which were originally interpreted as traces of re were at-tributable to manganic discoloration The hypothesis that these earlyhominids mainly fed on meat had to be revised The fossil accumula-tions of bones found in certain places of the South African savannahwere caused by lions and hyenas From a palaeanthropologica l point ofview it is impossible that the different species of Australopithecus withtheir low brain volume of 310 ccm up to 530 ccm were able to thinkin abstract terms It is true that early hominids pursued the strategyof progressive brain development and therefore managed to occupya new ecological niche as carrion-eaters This strategy proved to bequite successful during the rst steps of the evolution of man but doesnot mean that Australopithecus Homo rudolfensis Homo ergaster andHomo habilis had necessarily better intellectual facilities than modernday chimpanzees17 From a different point of view the archaeologistStephen Mithen comes to the same conclusion He pleads for a certainmodel of the mindrsquos development during evolution deduced from evo-lutionary and developmental psychology18 Hominids as well as youngchildren seem to have intuitive knowledge in four fundamental behav-ioural domains Content-rich mental modules provide young childrenand probably our ancestors with certain abilities such as social intelli-gence19 intuitive biological knowledge20 technical intelligence21 andlinguistic intelligence Those domains of the mind determine the waya young child starts learning about language other minds and theirnatural and physical surroundings During individual development andevolution the multiple specialised intelligences start working togetherso that knowledge and ideas can ow between the former modules22

17 Grzimek 1972 517 and Goodall 199018 Mithen 1996 42ff19 Whiten 199120 Atran 199021 Spelke 1991 133-16822 Mithen 1996 64

422 Ina Wunn

But the ancestor of Australopithecus and Australopithecus himself stillhad a primitive mind with only powerful general intelligence a spe-cialised domain of social intelligence and several minor mental mod-ules comparable to the mind of recent apes and monkeys23 This meansthat Australopithecus was absolutely not capable of performing rites ordeveloping any religious ideas

A further crucial step in the direction of hominisation was thepreparation and use of tools by the earliest representatives of the genusHomo as Mircea Eliade emphasises He is convinced that the veryslow advancement of the rst lithic cultures is not connected to alow intelligence24 Eliade takes for granted that early humans of thelower Palaeolithic made their living mainly by hunting As a resultthose early hunters should have developed a reference system betweenhunter and killed animal which rst led to a kind of mythical solidaritybetween hunter and game and was the origin of religiosity25

The hypothesis that early hominids already were successful huntersis attributable to Raymond Dart who suddenly found himself at thecentre of general critical interest due to his exciting discovery of anew species26 Since humans according to Raymond Dart are theonly meat-eating primates his biological conclusions regarding theclassi cation of the skull of Taung would be supported by evidenceof similar behaviour of this early hominid species27 Therefore helooked speci cally for fossil bone beds which he interpreted to bethe remnants of the prey of Australopithecus In this context he alsodiscovered densities close to the bone beds which he thought to betraces of re Today it is known that those dense areas are merelymanganese discolorations Dartrsquos thesis seemed to be con rmed by

23 Ibid 9424 Eliade 1978 1625 Eliade 1978 16 1726 Many arguments against Dartrsquos classi cation of the ldquoBaby of Taungrdquo are due to

scepticism and envy Henke and Rothe 1994 24827 Also the hypothesis of Joseph Campbell is based on Dart See Campbell 1987

359f

Beginning of Religion 423

Louis Leakey in the Tanzanian Olduvai Gorge where the famousanthropologis t found remnants of an early hominid classi ed asZinjanthropus along with primitive stone tools Although there weresubstantial doubts about Dartrsquos thesis mdash how could a delicate creatureweighing approximately 45 kg be able to kill the large ungulatesof the African savannah mdash Dartrsquos point of view became generallypopular and accepted in the sixties28 Only intensive research regardingthe behaviour of carnivores and taphonomic and sedimentologica lprocesses made it clear that the fossil bone beds were the results ofdifferent forces in an ecological system seen as a whole29 The layersof the ndings were by no means the result of the activities of only onespecies and certainly not of the weak and delicate AustralopithecusAs a result of these investigations it is certain that the rst humansincluding Homo habilis fed on fruit vegetables and carrion and werenot at all able to hunt30 On the contrary the so-called ldquoBaby ofTaungrdquo had itself become the prey of a predatory animal The rststone tools the so-called choppers did not serve to kill the prey butto crack nut-shells and split open the bones of ungulates killed bylions or hyenas in order to obtain the precious marrow That wasthe single part of the prey that was left for Australopithecus or Homohabilisrudolfensis ergaster31

Neither Australopithecus nor Homo habilis nor Homo ergaster tsinto the category of a hunter The mythical solidarity between hunterand victim claimed by Mircea Eliade for the humans of the lowerPalaeolithic results from false assumptions Eliade assumes that in-telligence imagination and the activity of the subconscious of theearly hominids differed only slightly from the intellectual abilities ofthe modern Homo sapiens The results of modern palaeoanthropolog y

28 Even in the late seventies and early eighties the archaeologist Glynn Isaacadvanced a hypothesis concerning human evolution based on the assumption that earlyHomo consumed a large quantity of meat (Isaac 1978)

29 See Binford 1984 28-57 and Henke and Rothe 1994 355f30 Binford 1984 57 and Schrenk 1997 49 and 7231 Henke and Rothe 1999 187

424 Ina Wunn

and evolutionary psychology indicate that the intellectual capability ofthose early forms of hominids is in no way comparable to that of re-cent Homo sapiens As stone tools and remains of meals prove the

rst member of the genus Homo had developed only a very small do-main for technical intelligence and several tiny mental modules forinteraction with the natural world but had not yet full natural historyintelligence32 The discrete domain of social intelligence which theancestor of early hominids had already acquired developed during the

rst steps of human evolution into a more powerful and complex partof the mind Probably even a primitive kind of linguistic intelligencehad started to develop As Steven Mithen emphasises the intellectualcapability of the Homo habilis group was already higher than that ofAustralopithecus but nevertheless ldquolittle more than an elaborate ver-

sion of the mind of the common ancestorrdquo33 Therefore Australopithe-cus Homo rudolfensis and Homo habilisergaster were at the originof a development that encouraged the growth of hominids by forcingthem to occupy the niche of meat-eaters They were competitively suc-cessful because they developed the intellectual facilities allowing them

to use stone tools to serve their needs but not to think in abstract termsMircea Eliade also assumes that early hominids were able to hunt

successfully There is no archaeological evidence for this assumptionIt is certain that both Australopithecus and early Homo occupied the

niche of carrion-eaters Eliade himself was absolutely convinced thateven the rst of the hominids had a kind of religion that resembledin one way or the other the religion of recent hunter-gatherer com-munities He called upon his critics to present evidence on the non-religiosity of early hominids34 The palaeoanthropolog y and evolution-

ary psychology has since provided this evidence

32 Mithen 1996 104ff33 Ibid 11234 Eliade 1978 17

Beginning of Religion 425

2 Religiosity of Homo erectus and his Contemporaries

Homo erectus and his immediate descendants were the rst ho-minids who succeeded in leaving the African continent and to settlealmost everywhere in the Old World35 One of the oldest known Euro-pean fossiles is a jaw of the genus Homo discovered among the peb-bles on the banks of the Neckar river at the village of Mauer near Hei-delberg This jaw of Homo erectus heidelbergensi s is approximately650 000 to 600 000 years old36 Geologically the nd belongs to theperiod of Cromer This is a period between two long-lasting ice-agesthe Guumlnz- and the Mindel-periods when a relatively warm climate en-abled humans to occupy new habitats Primitive stone tools from theNeuwieder Becken and the latest excavations at Burgos in Spain provethat the European continent was inhabited at least 800 000 years ago oreven earlier Information on the life style of Homo erectus could onlybe gained from excavations at Bilzingsleben where an early settlementof Homo erectus could be found Geologically Bilzingsleben belongsto the Holstein period This means that the ndings at this place are notonly 200 000 years younger than the jaw from Mauer but completelyindependent of the rst appearance of a specimen of Homo erectus as aresult of an entire ice-age This period led to a characteristic change of ora and fauna which formed the landscape and ecosystem during the

35 The oldest human fossil of Europe was detected in 1994 in the Gran Dolina ofAtapuerca in Spain These early humans are about 780 000 years old These hominidsnamed Homo antecessor seem to differ signi cantly from the well known (Asian)Homo erectus and the African Homo ergaster which means that the early hominidsof Africa Asia and Europe belong to different species Several scientists emphasisethe following phylogenetic tree Homo antecessor developed from the African Homoergaster and succeeded to settle in Europe Here he became the ancestor of Homoheidelbergensis who himself developed into the European Homo neanderthalensisSee Henke and Rothe 1999 204-217

36 The remnants of four individuals of the species Homo antecessor which weredetected at the excavation site ldquoLa Gran Dolinardquo near Burgos belong to the eldestmembers of the genus Homo in Europe An isolated skull found near Isneria Italyis nearly as old Early tools from France have an age of between one million and twomillion years and prove that Europe was inhabited very early

426 Ina Wunn

rst conquest of Europe by a hominid The distance in time betweenthe ndings of Mauer and Bilzingsleben is re ected in the developmentof the culture While the tools of Homo erectus heidelbergensis werestill simple handaxes the Homo erectus bilzingslebensi s was alreadycapable of manufacturing developed weapons and tools Theoreticallythis made him capable of hunting for game

Anatomically H erectus bilzingslebensi s was more developed thanhis predecessor Therefore the way of life of H erectus heidelbergensismust have been even simpler and less advanced37 The excavation ofthe settlement at Bilzingsleben provides insight into the way of lifeof the younger Homo erectus The archaeological ndings of earlyman prove the following facts At Bilzingsleben a small group of earlyhumans camped at the shore of a small lake in not more than two orthree tents Here they seemed to have occasionally hunted a beaveror other small animals Their stone tools were suitable for huntingsmaller prey whereas no weapon was found which would have beeneffective enough to kill an elephant or a bison The distribution of theelements of the fauna supports this point of view38 Additionally theymay have fed on the corpses of dead animals which were probablyfound frequently along the shore of the lake Surely elephant and rhinobones which were found at the working sites and served as supportor work material originated from dead animals that were not killedby H erectus bilzingslebensi s One could conclude that they also ate sh eggs and vegetables and that the food was most likely cookedThe people of Bilzingsleben were already aware of a certain code ofsocial behaviour and it is also clear that there was some degree ofemotional exchange between certain members of the group There areno indications of any religious activities The comparison of Homoerectus bilzingslebensi s with recent hunter-gatherer communities isnot convincing due to the following facts The popular belief thatH erectus successfully hunted larger game has been disproved Manyof the ndings of fossil bone beds which were said to be due to

37 See Henke and Rothe 1994 407f38 Mania and Weber 1986 20ff

Beginning of Religion 427

the hunting activities of the H erectus are in the near vicinity ofwatering places Here the ungulates frequently became the prey ofpredatory animals Analysis of the individual age of the bones offossil mammals at Bilzingsleben and other Palaeolithic settlements ledto the conclusion that many of those animals died naturally39 The rst evidence that at least the younger Homo erectus was capable ofhunting larger prey came from Schoumlningen near Helmstedt Germanywhere a wooden spear about 15 meters long was found in a huntingcamp inhabited about 400 000 years ago40 Homo erectus had a brainvolume which was still quite small compared to the brain of recentHomo sapiens Only the younger H erectus is supposed to havebeen capable of verbal communication as anatomical investigation shave proven Though there is no direct relationship between brainvolume and intelligence behaviour or certain abilities scholars areconvinced that H erectus was quite primitive compared to H sapiensas the archaeological ndings related to his culture have revealed41

The results of evolutionary psychology seem to prove the followingfacts Obviously technical skills increased dramatically over those ofH habilis Natural history intelligence and social intelligence werealso well developed On the other hand the technical conservatismof Homo erectus over a period of about one million years is strikingThe only explanation for this contradictory evidence is to assume thatthe well developed multiple intelligences of the H erectus were stillcommitted to speci c domains of behaviour with very little interactionbetween them42 Thinking and communication in abstract terms whichare essential for religious awareness probably developed quite late

Though excavations like the camp of Bilzingsleben MarkleebergKaumlrlich or Bad Cannstadt and the results of archaeological psychologydo not support the hypothesis that early man performed any religiousrites and though the discussion of palaeanthropologica l facts prove

39 Henke and Rothe 1994 42840 Thieme 1997 807-81041 See Henke and Rothe1994 42442 Mithen 1996 115ff

428 Ina Wunn

that H erectus was not at all capable of performing complicated rit-uals it is still the opinion among scholars of the History of Religionand several archaeologists that ritual cannibalism was common amongearly human populations Thus Alfred Rust writes ldquoUnique nds fromAsia prove that cannibalism was exercised in the whole worldrdquo43 Al-fred Rust refers to nds of Homo erectus in the caves of Zhoukoudianwhich reveal many similarities to Bilzingsleben44 While Alfred Rustis convinced that the presence of several ldquosmashedrdquo human skulls isa clear sign of ritual cannibalism Johannes Maringer presumes thatskulls and lower jaws are the remnants of the deceased which had beenkept and worshipped by their family Similar customs are still evidentamong members of primitive cultures in Africa or Asia45 The palaean-thropologist s Winfried Henke and Hartmut Rothe express strong andjusti ed doubt about this assertion The analysis of several craniumsof early man gave evidence that the destruction of the skulls was dueto the activities of ancient hyena and normal taphonomic processes46

The archaeologist Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan had already noted in the six-ties ldquoThe conditions of the former excavations of Chou Kou Tien makeit dif cult to even nd a map of the site of skulls The skulls were ex-tracted from solid limestone and not even one of them is near to beingcomplete After decomposing into tiny sections they entered the gen-eral category of the animal remains It is dif cult to understand how themyth of head-collecting Sinanthropus could have assumed a de niteformrdquo47 Another victim of such prejudice is Karl Dietrich Adam withhis hypothesis that the skull of Homo erectus steinheimensis showstraces of having been subjected to postmortal manipulations48 Thedestruction of the base of the skull is his only criterion for the hy-pothesis that stone-age man was frequently the victim of ritual prac-

43 Rust 1991 17544 Ibid 17845 Maringer 1956 64-7146 Rust 1991 178f and Henke and Rothe 1994 42847 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 4948 Adam 1991 218

Beginning of Religion 429

tices Between the death of the individual and the later recovery ofthe fossil a number of taphonomic processes take place which havesigni cant effects on the later fossil One of those effects is the modi- cation of organic matter and its decay the assortment or destructionof hard sections as well as sedimentologica l processes Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan was able to show that the cranium and lower jaws are usuallywell preserved Therefore it is only due to taphonomic processes thatthese individual body parts survive and not at all due to human ac-tivities or postmortal manipulation49 In this connection it is necessaryto emphasise that scholars can only come to a decision based on a se-ries of complex investigations using a scanning electron microscopeas to whether scratches on fossil bones are due to violence caused bya stone tool or the teeth of a predatory animal Since there are no ar-chaeological ndings for the entire Palaeolithic or Neolithic period toprove the opening of the skull by humans none of the speculationsabout possible cult practice connected with human skulls is based onfacts50

3 Religion in the Middle Palaeolithic

From an anthropologica l point of view the European middle Palae-olithic is characterised by Homo neanderthalensi s51 This early form ofHomo sapiens or descendant of Homo heidelbergensis lived over a pe-

49 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 45 5550 Experiments with animal bones have shown that scratches made by stone tools

are absolutely equal to scratches caused by sand Those scratches occur frequentlyduring the process of embedding It is still dif cult to distinguish between traces ofhuman activities and traces of animal bites An examination is only possible with thehelp of a scanning electron microscope See Henke and Rothe 1994 20-24

51 The so-called Neanderthal-problem is however a source of heated debateOnly ten years ago many palaeanthropologists were convinced that Neanderthalman belonged to our species H sapiens His characteristic features were supposedto be due to the extreme climate of the ice-age In the meantime most scientistshave been convinced that Homo neanderthalensis developed directly from Homoheidelbergensis while the modern Homo sapiens developed during the same timein Africa and conquered Europe about 40 000 years ago See Henke and Rothe 1994433ff and Henke and Rothe 1999 272f

430 Ina Wunn

riod of nearly 100 000 years during which the landscape climate andliving conditions changed dramatically These environmental changesmight have contributed to the special anatomical features of the Nean-derthal man Surely the need to adapt to a frequently changing habitatforced H neanderthalensi s to develop sociocultural abilities that wereclosely related to the progressive evolution of intelligence and psycho-logical abilities52 The frequent environmental changes to which H ne-anderthalensis had to adapt made life immensely challenging In thewarmer and humid periods of the Eem period dense forests coveredthe landscape Population migration was only possible in the valleysThe fauna consisted of elephant deer stag aurochs bear and othersSuf cient food-supply in the direct surroundings allows one to believethat Neanderthal man was relatively stationary during this climatic pe-riod The excavated settlement of Weimar-Ehringsdorf was inhabitedduring this time During the initial phase of cooler climate the orachanged Fir and pine trees were common and formed large and humidforests The winters were cold and snow was plentiful even in sum-mertime the temperature remained low Not only non-migrating ani-mals were hunted by Neanderthal man herds of reindeer wild horsebison and mammoth provided suf cient opportunity for hunting Dur-ing the coldest periods the forests disappeared and made room for

52 Steven Mithen emphasises that natural history intelligence technical intelli-gence social and linguistic intelligence of Neanderthal man were all well developedbut there was still a lack of interaction between the four domains of the mind Cogni-tive uidity took place only between the domains of social and linguistic intelligence(Mithen 1996 143 and 147ff) The author of this article has a different opinion In gen-eral the lithic culture of Neanderthal man is the Mousterian which is still simple com-pared to the technology of the upper Palaeolithic On the other hand the lithic culturesare not strictly related to the one or the other human species Homo neanderthalensistoo was found together with the more advanced tools of the upper Palaeolithic whileHomo sapiens was found with the simple tools of the Mousterian culture Thereforedirect connections between a certain human species and its lithic culture cannot beproved The technical skills of the younger H neanderthalensis and early H sapiensobviously did not differ That means that there is no palaeanthropological evidence forthe assumption of fundamental difference between the minds of H neanderthalensisand H sapiens (Henke and Rothe 1999 275 Reynolds 1990 263ff)

Beginning of Religion 431

prairies and tundra The climate became dry with extremely cold win-ters and relatively mild but short summers The prairies were full ofgame which migrated with the seasons53

The Magic of Hunting in the Middle Palaeolithic

The hunting activities of the Palaeolithic man which Mircea Eliadeand other scholars take for granted are only able to be proved with ref-erence to later periods of ice-age At the town of Lehringen near Ver-den an der Aller the skeleton of an elephant had been preserved thathad been killed with the aid of a wooden spear found between the ribsof the animal This is impressive evidence of the fact that Homo nean-derthalensis was able to successfully hunt big game Therefore it canbe assumed that Mircea Eliadersquos precise conceptions of religion duringprehistoric times may at least be correct with regard to the people of theMousterian He describes this religion as ldquomagic-religious conceptionsof Palaeolithic manrdquo as follows54 The documents regarding the reli-gion of the Palaeolithic man are obscure he says but available Theirmeaning can be deciphered if the scholar succeeds in inserting thesedocuments into a semantic system55 This semantic system is alreadygiven by the results of investigations of recent hunter-gatherer commu-nities Their similar lifestyle offers suf cient certainty for identical orvery similar religions of recent hunter-gatherers and Palaeolithic manTherefore Homo neanderthalensi s believed that the animal is a beingquite similar to man but talented with supernatural forces He wasconvinced that gods such as the ldquoMaster of the Animalsrdquo or ldquoSupremeBeingrdquo existed The kill of the animal took place after a complicatedritual On the other hand rites must have existed which were linkedwith a skull-cult and deposits of long bones Similarly Ioan Coulianoargues that ldquoeither similar models of well-known primitive peoplesare referred to or one dispenses with any model The History of Reli-gion can only use the rst option as imperfect as it may be Scholars

53 See Henke and Rothe 1994 52554 Eliade 1978 15ff55 Ibid 18

432 Ina Wunn

have to endeavour to decipher the mental horizon of the people of pre-historic times by using the results of ethnographic and archaeologicalstudiesrdquo56 John Campbell concludes from the myths of known peoplesthat there must be close connections between the religions of Palae-olithic man and recent hunter-gatherers The following conviction isboth precondition and result of his investigations ldquoI nd that its mainresult has been its con rmation of a thought I have long and faithfullyentertained of the unity of the race of man not only in its biology butalso in its spiritual historyrdquo57 He proves his assumption with the helpof a comparison Under the title ldquoThe Stage of Neanderthal Manrdquo thereader nds the detailed description of the life habits of the small anddelicate Negritos of the Andaman Islands in the Gulf of Bengal butCampbell fails to prove the connections between the habits of a peopleof recent tropical Asia and an anatomically different prehistoric peo-ple which lived in boreal climates 100 000 years ago58 Another argu-ment of John Campbellrsquos is founded on archaeological facts The stoneblades of the Mousterian (the material culture of Neanderthal man ismainly Mousterian) are still very similar a wider range of differenttools was unknown at that time This means for Campbell that thecustom of tool-making was carefully handed down from one genera-tion to another comparably to customs of recent bushman culture Thisextraordinary attention is due to a certain feeling of the holy whichwas connected with the manufacturing and use of the tool59 The pass-ing on of Palaeolithic religion to religions of recent hunter-gatherercommunities serves as a proof that the myths of recent peoples origi-nated in the Palaeolithic and have been handed down till today withoutany changes This means that Joseph Campbell constructed a typicalcircular argument Todayrsquos behaviours and myths are taken as proofin order to postulate the existence of the same behaviours and mythsas practised by Palaeolithic man Then the postulate itself is taken as

56 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2757 Campbell 1987 v58 Ibid 365ff59 Ibid 364f

Beginning of Religion 433

a voucher to prove the unchanged existence of those myths from thePalaeolithic up to now

The opinion that Palaeolithic man already had a complicated reli-gion with certain notions of the holy and various rituals can be foundin nearly every religious reference work Fritz Hartmann writes forexample ldquoThe magic of the hunt belongs to this typically human con-ception of the worldrdquo60

Even if the consequences drawn from the archaeologically securedfacts in the past seem frequently exaggerated several sentences in thevolume of Johannes Maringer explain the intention of the authors Itwas the common statement that prehistoric man was a mere beast with-out a developed mind that made the opponents of this point of viewlook for counter-arguments which are no longer defendable in the lightof modern research results61 The use of ethnographic analogies to re-construct prehistoric religion is based on a speci c understanding ofthe evolution of religion In the nineteenth century Charles Darwinrsquostheory of biological evolution in uenced nearly all branches of sci-ence In the elds of the study of religion and anthropology scholarslike Edward Burnett Tylor or James George Frazer developed concep-tions of religious evolution which have strongly determined researchuntil today Tylor as well as Frazer were convinced that they couldprove an ascending development of religion from primitive origins tothe modern religions of the industrial age According to this theory thereligions of recent hunter-gatherer communities can be classi ed asrelics from ancient times62 This means on the contrary that it is pos-sible to reconstruct the consciousness of ancient people with the helpof knowledge about the religion of todayrsquos hunter-gatherer communi-ties However only a brief insight into the multiplicity of so-calledprimitive religions reveals that their contents and symbols are not sim-ilar by any means According to Max Raphael the faith-conceptions of

60 Hartmann 1957 403 Among the latest literature see for example Grim 19981107-1108 and Hultkrantz 1998 746-752

61 Maringer 1956 59ff62 Michaels (ed) 1997 41-60 and 77-89

434 Ina Wunn

recent hunter-gatherer communities cannot be consulted in order to de-rive from them a certain belief of prehistoric man Even people livingon a relatively primitive economical level up to the present day havebeen affected by their past which has in uenced their state of mindAs a result their ideas and religious conceptions changed in the samemanner as the belief system of modern communities did63 The an-thropologist Wilhelm Emil Muumlhlmann acknowledges the arguments ofMax Raphael when he emphasises that all known primitive religionsare younger than theological religions64 Even if ecological and eco-nomical prerequisites of different societies are the same they do notnecessarily have the same or a similar belief system identical ritualssymbols and practices Hermann Schulz emphasises ldquoKulturell aufdas engste verwandte Gruppen koumlnnen einen religioumls-symbolisch undartefaktreichen Ritualismus entwickeln (Sepik-Gebiet) oder innerhalbder elaborierten ritualsymbolische n Medien tendentiell nichtreligioumlseartefakt-arme Programme elaborieren (Kapauku)rdquo65

The arguments show that it is by no means suf cient to nd prooffor the hunting practices of Neanderthal man in order to imply any kindof religion and especially not a de nite and well-known religion

Bear-cult

The existence of the cult of the bear in the middle Palaeolithic pe-riod is taken for granted Aringke Hultkrantz writes ldquoDie Kulturen des ark-

63 Max Raphael writes ldquoMan hat diese Schwierigkeit umgehen wollen durchHeranziehen von Aussagen sogenannter primitiver Kulturvoumllker Diese nur in sehrengen Grenzen moumlgliche Analogie uumlbersieht daszlig auch diese Staumlmme eine Geschichtegehabt haben mdash eine regressive statt der progressiven der Kulturvoumllker Es liegt einunberechtigtes Vorurteil in der Annahme der Einfrierung des Gewesenen denn dielsquoPrimitivenrsquo nden sich selbst wo sie auf dem Stadium der Jagdwirtschaft stehengeblieben sind mit den alten Werkzeugen und Waffen einer anderen Umgebunggegenuumlber die starken den Einzelmenschen an Maumlchtigkeit uumlberragenden Tiere sindersetzt durch wesentlich kleinere und schwaumlchererdquo (Raphael 1978 78)

64 Muumlhlmann 1957 119865 Schulz 1993 189

Beginning of Religion 435

tischen Raumes sind Bruchstuumlcke einer palaumlolithischen Jagdkulturrdquo66

Friedrich Heiler67 refers to similar ideas as those expressed by JosephCampbell who describes the cult of the bear in an interesting buthardly well-grounded manner First Campbell refers to a bear-festivalamong the Ainu After the killing of the captured bear and during theceremonies the skull of the animal is put at the top of a long stick68

In a second step Campbell portrays Neanderthal man in impressiveterms ldquo when the remains of a strangely brutish yet manlike skele-ton were found in a limestone quarry not far from Duumlsseldorf in theValley of Neanderrdquo69 The following descriptions shortly mention thecaves of the Alps where the remains of the bears were detected Theexcavators had the impression that the arrangement of the fossil bonescould hardly be due to nature so they attributed this to the activitiesof H neanderthalensi s who were assumed to have killed the animalsand arranged their bones during certain ceremonies70 It is true thatnearly everywhere in the Arctic primitive peoples know certain ritu-als connected with the hunting of the bear71 The excavators of thecaves Emil Baumlchler and Karl Houmlrmann took these ceremonies of cir-cumpolar peoples to prove their hypothesis of an ancient bear-cult inprehistoric times72 In the following years several discoveries of simi-lar bear-caves seemed to support the hypothesis of cave bear worshipEmil Baumlchler himself discovered bear bone deposits at the Wilden-mannlisloch in Switzerland and in Sloveniarsquos Mornova Cave In 1946Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan excavated seven cave bear skulls arranged in acircle in Furtins Cave Saocircne-et-Loire In 1950 Kurt Ehrenberg secured

66 Hultkrantz 1998 75167 See Heiler 1979 7868 Campbell 1987 334ff69 Ibid 33970 Ibid 341f71 Edsman 1957 84172 Maringer 1956 95ff

436 Ina Wunn

a deposit of long bones arranged together with cave bear skulls in theSalzhofen Cave in the Austrian Alps73

The latest nd of supposed traces of prehistoric cave bear worshipwas published in 1996 In the Rumanian Bihor-Mountains ChristianLascu et al discovered a cave rich in palaeontologica l cave beardeposits74 Scholars such as Johannes Maringer or Aringke Hultkrantzrefer to the reports of the excavators when they interpret the depositsas the remainder of cult practice The historian Karl Narr also gives anaccount of the deposits of cave bear skulls and long bones but remainssceptical75

A detailed discussion of the nds of cave bear bones from a palaeon-tological and ethnographic point of view led to completely differentresults76 The careful and critical use of ethnographic analogues onwhich the theories of a cave bear cult is founded in the end leads toeven contrary results If H neanderthalensi s had known cave bear wor-ship its traces would have been found inside the settlements The re-mains of such a cult would have been the bone deposits of Neanderthalmanrsquos favourite and most dangerous game among which howeverthe bear did not rank Recent peoples who know the bear cult catchor kill a bear in his winter accommodation and bring it to their settle-ment There it is killed and eaten by the villagers under different ritualregulations The bones of the dead game are put into a holy place orare carefully buried near the village but never brought back again tothe dwelling of the bear

The most impressive arguments against cave bear worship comenevertheless from the bone deposits itself Crucial palaeontologica lobjections are to be stated rst of all Both the cave bear (Ursusspelaeus) which was extinct at the end of the last ice age and thebrown bear (Ursus arctos) which spread all over Eurasia since theEem period show a strong preference for cave accommodation There

73 See Lascu et al 1996 19-20 and Maringer 1956 91-9674 See Lascu et al 199675 Narr 1957 1076 Wunn 1999a 3-23

Beginning of Religion 437

they hide during wintertime and give birth to their young The caveswhere the relics of alleged bear worship were found are the naturalhabitat of the animals where they spend the long winters and hidetheir young At those places the bears sometimes died for severalreasons for example age illness lack of food Therefore their bonefossils are bound to be found in those places if they were not carriedoff by carrion eaters or removed by sedimentologica l processes Theoccurrence of cave bear bones in the caves of the ice age which servedgenerations of bear families as shelter is just what a palaeontologis twould expect

The proponents of Palaeolithic bear worship did not only think themere occurrence of bear bones in the caves to be remarkable butalso their alleged assortment and arrangement in which they werefound However there rst takes place an amassment of bear bones incertain places by the activities of the bears themselves as Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan correctly noticed The parts of skeletons of the deceasedanimals which originally are in their anatomical order are thrownin disorder or scattered by later generations of bears Sometimes theyare pressed to the walls where they are relatively protected againstfurther decay77 Also the outweighing of skulls and long bones is aresult of a process of natural decay and not due to human activitiesThe mentioned parts of the skeleton are relatively heavy and compactso that they are more able to resist decomposition processes thanthe small vertebrae ribs foot-bones or hand-bones A result of thoseprocesses is the natural selection of the bone material78 But notonly decomposition in uences the state of the bones During theirhistory the caves were ooded several times as the accumulatedsediments prove Such oodings do not remain without in uence onthe fossil material With high water level and stronger current all loosematerial is either rinsed away or carried for a certain distance andthen dropped at a place where there is a weaker current During theseprocesses the anatomical bone order is radically altered Therefore

77 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 3978 Ziegler 1975 44-45

438 Ina Wunn

the accumulation of several skulls in one place and the absenceof other bones is due to geological and sedimentologica l processesand not to human intervention The oating ability of sediments canbe reduced by prominent parts of the walls or unevenness of the oor resulting in some bone parts being deposited in the proximityof obstacles A concrete example of this effect is the discovery ofseveral skulls deposited in a crosslike pattern in the Cold Cave ofthe Bihor Mountains The obstacle which reduced the transportabilityof the skulls crucially was a stone at which the fossil skulls weredeposited79 Just as little as the assortment of the bone material isproof of human activities so the adjustment of the fossils is anunnatural process The movements of a transport medium be it windsediment or water are transferred to the material to be transportedso that the movement in a special direction leads to its assortmentTherefore the assortment of bear skulls is not due to human activitiesbut to the owing water or other transport mediums in the caves Itcannot be said clearly enough There was no cave bear worship inthe middle Palaeolithic period at all The bear caves show exactlywhat a palaeontologis t would expect Nothing suggests that the naturalprocess of decay and sedimentation was at any time interrupted ordisturbed80

Combined burials of man and cave bear

In connection with assumed bear worship the opinion was heldthat sometimes men and bear were buried together in one grave81 Asevidence served the excavations at Le Reacutegourdou near Lascaux whereunder a hill of debris both the remains of a bear and a Neanderthal manwere preserved The French archaeologist Fabienne May demonstratedthat the remains of the bear bore no connection with the human

79 See Lascu et al 1996 30 plate 380 Wunn 1999a 6ff81 Rust 1986 15

Beginning of Religion 439

skeleton and questioned whether there was a funeral at Le Reacutegourdouat all82

Skull deposits and skull worship

Just as the bear worship was regarded as irrefutable fact there washardly any doubt that Neanderthal man subjected the heads of thedeceased to a special treatment and set them up for ritual purposesOther scholars are convinced that Neanderthal man hunted fellowhumans to kill and eat them83 It is said that the skulls of the killedlater became the focal point of a ritual This hypothesis is suggestedby Ioan Couliano ldquoEinige Schaumldel sind in einer Weise verformtdie den Gedanken an ein Herausloumlsen des Gehirns nahelegenrdquo84

Alfred Rust expresses himself absolutely clearly He is sure that the nds of isolated lower jaws and craniums are closely connected withreligious customs85 Detailed and critically Johannes Maringer arguesthe question of the skull cult He discusses the nds which wereconsidered as proof of the presence of the alleged practices Thereis for example the crushed childlike skull from Gibraltar or the nds of human remains at Weimar-Ehringsdorf and particularly theoutstanding nd of the skull of Monte Circeo which is mentionedby every author as evidence of the described ritual practice Finallyhe comes to the following result ldquoDas Fundbild der Guattari-Grottespricht klar fuumlr einen Kult in dessen Mittelpunkt der Schaumldel standUrspruumlnglich scheint er auf einem Stock aufgesteckt gewesen zusein Einem heiligen Bannkreis gleich umgab ihn der Kranz vonSteinen Der ganze Houmlhlenteil erweckt den Eindruck als habe er den inder vorderen Houmlhle wohnenden Urmenschen als Heiligtum gedientrdquo86

and further ldquoDie Schaumldelsetzungen duumlrften aller Wahrscheinlichkeitnach eine Art Schaumldelkult darstellen in dem das Gedaumlchtnis der

82 Ibid 1583 Ullrich 1978 293ff See also the overview in Henke and Rothe 1999 27784 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2885 Rust 1991 19486 Maringer 1956 80

440 Ina Wunn

Verstorbenen gep egt und ihre Hilfe wie auch ihr Schutz fuumlr die Sippeer eht wurderdquo87 Even Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan agrees that the skull ofMonte Circeo is an intentional deposition of a skull but he refusesto draw any conclusions concerning religious customs88 On the otherhand he can prove that all other nds of isolated heads or jaws arethe result of taphonomic processes89 After a careful re-examinationof the original reports of the excavations Fabienne May states thatnone of the descriptions of the excavations is suf cient to con rm ordisprove the hypothesis of a ritual90 The discovery of a supposed cultsite at Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan where the skull of a child was set upbetween several skulls of ibex does not prove the hypothesis of a cultIn this case the remnants of ibexes and the skull of the child have noconnection at all91 Since it could be shown that even the skull depositof Monte Circeo was not the result of human activities but that thedamages of the skull were due to the work of hungry hyenas the lastargument in favour of a skull cult is disproved92

Cannibalism

Cannibalism has already been mentioned in connection with thedeposition of human skulls Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan expresses him-self as follows ldquoDie Existenz eines religioumlsen Kannibalismus imPalaumlolithikum mag wahrscheinlich sein doch laumlszligt sich dies bei dergegenwaumlrtigen Materiallage absolut nicht beweisen Und dennochspricht kein Autor von der palaumlolithischen Religion ohne fuumlr odergegen die Kannibalismusthese Stellung zu beziehen wobei in groumlszlige-rem Umfang auf ethnographische Beispiele zuruumlckgegriffen wirdrdquo93

But particularly those ethnographic analogies give strong argumentsagainst the hypothesis of prehistoric cannibalism The anthropologis t

87 Ibid 8588 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 5389 Ibid 54-5690 May 1986 1791 Ibid 33-3492 Henke and Rothe 1994 52793 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 56

Beginning of Religion 441

Gabriele Weiss and the archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher discuss thetopic of cannibalism carefully94 They state that the ethnographic ma-terial itself is frequently not convincing because it is based mainly onsensational reports of past adventurers There are no assertions by eye-witnesses but stories of man eaters were always reported by writerswho only stated that they had heard about those customs The cus-tom of cannibalism itself was always stated to have been given upjust several years before the arrival of the traveller95 Frequently theassumption that a certain people was guilty of cannibalism was usedpropagandistically in order to be able to lead a war against this peo-ple or to force them into slavery96 On the other hand it was a wellknown rumour in Africa even up to the beginning of this century thatEuropeans fed on the esh of African children97 It is argued by HeidiPeter-Roumlcher that there is no evidence of cannibalism among recentpeoples at all98 This means that it is nonsense to search for the reasonand the origin of that custom in prehistoric times It cannot be decidedto what extent Sigmund Freud with his hypothesis of the origin of hu-man society must be blamed for evoking the idea of early man-eatersIn his Totem und Tabu he made several statements about the origin ofhuman society claiming that at the beginning of prehistory a group ofhumans was ruled by a despotic patriarch until he was killed and eatenby his sons99 The subtitle of his book ldquoEinige Uumlbereinstimmungen imSeelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotikerrdquo100 re ects however the

94 Weiss 1987 142-159 and Peter-Roumlcher 198995 Volhard 1939 36996 Gabriele Weiss (1987 152) mentions the example of a decree of Queen Isabella

in 1503 who gave permission to enslave the Caribbean Indians because they weresaid to be man-eaters

97 Ibid 15098 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 On the contrary the American anthropologist Christy Turner

is convinced that the Anasazi an Indian people who lived in the southern parts of theUnited States during historical times did human hunting See Turner 1999

99 See Weiss 1987 44-45100 Weiss 1987 44

442 Ina Wunn

opinion of many of his contemporaries and colleagues and contributesto the picture of the mentality of Neanderthal man until today101

The facts on which the theory of prehistoric cannibalism are basedare usually poor Frequently it was suf cient to assume cannibalismexisted if a skeleton was found incomplete or not in anatomical or-der102 It is still considered a strong proof for cannibalism when splithuman bones occur as were excavated at Krapina The defenders ofthe cannibalism thesis argue that the remnants of human bones lookabsolutely similar to the scattered animal bones at the same excava-tion site Therefore they come to the conclusion that Neanderthal mantreated fellow humans in the same way as he treated game This argu-ment is still stressed by the anthropologist s Tim White and Alban De- eur Scattered bones of human beings and deer in the cave of Moula-Guercy show the same scratches103 This argument presupposes how-ever that the humans as well as the animals were killed by Neanderthalman Both the humans and the animals could however have been thevictims of carnivores for example hyena or cave lion or the scratcheson human and animal bones may be due to taphonomic processes104

This thesis would explain the remains of Krapina as well as the ndingsof Moula-Guercy In any case the identical treatment of human andanimal bones and the missing of any traces of a ritual do not promotethe hypothesis of a religious custom In this case Krapina and Moula-Guercy would prove that Neanderthal man hunted other humans formeat This seems however to be unlikely because the hunters of theMousterian lived in a habitat full of game which was for sure easier tokill than humans

101 Campbell 1987 339102 Maringer 1956 81f In the excavation report of the site Weimar-Ehringsdorf

cannibalism is not mentioned at all See Feustel 1989 391-393103 De eur et al 1999 128-131104 It is still more than dif cult to decide whether scratches on bones are due to

human activities to carnivores or to taphonomic processes The topic is still debated

among scientists For an overview see Henke and Rothe 1994 19-25

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

Beginning of Religion 421

sciousness First assumptions that Australopithecus knew how to use re were based on a false interpretation of the facts The blackishpatches which were originally interpreted as traces of re were at-tributable to manganic discoloration The hypothesis that these earlyhominids mainly fed on meat had to be revised The fossil accumula-tions of bones found in certain places of the South African savannahwere caused by lions and hyenas From a palaeanthropologica l point ofview it is impossible that the different species of Australopithecus withtheir low brain volume of 310 ccm up to 530 ccm were able to thinkin abstract terms It is true that early hominids pursued the strategyof progressive brain development and therefore managed to occupya new ecological niche as carrion-eaters This strategy proved to bequite successful during the rst steps of the evolution of man but doesnot mean that Australopithecus Homo rudolfensis Homo ergaster andHomo habilis had necessarily better intellectual facilities than modernday chimpanzees17 From a different point of view the archaeologistStephen Mithen comes to the same conclusion He pleads for a certainmodel of the mindrsquos development during evolution deduced from evo-lutionary and developmental psychology18 Hominids as well as youngchildren seem to have intuitive knowledge in four fundamental behav-ioural domains Content-rich mental modules provide young childrenand probably our ancestors with certain abilities such as social intelli-gence19 intuitive biological knowledge20 technical intelligence21 andlinguistic intelligence Those domains of the mind determine the waya young child starts learning about language other minds and theirnatural and physical surroundings During individual development andevolution the multiple specialised intelligences start working togetherso that knowledge and ideas can ow between the former modules22

17 Grzimek 1972 517 and Goodall 199018 Mithen 1996 42ff19 Whiten 199120 Atran 199021 Spelke 1991 133-16822 Mithen 1996 64

422 Ina Wunn

But the ancestor of Australopithecus and Australopithecus himself stillhad a primitive mind with only powerful general intelligence a spe-cialised domain of social intelligence and several minor mental mod-ules comparable to the mind of recent apes and monkeys23 This meansthat Australopithecus was absolutely not capable of performing rites ordeveloping any religious ideas

A further crucial step in the direction of hominisation was thepreparation and use of tools by the earliest representatives of the genusHomo as Mircea Eliade emphasises He is convinced that the veryslow advancement of the rst lithic cultures is not connected to alow intelligence24 Eliade takes for granted that early humans of thelower Palaeolithic made their living mainly by hunting As a resultthose early hunters should have developed a reference system betweenhunter and killed animal which rst led to a kind of mythical solidaritybetween hunter and game and was the origin of religiosity25

The hypothesis that early hominids already were successful huntersis attributable to Raymond Dart who suddenly found himself at thecentre of general critical interest due to his exciting discovery of anew species26 Since humans according to Raymond Dart are theonly meat-eating primates his biological conclusions regarding theclassi cation of the skull of Taung would be supported by evidenceof similar behaviour of this early hominid species27 Therefore helooked speci cally for fossil bone beds which he interpreted to bethe remnants of the prey of Australopithecus In this context he alsodiscovered densities close to the bone beds which he thought to betraces of re Today it is known that those dense areas are merelymanganese discolorations Dartrsquos thesis seemed to be con rmed by

23 Ibid 9424 Eliade 1978 1625 Eliade 1978 16 1726 Many arguments against Dartrsquos classi cation of the ldquoBaby of Taungrdquo are due to

scepticism and envy Henke and Rothe 1994 24827 Also the hypothesis of Joseph Campbell is based on Dart See Campbell 1987

359f

Beginning of Religion 423

Louis Leakey in the Tanzanian Olduvai Gorge where the famousanthropologis t found remnants of an early hominid classi ed asZinjanthropus along with primitive stone tools Although there weresubstantial doubts about Dartrsquos thesis mdash how could a delicate creatureweighing approximately 45 kg be able to kill the large ungulatesof the African savannah mdash Dartrsquos point of view became generallypopular and accepted in the sixties28 Only intensive research regardingthe behaviour of carnivores and taphonomic and sedimentologica lprocesses made it clear that the fossil bone beds were the results ofdifferent forces in an ecological system seen as a whole29 The layersof the ndings were by no means the result of the activities of only onespecies and certainly not of the weak and delicate AustralopithecusAs a result of these investigations it is certain that the rst humansincluding Homo habilis fed on fruit vegetables and carrion and werenot at all able to hunt30 On the contrary the so-called ldquoBaby ofTaungrdquo had itself become the prey of a predatory animal The rststone tools the so-called choppers did not serve to kill the prey butto crack nut-shells and split open the bones of ungulates killed bylions or hyenas in order to obtain the precious marrow That wasthe single part of the prey that was left for Australopithecus or Homohabilisrudolfensis ergaster31

Neither Australopithecus nor Homo habilis nor Homo ergaster tsinto the category of a hunter The mythical solidarity between hunterand victim claimed by Mircea Eliade for the humans of the lowerPalaeolithic results from false assumptions Eliade assumes that in-telligence imagination and the activity of the subconscious of theearly hominids differed only slightly from the intellectual abilities ofthe modern Homo sapiens The results of modern palaeoanthropolog y

28 Even in the late seventies and early eighties the archaeologist Glynn Isaacadvanced a hypothesis concerning human evolution based on the assumption that earlyHomo consumed a large quantity of meat (Isaac 1978)

29 See Binford 1984 28-57 and Henke and Rothe 1994 355f30 Binford 1984 57 and Schrenk 1997 49 and 7231 Henke and Rothe 1999 187

424 Ina Wunn

and evolutionary psychology indicate that the intellectual capability ofthose early forms of hominids is in no way comparable to that of re-cent Homo sapiens As stone tools and remains of meals prove the

rst member of the genus Homo had developed only a very small do-main for technical intelligence and several tiny mental modules forinteraction with the natural world but had not yet full natural historyintelligence32 The discrete domain of social intelligence which theancestor of early hominids had already acquired developed during the

rst steps of human evolution into a more powerful and complex partof the mind Probably even a primitive kind of linguistic intelligencehad started to develop As Steven Mithen emphasises the intellectualcapability of the Homo habilis group was already higher than that ofAustralopithecus but nevertheless ldquolittle more than an elaborate ver-

sion of the mind of the common ancestorrdquo33 Therefore Australopithe-cus Homo rudolfensis and Homo habilisergaster were at the originof a development that encouraged the growth of hominids by forcingthem to occupy the niche of meat-eaters They were competitively suc-cessful because they developed the intellectual facilities allowing them

to use stone tools to serve their needs but not to think in abstract termsMircea Eliade also assumes that early hominids were able to hunt

successfully There is no archaeological evidence for this assumptionIt is certain that both Australopithecus and early Homo occupied the

niche of carrion-eaters Eliade himself was absolutely convinced thateven the rst of the hominids had a kind of religion that resembledin one way or the other the religion of recent hunter-gatherer com-munities He called upon his critics to present evidence on the non-religiosity of early hominids34 The palaeoanthropolog y and evolution-

ary psychology has since provided this evidence

32 Mithen 1996 104ff33 Ibid 11234 Eliade 1978 17

Beginning of Religion 425

2 Religiosity of Homo erectus and his Contemporaries

Homo erectus and his immediate descendants were the rst ho-minids who succeeded in leaving the African continent and to settlealmost everywhere in the Old World35 One of the oldest known Euro-pean fossiles is a jaw of the genus Homo discovered among the peb-bles on the banks of the Neckar river at the village of Mauer near Hei-delberg This jaw of Homo erectus heidelbergensi s is approximately650 000 to 600 000 years old36 Geologically the nd belongs to theperiod of Cromer This is a period between two long-lasting ice-agesthe Guumlnz- and the Mindel-periods when a relatively warm climate en-abled humans to occupy new habitats Primitive stone tools from theNeuwieder Becken and the latest excavations at Burgos in Spain provethat the European continent was inhabited at least 800 000 years ago oreven earlier Information on the life style of Homo erectus could onlybe gained from excavations at Bilzingsleben where an early settlementof Homo erectus could be found Geologically Bilzingsleben belongsto the Holstein period This means that the ndings at this place are notonly 200 000 years younger than the jaw from Mauer but completelyindependent of the rst appearance of a specimen of Homo erectus as aresult of an entire ice-age This period led to a characteristic change of ora and fauna which formed the landscape and ecosystem during the

35 The oldest human fossil of Europe was detected in 1994 in the Gran Dolina ofAtapuerca in Spain These early humans are about 780 000 years old These hominidsnamed Homo antecessor seem to differ signi cantly from the well known (Asian)Homo erectus and the African Homo ergaster which means that the early hominidsof Africa Asia and Europe belong to different species Several scientists emphasisethe following phylogenetic tree Homo antecessor developed from the African Homoergaster and succeeded to settle in Europe Here he became the ancestor of Homoheidelbergensis who himself developed into the European Homo neanderthalensisSee Henke and Rothe 1999 204-217

36 The remnants of four individuals of the species Homo antecessor which weredetected at the excavation site ldquoLa Gran Dolinardquo near Burgos belong to the eldestmembers of the genus Homo in Europe An isolated skull found near Isneria Italyis nearly as old Early tools from France have an age of between one million and twomillion years and prove that Europe was inhabited very early

426 Ina Wunn

rst conquest of Europe by a hominid The distance in time betweenthe ndings of Mauer and Bilzingsleben is re ected in the developmentof the culture While the tools of Homo erectus heidelbergensis werestill simple handaxes the Homo erectus bilzingslebensi s was alreadycapable of manufacturing developed weapons and tools Theoreticallythis made him capable of hunting for game

Anatomically H erectus bilzingslebensi s was more developed thanhis predecessor Therefore the way of life of H erectus heidelbergensismust have been even simpler and less advanced37 The excavation ofthe settlement at Bilzingsleben provides insight into the way of lifeof the younger Homo erectus The archaeological ndings of earlyman prove the following facts At Bilzingsleben a small group of earlyhumans camped at the shore of a small lake in not more than two orthree tents Here they seemed to have occasionally hunted a beaveror other small animals Their stone tools were suitable for huntingsmaller prey whereas no weapon was found which would have beeneffective enough to kill an elephant or a bison The distribution of theelements of the fauna supports this point of view38 Additionally theymay have fed on the corpses of dead animals which were probablyfound frequently along the shore of the lake Surely elephant and rhinobones which were found at the working sites and served as supportor work material originated from dead animals that were not killedby H erectus bilzingslebensi s One could conclude that they also ate sh eggs and vegetables and that the food was most likely cookedThe people of Bilzingsleben were already aware of a certain code ofsocial behaviour and it is also clear that there was some degree ofemotional exchange between certain members of the group There areno indications of any religious activities The comparison of Homoerectus bilzingslebensi s with recent hunter-gatherer communities isnot convincing due to the following facts The popular belief thatH erectus successfully hunted larger game has been disproved Manyof the ndings of fossil bone beds which were said to be due to

37 See Henke and Rothe 1994 407f38 Mania and Weber 1986 20ff

Beginning of Religion 427

the hunting activities of the H erectus are in the near vicinity ofwatering places Here the ungulates frequently became the prey ofpredatory animals Analysis of the individual age of the bones offossil mammals at Bilzingsleben and other Palaeolithic settlements ledto the conclusion that many of those animals died naturally39 The rst evidence that at least the younger Homo erectus was capable ofhunting larger prey came from Schoumlningen near Helmstedt Germanywhere a wooden spear about 15 meters long was found in a huntingcamp inhabited about 400 000 years ago40 Homo erectus had a brainvolume which was still quite small compared to the brain of recentHomo sapiens Only the younger H erectus is supposed to havebeen capable of verbal communication as anatomical investigation shave proven Though there is no direct relationship between brainvolume and intelligence behaviour or certain abilities scholars areconvinced that H erectus was quite primitive compared to H sapiensas the archaeological ndings related to his culture have revealed41

The results of evolutionary psychology seem to prove the followingfacts Obviously technical skills increased dramatically over those ofH habilis Natural history intelligence and social intelligence werealso well developed On the other hand the technical conservatismof Homo erectus over a period of about one million years is strikingThe only explanation for this contradictory evidence is to assume thatthe well developed multiple intelligences of the H erectus were stillcommitted to speci c domains of behaviour with very little interactionbetween them42 Thinking and communication in abstract terms whichare essential for religious awareness probably developed quite late

Though excavations like the camp of Bilzingsleben MarkleebergKaumlrlich or Bad Cannstadt and the results of archaeological psychologydo not support the hypothesis that early man performed any religiousrites and though the discussion of palaeanthropologica l facts prove

39 Henke and Rothe 1994 42840 Thieme 1997 807-81041 See Henke and Rothe1994 42442 Mithen 1996 115ff

428 Ina Wunn

that H erectus was not at all capable of performing complicated rit-uals it is still the opinion among scholars of the History of Religionand several archaeologists that ritual cannibalism was common amongearly human populations Thus Alfred Rust writes ldquoUnique nds fromAsia prove that cannibalism was exercised in the whole worldrdquo43 Al-fred Rust refers to nds of Homo erectus in the caves of Zhoukoudianwhich reveal many similarities to Bilzingsleben44 While Alfred Rustis convinced that the presence of several ldquosmashedrdquo human skulls isa clear sign of ritual cannibalism Johannes Maringer presumes thatskulls and lower jaws are the remnants of the deceased which had beenkept and worshipped by their family Similar customs are still evidentamong members of primitive cultures in Africa or Asia45 The palaean-thropologist s Winfried Henke and Hartmut Rothe express strong andjusti ed doubt about this assertion The analysis of several craniumsof early man gave evidence that the destruction of the skulls was dueto the activities of ancient hyena and normal taphonomic processes46

The archaeologist Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan had already noted in the six-ties ldquoThe conditions of the former excavations of Chou Kou Tien makeit dif cult to even nd a map of the site of skulls The skulls were ex-tracted from solid limestone and not even one of them is near to beingcomplete After decomposing into tiny sections they entered the gen-eral category of the animal remains It is dif cult to understand how themyth of head-collecting Sinanthropus could have assumed a de niteformrdquo47 Another victim of such prejudice is Karl Dietrich Adam withhis hypothesis that the skull of Homo erectus steinheimensis showstraces of having been subjected to postmortal manipulations48 Thedestruction of the base of the skull is his only criterion for the hy-pothesis that stone-age man was frequently the victim of ritual prac-

43 Rust 1991 17544 Ibid 17845 Maringer 1956 64-7146 Rust 1991 178f and Henke and Rothe 1994 42847 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 4948 Adam 1991 218

Beginning of Religion 429

tices Between the death of the individual and the later recovery ofthe fossil a number of taphonomic processes take place which havesigni cant effects on the later fossil One of those effects is the modi- cation of organic matter and its decay the assortment or destructionof hard sections as well as sedimentologica l processes Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan was able to show that the cranium and lower jaws are usuallywell preserved Therefore it is only due to taphonomic processes thatthese individual body parts survive and not at all due to human ac-tivities or postmortal manipulation49 In this connection it is necessaryto emphasise that scholars can only come to a decision based on a se-ries of complex investigations using a scanning electron microscopeas to whether scratches on fossil bones are due to violence caused bya stone tool or the teeth of a predatory animal Since there are no ar-chaeological ndings for the entire Palaeolithic or Neolithic period toprove the opening of the skull by humans none of the speculationsabout possible cult practice connected with human skulls is based onfacts50

3 Religion in the Middle Palaeolithic

From an anthropologica l point of view the European middle Palae-olithic is characterised by Homo neanderthalensi s51 This early form ofHomo sapiens or descendant of Homo heidelbergensis lived over a pe-

49 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 45 5550 Experiments with animal bones have shown that scratches made by stone tools

are absolutely equal to scratches caused by sand Those scratches occur frequentlyduring the process of embedding It is still dif cult to distinguish between traces ofhuman activities and traces of animal bites An examination is only possible with thehelp of a scanning electron microscope See Henke and Rothe 1994 20-24

51 The so-called Neanderthal-problem is however a source of heated debateOnly ten years ago many palaeanthropologists were convinced that Neanderthalman belonged to our species H sapiens His characteristic features were supposedto be due to the extreme climate of the ice-age In the meantime most scientistshave been convinced that Homo neanderthalensis developed directly from Homoheidelbergensis while the modern Homo sapiens developed during the same timein Africa and conquered Europe about 40 000 years ago See Henke and Rothe 1994433ff and Henke and Rothe 1999 272f

430 Ina Wunn

riod of nearly 100 000 years during which the landscape climate andliving conditions changed dramatically These environmental changesmight have contributed to the special anatomical features of the Nean-derthal man Surely the need to adapt to a frequently changing habitatforced H neanderthalensi s to develop sociocultural abilities that wereclosely related to the progressive evolution of intelligence and psycho-logical abilities52 The frequent environmental changes to which H ne-anderthalensis had to adapt made life immensely challenging In thewarmer and humid periods of the Eem period dense forests coveredthe landscape Population migration was only possible in the valleysThe fauna consisted of elephant deer stag aurochs bear and othersSuf cient food-supply in the direct surroundings allows one to believethat Neanderthal man was relatively stationary during this climatic pe-riod The excavated settlement of Weimar-Ehringsdorf was inhabitedduring this time During the initial phase of cooler climate the orachanged Fir and pine trees were common and formed large and humidforests The winters were cold and snow was plentiful even in sum-mertime the temperature remained low Not only non-migrating ani-mals were hunted by Neanderthal man herds of reindeer wild horsebison and mammoth provided suf cient opportunity for hunting Dur-ing the coldest periods the forests disappeared and made room for

52 Steven Mithen emphasises that natural history intelligence technical intelli-gence social and linguistic intelligence of Neanderthal man were all well developedbut there was still a lack of interaction between the four domains of the mind Cogni-tive uidity took place only between the domains of social and linguistic intelligence(Mithen 1996 143 and 147ff) The author of this article has a different opinion In gen-eral the lithic culture of Neanderthal man is the Mousterian which is still simple com-pared to the technology of the upper Palaeolithic On the other hand the lithic culturesare not strictly related to the one or the other human species Homo neanderthalensistoo was found together with the more advanced tools of the upper Palaeolithic whileHomo sapiens was found with the simple tools of the Mousterian culture Thereforedirect connections between a certain human species and its lithic culture cannot beproved The technical skills of the younger H neanderthalensis and early H sapiensobviously did not differ That means that there is no palaeanthropological evidence forthe assumption of fundamental difference between the minds of H neanderthalensisand H sapiens (Henke and Rothe 1999 275 Reynolds 1990 263ff)

Beginning of Religion 431

prairies and tundra The climate became dry with extremely cold win-ters and relatively mild but short summers The prairies were full ofgame which migrated with the seasons53

The Magic of Hunting in the Middle Palaeolithic

The hunting activities of the Palaeolithic man which Mircea Eliadeand other scholars take for granted are only able to be proved with ref-erence to later periods of ice-age At the town of Lehringen near Ver-den an der Aller the skeleton of an elephant had been preserved thathad been killed with the aid of a wooden spear found between the ribsof the animal This is impressive evidence of the fact that Homo nean-derthalensis was able to successfully hunt big game Therefore it canbe assumed that Mircea Eliadersquos precise conceptions of religion duringprehistoric times may at least be correct with regard to the people of theMousterian He describes this religion as ldquomagic-religious conceptionsof Palaeolithic manrdquo as follows54 The documents regarding the reli-gion of the Palaeolithic man are obscure he says but available Theirmeaning can be deciphered if the scholar succeeds in inserting thesedocuments into a semantic system55 This semantic system is alreadygiven by the results of investigations of recent hunter-gatherer commu-nities Their similar lifestyle offers suf cient certainty for identical orvery similar religions of recent hunter-gatherers and Palaeolithic manTherefore Homo neanderthalensi s believed that the animal is a beingquite similar to man but talented with supernatural forces He wasconvinced that gods such as the ldquoMaster of the Animalsrdquo or ldquoSupremeBeingrdquo existed The kill of the animal took place after a complicatedritual On the other hand rites must have existed which were linkedwith a skull-cult and deposits of long bones Similarly Ioan Coulianoargues that ldquoeither similar models of well-known primitive peoplesare referred to or one dispenses with any model The History of Reli-gion can only use the rst option as imperfect as it may be Scholars

53 See Henke and Rothe 1994 52554 Eliade 1978 15ff55 Ibid 18

432 Ina Wunn

have to endeavour to decipher the mental horizon of the people of pre-historic times by using the results of ethnographic and archaeologicalstudiesrdquo56 John Campbell concludes from the myths of known peoplesthat there must be close connections between the religions of Palae-olithic man and recent hunter-gatherers The following conviction isboth precondition and result of his investigations ldquoI nd that its mainresult has been its con rmation of a thought I have long and faithfullyentertained of the unity of the race of man not only in its biology butalso in its spiritual historyrdquo57 He proves his assumption with the helpof a comparison Under the title ldquoThe Stage of Neanderthal Manrdquo thereader nds the detailed description of the life habits of the small anddelicate Negritos of the Andaman Islands in the Gulf of Bengal butCampbell fails to prove the connections between the habits of a peopleof recent tropical Asia and an anatomically different prehistoric peo-ple which lived in boreal climates 100 000 years ago58 Another argu-ment of John Campbellrsquos is founded on archaeological facts The stoneblades of the Mousterian (the material culture of Neanderthal man ismainly Mousterian) are still very similar a wider range of differenttools was unknown at that time This means for Campbell that thecustom of tool-making was carefully handed down from one genera-tion to another comparably to customs of recent bushman culture Thisextraordinary attention is due to a certain feeling of the holy whichwas connected with the manufacturing and use of the tool59 The pass-ing on of Palaeolithic religion to religions of recent hunter-gatherercommunities serves as a proof that the myths of recent peoples origi-nated in the Palaeolithic and have been handed down till today withoutany changes This means that Joseph Campbell constructed a typicalcircular argument Todayrsquos behaviours and myths are taken as proofin order to postulate the existence of the same behaviours and mythsas practised by Palaeolithic man Then the postulate itself is taken as

56 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2757 Campbell 1987 v58 Ibid 365ff59 Ibid 364f

Beginning of Religion 433

a voucher to prove the unchanged existence of those myths from thePalaeolithic up to now

The opinion that Palaeolithic man already had a complicated reli-gion with certain notions of the holy and various rituals can be foundin nearly every religious reference work Fritz Hartmann writes forexample ldquoThe magic of the hunt belongs to this typically human con-ception of the worldrdquo60

Even if the consequences drawn from the archaeologically securedfacts in the past seem frequently exaggerated several sentences in thevolume of Johannes Maringer explain the intention of the authors Itwas the common statement that prehistoric man was a mere beast with-out a developed mind that made the opponents of this point of viewlook for counter-arguments which are no longer defendable in the lightof modern research results61 The use of ethnographic analogies to re-construct prehistoric religion is based on a speci c understanding ofthe evolution of religion In the nineteenth century Charles Darwinrsquostheory of biological evolution in uenced nearly all branches of sci-ence In the elds of the study of religion and anthropology scholarslike Edward Burnett Tylor or James George Frazer developed concep-tions of religious evolution which have strongly determined researchuntil today Tylor as well as Frazer were convinced that they couldprove an ascending development of religion from primitive origins tothe modern religions of the industrial age According to this theory thereligions of recent hunter-gatherer communities can be classi ed asrelics from ancient times62 This means on the contrary that it is pos-sible to reconstruct the consciousness of ancient people with the helpof knowledge about the religion of todayrsquos hunter-gatherer communi-ties However only a brief insight into the multiplicity of so-calledprimitive religions reveals that their contents and symbols are not sim-ilar by any means According to Max Raphael the faith-conceptions of

60 Hartmann 1957 403 Among the latest literature see for example Grim 19981107-1108 and Hultkrantz 1998 746-752

61 Maringer 1956 59ff62 Michaels (ed) 1997 41-60 and 77-89

434 Ina Wunn

recent hunter-gatherer communities cannot be consulted in order to de-rive from them a certain belief of prehistoric man Even people livingon a relatively primitive economical level up to the present day havebeen affected by their past which has in uenced their state of mindAs a result their ideas and religious conceptions changed in the samemanner as the belief system of modern communities did63 The an-thropologist Wilhelm Emil Muumlhlmann acknowledges the arguments ofMax Raphael when he emphasises that all known primitive religionsare younger than theological religions64 Even if ecological and eco-nomical prerequisites of different societies are the same they do notnecessarily have the same or a similar belief system identical ritualssymbols and practices Hermann Schulz emphasises ldquoKulturell aufdas engste verwandte Gruppen koumlnnen einen religioumls-symbolisch undartefaktreichen Ritualismus entwickeln (Sepik-Gebiet) oder innerhalbder elaborierten ritualsymbolische n Medien tendentiell nichtreligioumlseartefakt-arme Programme elaborieren (Kapauku)rdquo65

The arguments show that it is by no means suf cient to nd prooffor the hunting practices of Neanderthal man in order to imply any kindof religion and especially not a de nite and well-known religion

Bear-cult

The existence of the cult of the bear in the middle Palaeolithic pe-riod is taken for granted Aringke Hultkrantz writes ldquoDie Kulturen des ark-

63 Max Raphael writes ldquoMan hat diese Schwierigkeit umgehen wollen durchHeranziehen von Aussagen sogenannter primitiver Kulturvoumllker Diese nur in sehrengen Grenzen moumlgliche Analogie uumlbersieht daszlig auch diese Staumlmme eine Geschichtegehabt haben mdash eine regressive statt der progressiven der Kulturvoumllker Es liegt einunberechtigtes Vorurteil in der Annahme der Einfrierung des Gewesenen denn dielsquoPrimitivenrsquo nden sich selbst wo sie auf dem Stadium der Jagdwirtschaft stehengeblieben sind mit den alten Werkzeugen und Waffen einer anderen Umgebunggegenuumlber die starken den Einzelmenschen an Maumlchtigkeit uumlberragenden Tiere sindersetzt durch wesentlich kleinere und schwaumlchererdquo (Raphael 1978 78)

64 Muumlhlmann 1957 119865 Schulz 1993 189

Beginning of Religion 435

tischen Raumes sind Bruchstuumlcke einer palaumlolithischen Jagdkulturrdquo66

Friedrich Heiler67 refers to similar ideas as those expressed by JosephCampbell who describes the cult of the bear in an interesting buthardly well-grounded manner First Campbell refers to a bear-festivalamong the Ainu After the killing of the captured bear and during theceremonies the skull of the animal is put at the top of a long stick68

In a second step Campbell portrays Neanderthal man in impressiveterms ldquo when the remains of a strangely brutish yet manlike skele-ton were found in a limestone quarry not far from Duumlsseldorf in theValley of Neanderrdquo69 The following descriptions shortly mention thecaves of the Alps where the remains of the bears were detected Theexcavators had the impression that the arrangement of the fossil bonescould hardly be due to nature so they attributed this to the activitiesof H neanderthalensi s who were assumed to have killed the animalsand arranged their bones during certain ceremonies70 It is true thatnearly everywhere in the Arctic primitive peoples know certain ritu-als connected with the hunting of the bear71 The excavators of thecaves Emil Baumlchler and Karl Houmlrmann took these ceremonies of cir-cumpolar peoples to prove their hypothesis of an ancient bear-cult inprehistoric times72 In the following years several discoveries of simi-lar bear-caves seemed to support the hypothesis of cave bear worshipEmil Baumlchler himself discovered bear bone deposits at the Wilden-mannlisloch in Switzerland and in Sloveniarsquos Mornova Cave In 1946Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan excavated seven cave bear skulls arranged in acircle in Furtins Cave Saocircne-et-Loire In 1950 Kurt Ehrenberg secured

66 Hultkrantz 1998 75167 See Heiler 1979 7868 Campbell 1987 334ff69 Ibid 33970 Ibid 341f71 Edsman 1957 84172 Maringer 1956 95ff

436 Ina Wunn

a deposit of long bones arranged together with cave bear skulls in theSalzhofen Cave in the Austrian Alps73

The latest nd of supposed traces of prehistoric cave bear worshipwas published in 1996 In the Rumanian Bihor-Mountains ChristianLascu et al discovered a cave rich in palaeontologica l cave beardeposits74 Scholars such as Johannes Maringer or Aringke Hultkrantzrefer to the reports of the excavators when they interpret the depositsas the remainder of cult practice The historian Karl Narr also gives anaccount of the deposits of cave bear skulls and long bones but remainssceptical75

A detailed discussion of the nds of cave bear bones from a palaeon-tological and ethnographic point of view led to completely differentresults76 The careful and critical use of ethnographic analogues onwhich the theories of a cave bear cult is founded in the end leads toeven contrary results If H neanderthalensi s had known cave bear wor-ship its traces would have been found inside the settlements The re-mains of such a cult would have been the bone deposits of Neanderthalmanrsquos favourite and most dangerous game among which howeverthe bear did not rank Recent peoples who know the bear cult catchor kill a bear in his winter accommodation and bring it to their settle-ment There it is killed and eaten by the villagers under different ritualregulations The bones of the dead game are put into a holy place orare carefully buried near the village but never brought back again tothe dwelling of the bear

The most impressive arguments against cave bear worship comenevertheless from the bone deposits itself Crucial palaeontologica lobjections are to be stated rst of all Both the cave bear (Ursusspelaeus) which was extinct at the end of the last ice age and thebrown bear (Ursus arctos) which spread all over Eurasia since theEem period show a strong preference for cave accommodation There

73 See Lascu et al 1996 19-20 and Maringer 1956 91-9674 See Lascu et al 199675 Narr 1957 1076 Wunn 1999a 3-23

Beginning of Religion 437

they hide during wintertime and give birth to their young The caveswhere the relics of alleged bear worship were found are the naturalhabitat of the animals where they spend the long winters and hidetheir young At those places the bears sometimes died for severalreasons for example age illness lack of food Therefore their bonefossils are bound to be found in those places if they were not carriedoff by carrion eaters or removed by sedimentologica l processes Theoccurrence of cave bear bones in the caves of the ice age which servedgenerations of bear families as shelter is just what a palaeontologis twould expect

The proponents of Palaeolithic bear worship did not only think themere occurrence of bear bones in the caves to be remarkable butalso their alleged assortment and arrangement in which they werefound However there rst takes place an amassment of bear bones incertain places by the activities of the bears themselves as Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan correctly noticed The parts of skeletons of the deceasedanimals which originally are in their anatomical order are thrownin disorder or scattered by later generations of bears Sometimes theyare pressed to the walls where they are relatively protected againstfurther decay77 Also the outweighing of skulls and long bones is aresult of a process of natural decay and not due to human activitiesThe mentioned parts of the skeleton are relatively heavy and compactso that they are more able to resist decomposition processes thanthe small vertebrae ribs foot-bones or hand-bones A result of thoseprocesses is the natural selection of the bone material78 But notonly decomposition in uences the state of the bones During theirhistory the caves were ooded several times as the accumulatedsediments prove Such oodings do not remain without in uence onthe fossil material With high water level and stronger current all loosematerial is either rinsed away or carried for a certain distance andthen dropped at a place where there is a weaker current During theseprocesses the anatomical bone order is radically altered Therefore

77 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 3978 Ziegler 1975 44-45

438 Ina Wunn

the accumulation of several skulls in one place and the absenceof other bones is due to geological and sedimentologica l processesand not to human intervention The oating ability of sediments canbe reduced by prominent parts of the walls or unevenness of the oor resulting in some bone parts being deposited in the proximityof obstacles A concrete example of this effect is the discovery ofseveral skulls deposited in a crosslike pattern in the Cold Cave ofthe Bihor Mountains The obstacle which reduced the transportabilityof the skulls crucially was a stone at which the fossil skulls weredeposited79 Just as little as the assortment of the bone material isproof of human activities so the adjustment of the fossils is anunnatural process The movements of a transport medium be it windsediment or water are transferred to the material to be transportedso that the movement in a special direction leads to its assortmentTherefore the assortment of bear skulls is not due to human activitiesbut to the owing water or other transport mediums in the caves Itcannot be said clearly enough There was no cave bear worship inthe middle Palaeolithic period at all The bear caves show exactlywhat a palaeontologis t would expect Nothing suggests that the naturalprocess of decay and sedimentation was at any time interrupted ordisturbed80

Combined burials of man and cave bear

In connection with assumed bear worship the opinion was heldthat sometimes men and bear were buried together in one grave81 Asevidence served the excavations at Le Reacutegourdou near Lascaux whereunder a hill of debris both the remains of a bear and a Neanderthal manwere preserved The French archaeologist Fabienne May demonstratedthat the remains of the bear bore no connection with the human

79 See Lascu et al 1996 30 plate 380 Wunn 1999a 6ff81 Rust 1986 15

Beginning of Religion 439

skeleton and questioned whether there was a funeral at Le Reacutegourdouat all82

Skull deposits and skull worship

Just as the bear worship was regarded as irrefutable fact there washardly any doubt that Neanderthal man subjected the heads of thedeceased to a special treatment and set them up for ritual purposesOther scholars are convinced that Neanderthal man hunted fellowhumans to kill and eat them83 It is said that the skulls of the killedlater became the focal point of a ritual This hypothesis is suggestedby Ioan Couliano ldquoEinige Schaumldel sind in einer Weise verformtdie den Gedanken an ein Herausloumlsen des Gehirns nahelegenrdquo84

Alfred Rust expresses himself absolutely clearly He is sure that the nds of isolated lower jaws and craniums are closely connected withreligious customs85 Detailed and critically Johannes Maringer arguesthe question of the skull cult He discusses the nds which wereconsidered as proof of the presence of the alleged practices Thereis for example the crushed childlike skull from Gibraltar or the nds of human remains at Weimar-Ehringsdorf and particularly theoutstanding nd of the skull of Monte Circeo which is mentionedby every author as evidence of the described ritual practice Finallyhe comes to the following result ldquoDas Fundbild der Guattari-Grottespricht klar fuumlr einen Kult in dessen Mittelpunkt der Schaumldel standUrspruumlnglich scheint er auf einem Stock aufgesteckt gewesen zusein Einem heiligen Bannkreis gleich umgab ihn der Kranz vonSteinen Der ganze Houmlhlenteil erweckt den Eindruck als habe er den inder vorderen Houmlhle wohnenden Urmenschen als Heiligtum gedientrdquo86

and further ldquoDie Schaumldelsetzungen duumlrften aller Wahrscheinlichkeitnach eine Art Schaumldelkult darstellen in dem das Gedaumlchtnis der

82 Ibid 1583 Ullrich 1978 293ff See also the overview in Henke and Rothe 1999 27784 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2885 Rust 1991 19486 Maringer 1956 80

440 Ina Wunn

Verstorbenen gep egt und ihre Hilfe wie auch ihr Schutz fuumlr die Sippeer eht wurderdquo87 Even Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan agrees that the skull ofMonte Circeo is an intentional deposition of a skull but he refusesto draw any conclusions concerning religious customs88 On the otherhand he can prove that all other nds of isolated heads or jaws arethe result of taphonomic processes89 After a careful re-examinationof the original reports of the excavations Fabienne May states thatnone of the descriptions of the excavations is suf cient to con rm ordisprove the hypothesis of a ritual90 The discovery of a supposed cultsite at Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan where the skull of a child was set upbetween several skulls of ibex does not prove the hypothesis of a cultIn this case the remnants of ibexes and the skull of the child have noconnection at all91 Since it could be shown that even the skull depositof Monte Circeo was not the result of human activities but that thedamages of the skull were due to the work of hungry hyenas the lastargument in favour of a skull cult is disproved92

Cannibalism

Cannibalism has already been mentioned in connection with thedeposition of human skulls Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan expresses him-self as follows ldquoDie Existenz eines religioumlsen Kannibalismus imPalaumlolithikum mag wahrscheinlich sein doch laumlszligt sich dies bei dergegenwaumlrtigen Materiallage absolut nicht beweisen Und dennochspricht kein Autor von der palaumlolithischen Religion ohne fuumlr odergegen die Kannibalismusthese Stellung zu beziehen wobei in groumlszlige-rem Umfang auf ethnographische Beispiele zuruumlckgegriffen wirdrdquo93

But particularly those ethnographic analogies give strong argumentsagainst the hypothesis of prehistoric cannibalism The anthropologis t

87 Ibid 8588 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 5389 Ibid 54-5690 May 1986 1791 Ibid 33-3492 Henke and Rothe 1994 52793 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 56

Beginning of Religion 441

Gabriele Weiss and the archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher discuss thetopic of cannibalism carefully94 They state that the ethnographic ma-terial itself is frequently not convincing because it is based mainly onsensational reports of past adventurers There are no assertions by eye-witnesses but stories of man eaters were always reported by writerswho only stated that they had heard about those customs The cus-tom of cannibalism itself was always stated to have been given upjust several years before the arrival of the traveller95 Frequently theassumption that a certain people was guilty of cannibalism was usedpropagandistically in order to be able to lead a war against this peo-ple or to force them into slavery96 On the other hand it was a wellknown rumour in Africa even up to the beginning of this century thatEuropeans fed on the esh of African children97 It is argued by HeidiPeter-Roumlcher that there is no evidence of cannibalism among recentpeoples at all98 This means that it is nonsense to search for the reasonand the origin of that custom in prehistoric times It cannot be decidedto what extent Sigmund Freud with his hypothesis of the origin of hu-man society must be blamed for evoking the idea of early man-eatersIn his Totem und Tabu he made several statements about the origin ofhuman society claiming that at the beginning of prehistory a group ofhumans was ruled by a despotic patriarch until he was killed and eatenby his sons99 The subtitle of his book ldquoEinige Uumlbereinstimmungen imSeelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotikerrdquo100 re ects however the

94 Weiss 1987 142-159 and Peter-Roumlcher 198995 Volhard 1939 36996 Gabriele Weiss (1987 152) mentions the example of a decree of Queen Isabella

in 1503 who gave permission to enslave the Caribbean Indians because they weresaid to be man-eaters

97 Ibid 15098 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 On the contrary the American anthropologist Christy Turner

is convinced that the Anasazi an Indian people who lived in the southern parts of theUnited States during historical times did human hunting See Turner 1999

99 See Weiss 1987 44-45100 Weiss 1987 44

442 Ina Wunn

opinion of many of his contemporaries and colleagues and contributesto the picture of the mentality of Neanderthal man until today101

The facts on which the theory of prehistoric cannibalism are basedare usually poor Frequently it was suf cient to assume cannibalismexisted if a skeleton was found incomplete or not in anatomical or-der102 It is still considered a strong proof for cannibalism when splithuman bones occur as were excavated at Krapina The defenders ofthe cannibalism thesis argue that the remnants of human bones lookabsolutely similar to the scattered animal bones at the same excava-tion site Therefore they come to the conclusion that Neanderthal mantreated fellow humans in the same way as he treated game This argu-ment is still stressed by the anthropologist s Tim White and Alban De- eur Scattered bones of human beings and deer in the cave of Moula-Guercy show the same scratches103 This argument presupposes how-ever that the humans as well as the animals were killed by Neanderthalman Both the humans and the animals could however have been thevictims of carnivores for example hyena or cave lion or the scratcheson human and animal bones may be due to taphonomic processes104

This thesis would explain the remains of Krapina as well as the ndingsof Moula-Guercy In any case the identical treatment of human andanimal bones and the missing of any traces of a ritual do not promotethe hypothesis of a religious custom In this case Krapina and Moula-Guercy would prove that Neanderthal man hunted other humans formeat This seems however to be unlikely because the hunters of theMousterian lived in a habitat full of game which was for sure easier tokill than humans

101 Campbell 1987 339102 Maringer 1956 81f In the excavation report of the site Weimar-Ehringsdorf

cannibalism is not mentioned at all See Feustel 1989 391-393103 De eur et al 1999 128-131104 It is still more than dif cult to decide whether scratches on bones are due to

human activities to carnivores or to taphonomic processes The topic is still debated

among scientists For an overview see Henke and Rothe 1994 19-25

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

422 Ina Wunn

But the ancestor of Australopithecus and Australopithecus himself stillhad a primitive mind with only powerful general intelligence a spe-cialised domain of social intelligence and several minor mental mod-ules comparable to the mind of recent apes and monkeys23 This meansthat Australopithecus was absolutely not capable of performing rites ordeveloping any religious ideas

A further crucial step in the direction of hominisation was thepreparation and use of tools by the earliest representatives of the genusHomo as Mircea Eliade emphasises He is convinced that the veryslow advancement of the rst lithic cultures is not connected to alow intelligence24 Eliade takes for granted that early humans of thelower Palaeolithic made their living mainly by hunting As a resultthose early hunters should have developed a reference system betweenhunter and killed animal which rst led to a kind of mythical solidaritybetween hunter and game and was the origin of religiosity25

The hypothesis that early hominids already were successful huntersis attributable to Raymond Dart who suddenly found himself at thecentre of general critical interest due to his exciting discovery of anew species26 Since humans according to Raymond Dart are theonly meat-eating primates his biological conclusions regarding theclassi cation of the skull of Taung would be supported by evidenceof similar behaviour of this early hominid species27 Therefore helooked speci cally for fossil bone beds which he interpreted to bethe remnants of the prey of Australopithecus In this context he alsodiscovered densities close to the bone beds which he thought to betraces of re Today it is known that those dense areas are merelymanganese discolorations Dartrsquos thesis seemed to be con rmed by

23 Ibid 9424 Eliade 1978 1625 Eliade 1978 16 1726 Many arguments against Dartrsquos classi cation of the ldquoBaby of Taungrdquo are due to

scepticism and envy Henke and Rothe 1994 24827 Also the hypothesis of Joseph Campbell is based on Dart See Campbell 1987

359f

Beginning of Religion 423

Louis Leakey in the Tanzanian Olduvai Gorge where the famousanthropologis t found remnants of an early hominid classi ed asZinjanthropus along with primitive stone tools Although there weresubstantial doubts about Dartrsquos thesis mdash how could a delicate creatureweighing approximately 45 kg be able to kill the large ungulatesof the African savannah mdash Dartrsquos point of view became generallypopular and accepted in the sixties28 Only intensive research regardingthe behaviour of carnivores and taphonomic and sedimentologica lprocesses made it clear that the fossil bone beds were the results ofdifferent forces in an ecological system seen as a whole29 The layersof the ndings were by no means the result of the activities of only onespecies and certainly not of the weak and delicate AustralopithecusAs a result of these investigations it is certain that the rst humansincluding Homo habilis fed on fruit vegetables and carrion and werenot at all able to hunt30 On the contrary the so-called ldquoBaby ofTaungrdquo had itself become the prey of a predatory animal The rststone tools the so-called choppers did not serve to kill the prey butto crack nut-shells and split open the bones of ungulates killed bylions or hyenas in order to obtain the precious marrow That wasthe single part of the prey that was left for Australopithecus or Homohabilisrudolfensis ergaster31

Neither Australopithecus nor Homo habilis nor Homo ergaster tsinto the category of a hunter The mythical solidarity between hunterand victim claimed by Mircea Eliade for the humans of the lowerPalaeolithic results from false assumptions Eliade assumes that in-telligence imagination and the activity of the subconscious of theearly hominids differed only slightly from the intellectual abilities ofthe modern Homo sapiens The results of modern palaeoanthropolog y

28 Even in the late seventies and early eighties the archaeologist Glynn Isaacadvanced a hypothesis concerning human evolution based on the assumption that earlyHomo consumed a large quantity of meat (Isaac 1978)

29 See Binford 1984 28-57 and Henke and Rothe 1994 355f30 Binford 1984 57 and Schrenk 1997 49 and 7231 Henke and Rothe 1999 187

424 Ina Wunn

and evolutionary psychology indicate that the intellectual capability ofthose early forms of hominids is in no way comparable to that of re-cent Homo sapiens As stone tools and remains of meals prove the

rst member of the genus Homo had developed only a very small do-main for technical intelligence and several tiny mental modules forinteraction with the natural world but had not yet full natural historyintelligence32 The discrete domain of social intelligence which theancestor of early hominids had already acquired developed during the

rst steps of human evolution into a more powerful and complex partof the mind Probably even a primitive kind of linguistic intelligencehad started to develop As Steven Mithen emphasises the intellectualcapability of the Homo habilis group was already higher than that ofAustralopithecus but nevertheless ldquolittle more than an elaborate ver-

sion of the mind of the common ancestorrdquo33 Therefore Australopithe-cus Homo rudolfensis and Homo habilisergaster were at the originof a development that encouraged the growth of hominids by forcingthem to occupy the niche of meat-eaters They were competitively suc-cessful because they developed the intellectual facilities allowing them

to use stone tools to serve their needs but not to think in abstract termsMircea Eliade also assumes that early hominids were able to hunt

successfully There is no archaeological evidence for this assumptionIt is certain that both Australopithecus and early Homo occupied the

niche of carrion-eaters Eliade himself was absolutely convinced thateven the rst of the hominids had a kind of religion that resembledin one way or the other the religion of recent hunter-gatherer com-munities He called upon his critics to present evidence on the non-religiosity of early hominids34 The palaeoanthropolog y and evolution-

ary psychology has since provided this evidence

32 Mithen 1996 104ff33 Ibid 11234 Eliade 1978 17

Beginning of Religion 425

2 Religiosity of Homo erectus and his Contemporaries

Homo erectus and his immediate descendants were the rst ho-minids who succeeded in leaving the African continent and to settlealmost everywhere in the Old World35 One of the oldest known Euro-pean fossiles is a jaw of the genus Homo discovered among the peb-bles on the banks of the Neckar river at the village of Mauer near Hei-delberg This jaw of Homo erectus heidelbergensi s is approximately650 000 to 600 000 years old36 Geologically the nd belongs to theperiod of Cromer This is a period between two long-lasting ice-agesthe Guumlnz- and the Mindel-periods when a relatively warm climate en-abled humans to occupy new habitats Primitive stone tools from theNeuwieder Becken and the latest excavations at Burgos in Spain provethat the European continent was inhabited at least 800 000 years ago oreven earlier Information on the life style of Homo erectus could onlybe gained from excavations at Bilzingsleben where an early settlementof Homo erectus could be found Geologically Bilzingsleben belongsto the Holstein period This means that the ndings at this place are notonly 200 000 years younger than the jaw from Mauer but completelyindependent of the rst appearance of a specimen of Homo erectus as aresult of an entire ice-age This period led to a characteristic change of ora and fauna which formed the landscape and ecosystem during the

35 The oldest human fossil of Europe was detected in 1994 in the Gran Dolina ofAtapuerca in Spain These early humans are about 780 000 years old These hominidsnamed Homo antecessor seem to differ signi cantly from the well known (Asian)Homo erectus and the African Homo ergaster which means that the early hominidsof Africa Asia and Europe belong to different species Several scientists emphasisethe following phylogenetic tree Homo antecessor developed from the African Homoergaster and succeeded to settle in Europe Here he became the ancestor of Homoheidelbergensis who himself developed into the European Homo neanderthalensisSee Henke and Rothe 1999 204-217

36 The remnants of four individuals of the species Homo antecessor which weredetected at the excavation site ldquoLa Gran Dolinardquo near Burgos belong to the eldestmembers of the genus Homo in Europe An isolated skull found near Isneria Italyis nearly as old Early tools from France have an age of between one million and twomillion years and prove that Europe was inhabited very early

426 Ina Wunn

rst conquest of Europe by a hominid The distance in time betweenthe ndings of Mauer and Bilzingsleben is re ected in the developmentof the culture While the tools of Homo erectus heidelbergensis werestill simple handaxes the Homo erectus bilzingslebensi s was alreadycapable of manufacturing developed weapons and tools Theoreticallythis made him capable of hunting for game

Anatomically H erectus bilzingslebensi s was more developed thanhis predecessor Therefore the way of life of H erectus heidelbergensismust have been even simpler and less advanced37 The excavation ofthe settlement at Bilzingsleben provides insight into the way of lifeof the younger Homo erectus The archaeological ndings of earlyman prove the following facts At Bilzingsleben a small group of earlyhumans camped at the shore of a small lake in not more than two orthree tents Here they seemed to have occasionally hunted a beaveror other small animals Their stone tools were suitable for huntingsmaller prey whereas no weapon was found which would have beeneffective enough to kill an elephant or a bison The distribution of theelements of the fauna supports this point of view38 Additionally theymay have fed on the corpses of dead animals which were probablyfound frequently along the shore of the lake Surely elephant and rhinobones which were found at the working sites and served as supportor work material originated from dead animals that were not killedby H erectus bilzingslebensi s One could conclude that they also ate sh eggs and vegetables and that the food was most likely cookedThe people of Bilzingsleben were already aware of a certain code ofsocial behaviour and it is also clear that there was some degree ofemotional exchange between certain members of the group There areno indications of any religious activities The comparison of Homoerectus bilzingslebensi s with recent hunter-gatherer communities isnot convincing due to the following facts The popular belief thatH erectus successfully hunted larger game has been disproved Manyof the ndings of fossil bone beds which were said to be due to

37 See Henke and Rothe 1994 407f38 Mania and Weber 1986 20ff

Beginning of Religion 427

the hunting activities of the H erectus are in the near vicinity ofwatering places Here the ungulates frequently became the prey ofpredatory animals Analysis of the individual age of the bones offossil mammals at Bilzingsleben and other Palaeolithic settlements ledto the conclusion that many of those animals died naturally39 The rst evidence that at least the younger Homo erectus was capable ofhunting larger prey came from Schoumlningen near Helmstedt Germanywhere a wooden spear about 15 meters long was found in a huntingcamp inhabited about 400 000 years ago40 Homo erectus had a brainvolume which was still quite small compared to the brain of recentHomo sapiens Only the younger H erectus is supposed to havebeen capable of verbal communication as anatomical investigation shave proven Though there is no direct relationship between brainvolume and intelligence behaviour or certain abilities scholars areconvinced that H erectus was quite primitive compared to H sapiensas the archaeological ndings related to his culture have revealed41

The results of evolutionary psychology seem to prove the followingfacts Obviously technical skills increased dramatically over those ofH habilis Natural history intelligence and social intelligence werealso well developed On the other hand the technical conservatismof Homo erectus over a period of about one million years is strikingThe only explanation for this contradictory evidence is to assume thatthe well developed multiple intelligences of the H erectus were stillcommitted to speci c domains of behaviour with very little interactionbetween them42 Thinking and communication in abstract terms whichare essential for religious awareness probably developed quite late

Though excavations like the camp of Bilzingsleben MarkleebergKaumlrlich or Bad Cannstadt and the results of archaeological psychologydo not support the hypothesis that early man performed any religiousrites and though the discussion of palaeanthropologica l facts prove

39 Henke and Rothe 1994 42840 Thieme 1997 807-81041 See Henke and Rothe1994 42442 Mithen 1996 115ff

428 Ina Wunn

that H erectus was not at all capable of performing complicated rit-uals it is still the opinion among scholars of the History of Religionand several archaeologists that ritual cannibalism was common amongearly human populations Thus Alfred Rust writes ldquoUnique nds fromAsia prove that cannibalism was exercised in the whole worldrdquo43 Al-fred Rust refers to nds of Homo erectus in the caves of Zhoukoudianwhich reveal many similarities to Bilzingsleben44 While Alfred Rustis convinced that the presence of several ldquosmashedrdquo human skulls isa clear sign of ritual cannibalism Johannes Maringer presumes thatskulls and lower jaws are the remnants of the deceased which had beenkept and worshipped by their family Similar customs are still evidentamong members of primitive cultures in Africa or Asia45 The palaean-thropologist s Winfried Henke and Hartmut Rothe express strong andjusti ed doubt about this assertion The analysis of several craniumsof early man gave evidence that the destruction of the skulls was dueto the activities of ancient hyena and normal taphonomic processes46

The archaeologist Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan had already noted in the six-ties ldquoThe conditions of the former excavations of Chou Kou Tien makeit dif cult to even nd a map of the site of skulls The skulls were ex-tracted from solid limestone and not even one of them is near to beingcomplete After decomposing into tiny sections they entered the gen-eral category of the animal remains It is dif cult to understand how themyth of head-collecting Sinanthropus could have assumed a de niteformrdquo47 Another victim of such prejudice is Karl Dietrich Adam withhis hypothesis that the skull of Homo erectus steinheimensis showstraces of having been subjected to postmortal manipulations48 Thedestruction of the base of the skull is his only criterion for the hy-pothesis that stone-age man was frequently the victim of ritual prac-

43 Rust 1991 17544 Ibid 17845 Maringer 1956 64-7146 Rust 1991 178f and Henke and Rothe 1994 42847 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 4948 Adam 1991 218

Beginning of Religion 429

tices Between the death of the individual and the later recovery ofthe fossil a number of taphonomic processes take place which havesigni cant effects on the later fossil One of those effects is the modi- cation of organic matter and its decay the assortment or destructionof hard sections as well as sedimentologica l processes Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan was able to show that the cranium and lower jaws are usuallywell preserved Therefore it is only due to taphonomic processes thatthese individual body parts survive and not at all due to human ac-tivities or postmortal manipulation49 In this connection it is necessaryto emphasise that scholars can only come to a decision based on a se-ries of complex investigations using a scanning electron microscopeas to whether scratches on fossil bones are due to violence caused bya stone tool or the teeth of a predatory animal Since there are no ar-chaeological ndings for the entire Palaeolithic or Neolithic period toprove the opening of the skull by humans none of the speculationsabout possible cult practice connected with human skulls is based onfacts50

3 Religion in the Middle Palaeolithic

From an anthropologica l point of view the European middle Palae-olithic is characterised by Homo neanderthalensi s51 This early form ofHomo sapiens or descendant of Homo heidelbergensis lived over a pe-

49 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 45 5550 Experiments with animal bones have shown that scratches made by stone tools

are absolutely equal to scratches caused by sand Those scratches occur frequentlyduring the process of embedding It is still dif cult to distinguish between traces ofhuman activities and traces of animal bites An examination is only possible with thehelp of a scanning electron microscope See Henke and Rothe 1994 20-24

51 The so-called Neanderthal-problem is however a source of heated debateOnly ten years ago many palaeanthropologists were convinced that Neanderthalman belonged to our species H sapiens His characteristic features were supposedto be due to the extreme climate of the ice-age In the meantime most scientistshave been convinced that Homo neanderthalensis developed directly from Homoheidelbergensis while the modern Homo sapiens developed during the same timein Africa and conquered Europe about 40 000 years ago See Henke and Rothe 1994433ff and Henke and Rothe 1999 272f

430 Ina Wunn

riod of nearly 100 000 years during which the landscape climate andliving conditions changed dramatically These environmental changesmight have contributed to the special anatomical features of the Nean-derthal man Surely the need to adapt to a frequently changing habitatforced H neanderthalensi s to develop sociocultural abilities that wereclosely related to the progressive evolution of intelligence and psycho-logical abilities52 The frequent environmental changes to which H ne-anderthalensis had to adapt made life immensely challenging In thewarmer and humid periods of the Eem period dense forests coveredthe landscape Population migration was only possible in the valleysThe fauna consisted of elephant deer stag aurochs bear and othersSuf cient food-supply in the direct surroundings allows one to believethat Neanderthal man was relatively stationary during this climatic pe-riod The excavated settlement of Weimar-Ehringsdorf was inhabitedduring this time During the initial phase of cooler climate the orachanged Fir and pine trees were common and formed large and humidforests The winters were cold and snow was plentiful even in sum-mertime the temperature remained low Not only non-migrating ani-mals were hunted by Neanderthal man herds of reindeer wild horsebison and mammoth provided suf cient opportunity for hunting Dur-ing the coldest periods the forests disappeared and made room for

52 Steven Mithen emphasises that natural history intelligence technical intelli-gence social and linguistic intelligence of Neanderthal man were all well developedbut there was still a lack of interaction between the four domains of the mind Cogni-tive uidity took place only between the domains of social and linguistic intelligence(Mithen 1996 143 and 147ff) The author of this article has a different opinion In gen-eral the lithic culture of Neanderthal man is the Mousterian which is still simple com-pared to the technology of the upper Palaeolithic On the other hand the lithic culturesare not strictly related to the one or the other human species Homo neanderthalensistoo was found together with the more advanced tools of the upper Palaeolithic whileHomo sapiens was found with the simple tools of the Mousterian culture Thereforedirect connections between a certain human species and its lithic culture cannot beproved The technical skills of the younger H neanderthalensis and early H sapiensobviously did not differ That means that there is no palaeanthropological evidence forthe assumption of fundamental difference between the minds of H neanderthalensisand H sapiens (Henke and Rothe 1999 275 Reynolds 1990 263ff)

Beginning of Religion 431

prairies and tundra The climate became dry with extremely cold win-ters and relatively mild but short summers The prairies were full ofgame which migrated with the seasons53

The Magic of Hunting in the Middle Palaeolithic

The hunting activities of the Palaeolithic man which Mircea Eliadeand other scholars take for granted are only able to be proved with ref-erence to later periods of ice-age At the town of Lehringen near Ver-den an der Aller the skeleton of an elephant had been preserved thathad been killed with the aid of a wooden spear found between the ribsof the animal This is impressive evidence of the fact that Homo nean-derthalensis was able to successfully hunt big game Therefore it canbe assumed that Mircea Eliadersquos precise conceptions of religion duringprehistoric times may at least be correct with regard to the people of theMousterian He describes this religion as ldquomagic-religious conceptionsof Palaeolithic manrdquo as follows54 The documents regarding the reli-gion of the Palaeolithic man are obscure he says but available Theirmeaning can be deciphered if the scholar succeeds in inserting thesedocuments into a semantic system55 This semantic system is alreadygiven by the results of investigations of recent hunter-gatherer commu-nities Their similar lifestyle offers suf cient certainty for identical orvery similar religions of recent hunter-gatherers and Palaeolithic manTherefore Homo neanderthalensi s believed that the animal is a beingquite similar to man but talented with supernatural forces He wasconvinced that gods such as the ldquoMaster of the Animalsrdquo or ldquoSupremeBeingrdquo existed The kill of the animal took place after a complicatedritual On the other hand rites must have existed which were linkedwith a skull-cult and deposits of long bones Similarly Ioan Coulianoargues that ldquoeither similar models of well-known primitive peoplesare referred to or one dispenses with any model The History of Reli-gion can only use the rst option as imperfect as it may be Scholars

53 See Henke and Rothe 1994 52554 Eliade 1978 15ff55 Ibid 18

432 Ina Wunn

have to endeavour to decipher the mental horizon of the people of pre-historic times by using the results of ethnographic and archaeologicalstudiesrdquo56 John Campbell concludes from the myths of known peoplesthat there must be close connections between the religions of Palae-olithic man and recent hunter-gatherers The following conviction isboth precondition and result of his investigations ldquoI nd that its mainresult has been its con rmation of a thought I have long and faithfullyentertained of the unity of the race of man not only in its biology butalso in its spiritual historyrdquo57 He proves his assumption with the helpof a comparison Under the title ldquoThe Stage of Neanderthal Manrdquo thereader nds the detailed description of the life habits of the small anddelicate Negritos of the Andaman Islands in the Gulf of Bengal butCampbell fails to prove the connections between the habits of a peopleof recent tropical Asia and an anatomically different prehistoric peo-ple which lived in boreal climates 100 000 years ago58 Another argu-ment of John Campbellrsquos is founded on archaeological facts The stoneblades of the Mousterian (the material culture of Neanderthal man ismainly Mousterian) are still very similar a wider range of differenttools was unknown at that time This means for Campbell that thecustom of tool-making was carefully handed down from one genera-tion to another comparably to customs of recent bushman culture Thisextraordinary attention is due to a certain feeling of the holy whichwas connected with the manufacturing and use of the tool59 The pass-ing on of Palaeolithic religion to religions of recent hunter-gatherercommunities serves as a proof that the myths of recent peoples origi-nated in the Palaeolithic and have been handed down till today withoutany changes This means that Joseph Campbell constructed a typicalcircular argument Todayrsquos behaviours and myths are taken as proofin order to postulate the existence of the same behaviours and mythsas practised by Palaeolithic man Then the postulate itself is taken as

56 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2757 Campbell 1987 v58 Ibid 365ff59 Ibid 364f

Beginning of Religion 433

a voucher to prove the unchanged existence of those myths from thePalaeolithic up to now

The opinion that Palaeolithic man already had a complicated reli-gion with certain notions of the holy and various rituals can be foundin nearly every religious reference work Fritz Hartmann writes forexample ldquoThe magic of the hunt belongs to this typically human con-ception of the worldrdquo60

Even if the consequences drawn from the archaeologically securedfacts in the past seem frequently exaggerated several sentences in thevolume of Johannes Maringer explain the intention of the authors Itwas the common statement that prehistoric man was a mere beast with-out a developed mind that made the opponents of this point of viewlook for counter-arguments which are no longer defendable in the lightof modern research results61 The use of ethnographic analogies to re-construct prehistoric religion is based on a speci c understanding ofthe evolution of religion In the nineteenth century Charles Darwinrsquostheory of biological evolution in uenced nearly all branches of sci-ence In the elds of the study of religion and anthropology scholarslike Edward Burnett Tylor or James George Frazer developed concep-tions of religious evolution which have strongly determined researchuntil today Tylor as well as Frazer were convinced that they couldprove an ascending development of religion from primitive origins tothe modern religions of the industrial age According to this theory thereligions of recent hunter-gatherer communities can be classi ed asrelics from ancient times62 This means on the contrary that it is pos-sible to reconstruct the consciousness of ancient people with the helpof knowledge about the religion of todayrsquos hunter-gatherer communi-ties However only a brief insight into the multiplicity of so-calledprimitive religions reveals that their contents and symbols are not sim-ilar by any means According to Max Raphael the faith-conceptions of

60 Hartmann 1957 403 Among the latest literature see for example Grim 19981107-1108 and Hultkrantz 1998 746-752

61 Maringer 1956 59ff62 Michaels (ed) 1997 41-60 and 77-89

434 Ina Wunn

recent hunter-gatherer communities cannot be consulted in order to de-rive from them a certain belief of prehistoric man Even people livingon a relatively primitive economical level up to the present day havebeen affected by their past which has in uenced their state of mindAs a result their ideas and religious conceptions changed in the samemanner as the belief system of modern communities did63 The an-thropologist Wilhelm Emil Muumlhlmann acknowledges the arguments ofMax Raphael when he emphasises that all known primitive religionsare younger than theological religions64 Even if ecological and eco-nomical prerequisites of different societies are the same they do notnecessarily have the same or a similar belief system identical ritualssymbols and practices Hermann Schulz emphasises ldquoKulturell aufdas engste verwandte Gruppen koumlnnen einen religioumls-symbolisch undartefaktreichen Ritualismus entwickeln (Sepik-Gebiet) oder innerhalbder elaborierten ritualsymbolische n Medien tendentiell nichtreligioumlseartefakt-arme Programme elaborieren (Kapauku)rdquo65

The arguments show that it is by no means suf cient to nd prooffor the hunting practices of Neanderthal man in order to imply any kindof religion and especially not a de nite and well-known religion

Bear-cult

The existence of the cult of the bear in the middle Palaeolithic pe-riod is taken for granted Aringke Hultkrantz writes ldquoDie Kulturen des ark-

63 Max Raphael writes ldquoMan hat diese Schwierigkeit umgehen wollen durchHeranziehen von Aussagen sogenannter primitiver Kulturvoumllker Diese nur in sehrengen Grenzen moumlgliche Analogie uumlbersieht daszlig auch diese Staumlmme eine Geschichtegehabt haben mdash eine regressive statt der progressiven der Kulturvoumllker Es liegt einunberechtigtes Vorurteil in der Annahme der Einfrierung des Gewesenen denn dielsquoPrimitivenrsquo nden sich selbst wo sie auf dem Stadium der Jagdwirtschaft stehengeblieben sind mit den alten Werkzeugen und Waffen einer anderen Umgebunggegenuumlber die starken den Einzelmenschen an Maumlchtigkeit uumlberragenden Tiere sindersetzt durch wesentlich kleinere und schwaumlchererdquo (Raphael 1978 78)

64 Muumlhlmann 1957 119865 Schulz 1993 189

Beginning of Religion 435

tischen Raumes sind Bruchstuumlcke einer palaumlolithischen Jagdkulturrdquo66

Friedrich Heiler67 refers to similar ideas as those expressed by JosephCampbell who describes the cult of the bear in an interesting buthardly well-grounded manner First Campbell refers to a bear-festivalamong the Ainu After the killing of the captured bear and during theceremonies the skull of the animal is put at the top of a long stick68

In a second step Campbell portrays Neanderthal man in impressiveterms ldquo when the remains of a strangely brutish yet manlike skele-ton were found in a limestone quarry not far from Duumlsseldorf in theValley of Neanderrdquo69 The following descriptions shortly mention thecaves of the Alps where the remains of the bears were detected Theexcavators had the impression that the arrangement of the fossil bonescould hardly be due to nature so they attributed this to the activitiesof H neanderthalensi s who were assumed to have killed the animalsand arranged their bones during certain ceremonies70 It is true thatnearly everywhere in the Arctic primitive peoples know certain ritu-als connected with the hunting of the bear71 The excavators of thecaves Emil Baumlchler and Karl Houmlrmann took these ceremonies of cir-cumpolar peoples to prove their hypothesis of an ancient bear-cult inprehistoric times72 In the following years several discoveries of simi-lar bear-caves seemed to support the hypothesis of cave bear worshipEmil Baumlchler himself discovered bear bone deposits at the Wilden-mannlisloch in Switzerland and in Sloveniarsquos Mornova Cave In 1946Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan excavated seven cave bear skulls arranged in acircle in Furtins Cave Saocircne-et-Loire In 1950 Kurt Ehrenberg secured

66 Hultkrantz 1998 75167 See Heiler 1979 7868 Campbell 1987 334ff69 Ibid 33970 Ibid 341f71 Edsman 1957 84172 Maringer 1956 95ff

436 Ina Wunn

a deposit of long bones arranged together with cave bear skulls in theSalzhofen Cave in the Austrian Alps73

The latest nd of supposed traces of prehistoric cave bear worshipwas published in 1996 In the Rumanian Bihor-Mountains ChristianLascu et al discovered a cave rich in palaeontologica l cave beardeposits74 Scholars such as Johannes Maringer or Aringke Hultkrantzrefer to the reports of the excavators when they interpret the depositsas the remainder of cult practice The historian Karl Narr also gives anaccount of the deposits of cave bear skulls and long bones but remainssceptical75

A detailed discussion of the nds of cave bear bones from a palaeon-tological and ethnographic point of view led to completely differentresults76 The careful and critical use of ethnographic analogues onwhich the theories of a cave bear cult is founded in the end leads toeven contrary results If H neanderthalensi s had known cave bear wor-ship its traces would have been found inside the settlements The re-mains of such a cult would have been the bone deposits of Neanderthalmanrsquos favourite and most dangerous game among which howeverthe bear did not rank Recent peoples who know the bear cult catchor kill a bear in his winter accommodation and bring it to their settle-ment There it is killed and eaten by the villagers under different ritualregulations The bones of the dead game are put into a holy place orare carefully buried near the village but never brought back again tothe dwelling of the bear

The most impressive arguments against cave bear worship comenevertheless from the bone deposits itself Crucial palaeontologica lobjections are to be stated rst of all Both the cave bear (Ursusspelaeus) which was extinct at the end of the last ice age and thebrown bear (Ursus arctos) which spread all over Eurasia since theEem period show a strong preference for cave accommodation There

73 See Lascu et al 1996 19-20 and Maringer 1956 91-9674 See Lascu et al 199675 Narr 1957 1076 Wunn 1999a 3-23

Beginning of Religion 437

they hide during wintertime and give birth to their young The caveswhere the relics of alleged bear worship were found are the naturalhabitat of the animals where they spend the long winters and hidetheir young At those places the bears sometimes died for severalreasons for example age illness lack of food Therefore their bonefossils are bound to be found in those places if they were not carriedoff by carrion eaters or removed by sedimentologica l processes Theoccurrence of cave bear bones in the caves of the ice age which servedgenerations of bear families as shelter is just what a palaeontologis twould expect

The proponents of Palaeolithic bear worship did not only think themere occurrence of bear bones in the caves to be remarkable butalso their alleged assortment and arrangement in which they werefound However there rst takes place an amassment of bear bones incertain places by the activities of the bears themselves as Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan correctly noticed The parts of skeletons of the deceasedanimals which originally are in their anatomical order are thrownin disorder or scattered by later generations of bears Sometimes theyare pressed to the walls where they are relatively protected againstfurther decay77 Also the outweighing of skulls and long bones is aresult of a process of natural decay and not due to human activitiesThe mentioned parts of the skeleton are relatively heavy and compactso that they are more able to resist decomposition processes thanthe small vertebrae ribs foot-bones or hand-bones A result of thoseprocesses is the natural selection of the bone material78 But notonly decomposition in uences the state of the bones During theirhistory the caves were ooded several times as the accumulatedsediments prove Such oodings do not remain without in uence onthe fossil material With high water level and stronger current all loosematerial is either rinsed away or carried for a certain distance andthen dropped at a place where there is a weaker current During theseprocesses the anatomical bone order is radically altered Therefore

77 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 3978 Ziegler 1975 44-45

438 Ina Wunn

the accumulation of several skulls in one place and the absenceof other bones is due to geological and sedimentologica l processesand not to human intervention The oating ability of sediments canbe reduced by prominent parts of the walls or unevenness of the oor resulting in some bone parts being deposited in the proximityof obstacles A concrete example of this effect is the discovery ofseveral skulls deposited in a crosslike pattern in the Cold Cave ofthe Bihor Mountains The obstacle which reduced the transportabilityof the skulls crucially was a stone at which the fossil skulls weredeposited79 Just as little as the assortment of the bone material isproof of human activities so the adjustment of the fossils is anunnatural process The movements of a transport medium be it windsediment or water are transferred to the material to be transportedso that the movement in a special direction leads to its assortmentTherefore the assortment of bear skulls is not due to human activitiesbut to the owing water or other transport mediums in the caves Itcannot be said clearly enough There was no cave bear worship inthe middle Palaeolithic period at all The bear caves show exactlywhat a palaeontologis t would expect Nothing suggests that the naturalprocess of decay and sedimentation was at any time interrupted ordisturbed80

Combined burials of man and cave bear

In connection with assumed bear worship the opinion was heldthat sometimes men and bear were buried together in one grave81 Asevidence served the excavations at Le Reacutegourdou near Lascaux whereunder a hill of debris both the remains of a bear and a Neanderthal manwere preserved The French archaeologist Fabienne May demonstratedthat the remains of the bear bore no connection with the human

79 See Lascu et al 1996 30 plate 380 Wunn 1999a 6ff81 Rust 1986 15

Beginning of Religion 439

skeleton and questioned whether there was a funeral at Le Reacutegourdouat all82

Skull deposits and skull worship

Just as the bear worship was regarded as irrefutable fact there washardly any doubt that Neanderthal man subjected the heads of thedeceased to a special treatment and set them up for ritual purposesOther scholars are convinced that Neanderthal man hunted fellowhumans to kill and eat them83 It is said that the skulls of the killedlater became the focal point of a ritual This hypothesis is suggestedby Ioan Couliano ldquoEinige Schaumldel sind in einer Weise verformtdie den Gedanken an ein Herausloumlsen des Gehirns nahelegenrdquo84

Alfred Rust expresses himself absolutely clearly He is sure that the nds of isolated lower jaws and craniums are closely connected withreligious customs85 Detailed and critically Johannes Maringer arguesthe question of the skull cult He discusses the nds which wereconsidered as proof of the presence of the alleged practices Thereis for example the crushed childlike skull from Gibraltar or the nds of human remains at Weimar-Ehringsdorf and particularly theoutstanding nd of the skull of Monte Circeo which is mentionedby every author as evidence of the described ritual practice Finallyhe comes to the following result ldquoDas Fundbild der Guattari-Grottespricht klar fuumlr einen Kult in dessen Mittelpunkt der Schaumldel standUrspruumlnglich scheint er auf einem Stock aufgesteckt gewesen zusein Einem heiligen Bannkreis gleich umgab ihn der Kranz vonSteinen Der ganze Houmlhlenteil erweckt den Eindruck als habe er den inder vorderen Houmlhle wohnenden Urmenschen als Heiligtum gedientrdquo86

and further ldquoDie Schaumldelsetzungen duumlrften aller Wahrscheinlichkeitnach eine Art Schaumldelkult darstellen in dem das Gedaumlchtnis der

82 Ibid 1583 Ullrich 1978 293ff See also the overview in Henke and Rothe 1999 27784 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2885 Rust 1991 19486 Maringer 1956 80

440 Ina Wunn

Verstorbenen gep egt und ihre Hilfe wie auch ihr Schutz fuumlr die Sippeer eht wurderdquo87 Even Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan agrees that the skull ofMonte Circeo is an intentional deposition of a skull but he refusesto draw any conclusions concerning religious customs88 On the otherhand he can prove that all other nds of isolated heads or jaws arethe result of taphonomic processes89 After a careful re-examinationof the original reports of the excavations Fabienne May states thatnone of the descriptions of the excavations is suf cient to con rm ordisprove the hypothesis of a ritual90 The discovery of a supposed cultsite at Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan where the skull of a child was set upbetween several skulls of ibex does not prove the hypothesis of a cultIn this case the remnants of ibexes and the skull of the child have noconnection at all91 Since it could be shown that even the skull depositof Monte Circeo was not the result of human activities but that thedamages of the skull were due to the work of hungry hyenas the lastargument in favour of a skull cult is disproved92

Cannibalism

Cannibalism has already been mentioned in connection with thedeposition of human skulls Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan expresses him-self as follows ldquoDie Existenz eines religioumlsen Kannibalismus imPalaumlolithikum mag wahrscheinlich sein doch laumlszligt sich dies bei dergegenwaumlrtigen Materiallage absolut nicht beweisen Und dennochspricht kein Autor von der palaumlolithischen Religion ohne fuumlr odergegen die Kannibalismusthese Stellung zu beziehen wobei in groumlszlige-rem Umfang auf ethnographische Beispiele zuruumlckgegriffen wirdrdquo93

But particularly those ethnographic analogies give strong argumentsagainst the hypothesis of prehistoric cannibalism The anthropologis t

87 Ibid 8588 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 5389 Ibid 54-5690 May 1986 1791 Ibid 33-3492 Henke and Rothe 1994 52793 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 56

Beginning of Religion 441

Gabriele Weiss and the archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher discuss thetopic of cannibalism carefully94 They state that the ethnographic ma-terial itself is frequently not convincing because it is based mainly onsensational reports of past adventurers There are no assertions by eye-witnesses but stories of man eaters were always reported by writerswho only stated that they had heard about those customs The cus-tom of cannibalism itself was always stated to have been given upjust several years before the arrival of the traveller95 Frequently theassumption that a certain people was guilty of cannibalism was usedpropagandistically in order to be able to lead a war against this peo-ple or to force them into slavery96 On the other hand it was a wellknown rumour in Africa even up to the beginning of this century thatEuropeans fed on the esh of African children97 It is argued by HeidiPeter-Roumlcher that there is no evidence of cannibalism among recentpeoples at all98 This means that it is nonsense to search for the reasonand the origin of that custom in prehistoric times It cannot be decidedto what extent Sigmund Freud with his hypothesis of the origin of hu-man society must be blamed for evoking the idea of early man-eatersIn his Totem und Tabu he made several statements about the origin ofhuman society claiming that at the beginning of prehistory a group ofhumans was ruled by a despotic patriarch until he was killed and eatenby his sons99 The subtitle of his book ldquoEinige Uumlbereinstimmungen imSeelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotikerrdquo100 re ects however the

94 Weiss 1987 142-159 and Peter-Roumlcher 198995 Volhard 1939 36996 Gabriele Weiss (1987 152) mentions the example of a decree of Queen Isabella

in 1503 who gave permission to enslave the Caribbean Indians because they weresaid to be man-eaters

97 Ibid 15098 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 On the contrary the American anthropologist Christy Turner

is convinced that the Anasazi an Indian people who lived in the southern parts of theUnited States during historical times did human hunting See Turner 1999

99 See Weiss 1987 44-45100 Weiss 1987 44

442 Ina Wunn

opinion of many of his contemporaries and colleagues and contributesto the picture of the mentality of Neanderthal man until today101

The facts on which the theory of prehistoric cannibalism are basedare usually poor Frequently it was suf cient to assume cannibalismexisted if a skeleton was found incomplete or not in anatomical or-der102 It is still considered a strong proof for cannibalism when splithuman bones occur as were excavated at Krapina The defenders ofthe cannibalism thesis argue that the remnants of human bones lookabsolutely similar to the scattered animal bones at the same excava-tion site Therefore they come to the conclusion that Neanderthal mantreated fellow humans in the same way as he treated game This argu-ment is still stressed by the anthropologist s Tim White and Alban De- eur Scattered bones of human beings and deer in the cave of Moula-Guercy show the same scratches103 This argument presupposes how-ever that the humans as well as the animals were killed by Neanderthalman Both the humans and the animals could however have been thevictims of carnivores for example hyena or cave lion or the scratcheson human and animal bones may be due to taphonomic processes104

This thesis would explain the remains of Krapina as well as the ndingsof Moula-Guercy In any case the identical treatment of human andanimal bones and the missing of any traces of a ritual do not promotethe hypothesis of a religious custom In this case Krapina and Moula-Guercy would prove that Neanderthal man hunted other humans formeat This seems however to be unlikely because the hunters of theMousterian lived in a habitat full of game which was for sure easier tokill than humans

101 Campbell 1987 339102 Maringer 1956 81f In the excavation report of the site Weimar-Ehringsdorf

cannibalism is not mentioned at all See Feustel 1989 391-393103 De eur et al 1999 128-131104 It is still more than dif cult to decide whether scratches on bones are due to

human activities to carnivores or to taphonomic processes The topic is still debated

among scientists For an overview see Henke and Rothe 1994 19-25

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

Beginning of Religion 423

Louis Leakey in the Tanzanian Olduvai Gorge where the famousanthropologis t found remnants of an early hominid classi ed asZinjanthropus along with primitive stone tools Although there weresubstantial doubts about Dartrsquos thesis mdash how could a delicate creatureweighing approximately 45 kg be able to kill the large ungulatesof the African savannah mdash Dartrsquos point of view became generallypopular and accepted in the sixties28 Only intensive research regardingthe behaviour of carnivores and taphonomic and sedimentologica lprocesses made it clear that the fossil bone beds were the results ofdifferent forces in an ecological system seen as a whole29 The layersof the ndings were by no means the result of the activities of only onespecies and certainly not of the weak and delicate AustralopithecusAs a result of these investigations it is certain that the rst humansincluding Homo habilis fed on fruit vegetables and carrion and werenot at all able to hunt30 On the contrary the so-called ldquoBaby ofTaungrdquo had itself become the prey of a predatory animal The rststone tools the so-called choppers did not serve to kill the prey butto crack nut-shells and split open the bones of ungulates killed bylions or hyenas in order to obtain the precious marrow That wasthe single part of the prey that was left for Australopithecus or Homohabilisrudolfensis ergaster31

Neither Australopithecus nor Homo habilis nor Homo ergaster tsinto the category of a hunter The mythical solidarity between hunterand victim claimed by Mircea Eliade for the humans of the lowerPalaeolithic results from false assumptions Eliade assumes that in-telligence imagination and the activity of the subconscious of theearly hominids differed only slightly from the intellectual abilities ofthe modern Homo sapiens The results of modern palaeoanthropolog y

28 Even in the late seventies and early eighties the archaeologist Glynn Isaacadvanced a hypothesis concerning human evolution based on the assumption that earlyHomo consumed a large quantity of meat (Isaac 1978)

29 See Binford 1984 28-57 and Henke and Rothe 1994 355f30 Binford 1984 57 and Schrenk 1997 49 and 7231 Henke and Rothe 1999 187

424 Ina Wunn

and evolutionary psychology indicate that the intellectual capability ofthose early forms of hominids is in no way comparable to that of re-cent Homo sapiens As stone tools and remains of meals prove the

rst member of the genus Homo had developed only a very small do-main for technical intelligence and several tiny mental modules forinteraction with the natural world but had not yet full natural historyintelligence32 The discrete domain of social intelligence which theancestor of early hominids had already acquired developed during the

rst steps of human evolution into a more powerful and complex partof the mind Probably even a primitive kind of linguistic intelligencehad started to develop As Steven Mithen emphasises the intellectualcapability of the Homo habilis group was already higher than that ofAustralopithecus but nevertheless ldquolittle more than an elaborate ver-

sion of the mind of the common ancestorrdquo33 Therefore Australopithe-cus Homo rudolfensis and Homo habilisergaster were at the originof a development that encouraged the growth of hominids by forcingthem to occupy the niche of meat-eaters They were competitively suc-cessful because they developed the intellectual facilities allowing them

to use stone tools to serve their needs but not to think in abstract termsMircea Eliade also assumes that early hominids were able to hunt

successfully There is no archaeological evidence for this assumptionIt is certain that both Australopithecus and early Homo occupied the

niche of carrion-eaters Eliade himself was absolutely convinced thateven the rst of the hominids had a kind of religion that resembledin one way or the other the religion of recent hunter-gatherer com-munities He called upon his critics to present evidence on the non-religiosity of early hominids34 The palaeoanthropolog y and evolution-

ary psychology has since provided this evidence

32 Mithen 1996 104ff33 Ibid 11234 Eliade 1978 17

Beginning of Religion 425

2 Religiosity of Homo erectus and his Contemporaries

Homo erectus and his immediate descendants were the rst ho-minids who succeeded in leaving the African continent and to settlealmost everywhere in the Old World35 One of the oldest known Euro-pean fossiles is a jaw of the genus Homo discovered among the peb-bles on the banks of the Neckar river at the village of Mauer near Hei-delberg This jaw of Homo erectus heidelbergensi s is approximately650 000 to 600 000 years old36 Geologically the nd belongs to theperiod of Cromer This is a period between two long-lasting ice-agesthe Guumlnz- and the Mindel-periods when a relatively warm climate en-abled humans to occupy new habitats Primitive stone tools from theNeuwieder Becken and the latest excavations at Burgos in Spain provethat the European continent was inhabited at least 800 000 years ago oreven earlier Information on the life style of Homo erectus could onlybe gained from excavations at Bilzingsleben where an early settlementof Homo erectus could be found Geologically Bilzingsleben belongsto the Holstein period This means that the ndings at this place are notonly 200 000 years younger than the jaw from Mauer but completelyindependent of the rst appearance of a specimen of Homo erectus as aresult of an entire ice-age This period led to a characteristic change of ora and fauna which formed the landscape and ecosystem during the

35 The oldest human fossil of Europe was detected in 1994 in the Gran Dolina ofAtapuerca in Spain These early humans are about 780 000 years old These hominidsnamed Homo antecessor seem to differ signi cantly from the well known (Asian)Homo erectus and the African Homo ergaster which means that the early hominidsof Africa Asia and Europe belong to different species Several scientists emphasisethe following phylogenetic tree Homo antecessor developed from the African Homoergaster and succeeded to settle in Europe Here he became the ancestor of Homoheidelbergensis who himself developed into the European Homo neanderthalensisSee Henke and Rothe 1999 204-217

36 The remnants of four individuals of the species Homo antecessor which weredetected at the excavation site ldquoLa Gran Dolinardquo near Burgos belong to the eldestmembers of the genus Homo in Europe An isolated skull found near Isneria Italyis nearly as old Early tools from France have an age of between one million and twomillion years and prove that Europe was inhabited very early

426 Ina Wunn

rst conquest of Europe by a hominid The distance in time betweenthe ndings of Mauer and Bilzingsleben is re ected in the developmentof the culture While the tools of Homo erectus heidelbergensis werestill simple handaxes the Homo erectus bilzingslebensi s was alreadycapable of manufacturing developed weapons and tools Theoreticallythis made him capable of hunting for game

Anatomically H erectus bilzingslebensi s was more developed thanhis predecessor Therefore the way of life of H erectus heidelbergensismust have been even simpler and less advanced37 The excavation ofthe settlement at Bilzingsleben provides insight into the way of lifeof the younger Homo erectus The archaeological ndings of earlyman prove the following facts At Bilzingsleben a small group of earlyhumans camped at the shore of a small lake in not more than two orthree tents Here they seemed to have occasionally hunted a beaveror other small animals Their stone tools were suitable for huntingsmaller prey whereas no weapon was found which would have beeneffective enough to kill an elephant or a bison The distribution of theelements of the fauna supports this point of view38 Additionally theymay have fed on the corpses of dead animals which were probablyfound frequently along the shore of the lake Surely elephant and rhinobones which were found at the working sites and served as supportor work material originated from dead animals that were not killedby H erectus bilzingslebensi s One could conclude that they also ate sh eggs and vegetables and that the food was most likely cookedThe people of Bilzingsleben were already aware of a certain code ofsocial behaviour and it is also clear that there was some degree ofemotional exchange between certain members of the group There areno indications of any religious activities The comparison of Homoerectus bilzingslebensi s with recent hunter-gatherer communities isnot convincing due to the following facts The popular belief thatH erectus successfully hunted larger game has been disproved Manyof the ndings of fossil bone beds which were said to be due to

37 See Henke and Rothe 1994 407f38 Mania and Weber 1986 20ff

Beginning of Religion 427

the hunting activities of the H erectus are in the near vicinity ofwatering places Here the ungulates frequently became the prey ofpredatory animals Analysis of the individual age of the bones offossil mammals at Bilzingsleben and other Palaeolithic settlements ledto the conclusion that many of those animals died naturally39 The rst evidence that at least the younger Homo erectus was capable ofhunting larger prey came from Schoumlningen near Helmstedt Germanywhere a wooden spear about 15 meters long was found in a huntingcamp inhabited about 400 000 years ago40 Homo erectus had a brainvolume which was still quite small compared to the brain of recentHomo sapiens Only the younger H erectus is supposed to havebeen capable of verbal communication as anatomical investigation shave proven Though there is no direct relationship between brainvolume and intelligence behaviour or certain abilities scholars areconvinced that H erectus was quite primitive compared to H sapiensas the archaeological ndings related to his culture have revealed41

The results of evolutionary psychology seem to prove the followingfacts Obviously technical skills increased dramatically over those ofH habilis Natural history intelligence and social intelligence werealso well developed On the other hand the technical conservatismof Homo erectus over a period of about one million years is strikingThe only explanation for this contradictory evidence is to assume thatthe well developed multiple intelligences of the H erectus were stillcommitted to speci c domains of behaviour with very little interactionbetween them42 Thinking and communication in abstract terms whichare essential for religious awareness probably developed quite late

Though excavations like the camp of Bilzingsleben MarkleebergKaumlrlich or Bad Cannstadt and the results of archaeological psychologydo not support the hypothesis that early man performed any religiousrites and though the discussion of palaeanthropologica l facts prove

39 Henke and Rothe 1994 42840 Thieme 1997 807-81041 See Henke and Rothe1994 42442 Mithen 1996 115ff

428 Ina Wunn

that H erectus was not at all capable of performing complicated rit-uals it is still the opinion among scholars of the History of Religionand several archaeologists that ritual cannibalism was common amongearly human populations Thus Alfred Rust writes ldquoUnique nds fromAsia prove that cannibalism was exercised in the whole worldrdquo43 Al-fred Rust refers to nds of Homo erectus in the caves of Zhoukoudianwhich reveal many similarities to Bilzingsleben44 While Alfred Rustis convinced that the presence of several ldquosmashedrdquo human skulls isa clear sign of ritual cannibalism Johannes Maringer presumes thatskulls and lower jaws are the remnants of the deceased which had beenkept and worshipped by their family Similar customs are still evidentamong members of primitive cultures in Africa or Asia45 The palaean-thropologist s Winfried Henke and Hartmut Rothe express strong andjusti ed doubt about this assertion The analysis of several craniumsof early man gave evidence that the destruction of the skulls was dueto the activities of ancient hyena and normal taphonomic processes46

The archaeologist Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan had already noted in the six-ties ldquoThe conditions of the former excavations of Chou Kou Tien makeit dif cult to even nd a map of the site of skulls The skulls were ex-tracted from solid limestone and not even one of them is near to beingcomplete After decomposing into tiny sections they entered the gen-eral category of the animal remains It is dif cult to understand how themyth of head-collecting Sinanthropus could have assumed a de niteformrdquo47 Another victim of such prejudice is Karl Dietrich Adam withhis hypothesis that the skull of Homo erectus steinheimensis showstraces of having been subjected to postmortal manipulations48 Thedestruction of the base of the skull is his only criterion for the hy-pothesis that stone-age man was frequently the victim of ritual prac-

43 Rust 1991 17544 Ibid 17845 Maringer 1956 64-7146 Rust 1991 178f and Henke and Rothe 1994 42847 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 4948 Adam 1991 218

Beginning of Religion 429

tices Between the death of the individual and the later recovery ofthe fossil a number of taphonomic processes take place which havesigni cant effects on the later fossil One of those effects is the modi- cation of organic matter and its decay the assortment or destructionof hard sections as well as sedimentologica l processes Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan was able to show that the cranium and lower jaws are usuallywell preserved Therefore it is only due to taphonomic processes thatthese individual body parts survive and not at all due to human ac-tivities or postmortal manipulation49 In this connection it is necessaryto emphasise that scholars can only come to a decision based on a se-ries of complex investigations using a scanning electron microscopeas to whether scratches on fossil bones are due to violence caused bya stone tool or the teeth of a predatory animal Since there are no ar-chaeological ndings for the entire Palaeolithic or Neolithic period toprove the opening of the skull by humans none of the speculationsabout possible cult practice connected with human skulls is based onfacts50

3 Religion in the Middle Palaeolithic

From an anthropologica l point of view the European middle Palae-olithic is characterised by Homo neanderthalensi s51 This early form ofHomo sapiens or descendant of Homo heidelbergensis lived over a pe-

49 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 45 5550 Experiments with animal bones have shown that scratches made by stone tools

are absolutely equal to scratches caused by sand Those scratches occur frequentlyduring the process of embedding It is still dif cult to distinguish between traces ofhuman activities and traces of animal bites An examination is only possible with thehelp of a scanning electron microscope See Henke and Rothe 1994 20-24

51 The so-called Neanderthal-problem is however a source of heated debateOnly ten years ago many palaeanthropologists were convinced that Neanderthalman belonged to our species H sapiens His characteristic features were supposedto be due to the extreme climate of the ice-age In the meantime most scientistshave been convinced that Homo neanderthalensis developed directly from Homoheidelbergensis while the modern Homo sapiens developed during the same timein Africa and conquered Europe about 40 000 years ago See Henke and Rothe 1994433ff and Henke and Rothe 1999 272f

430 Ina Wunn

riod of nearly 100 000 years during which the landscape climate andliving conditions changed dramatically These environmental changesmight have contributed to the special anatomical features of the Nean-derthal man Surely the need to adapt to a frequently changing habitatforced H neanderthalensi s to develop sociocultural abilities that wereclosely related to the progressive evolution of intelligence and psycho-logical abilities52 The frequent environmental changes to which H ne-anderthalensis had to adapt made life immensely challenging In thewarmer and humid periods of the Eem period dense forests coveredthe landscape Population migration was only possible in the valleysThe fauna consisted of elephant deer stag aurochs bear and othersSuf cient food-supply in the direct surroundings allows one to believethat Neanderthal man was relatively stationary during this climatic pe-riod The excavated settlement of Weimar-Ehringsdorf was inhabitedduring this time During the initial phase of cooler climate the orachanged Fir and pine trees were common and formed large and humidforests The winters were cold and snow was plentiful even in sum-mertime the temperature remained low Not only non-migrating ani-mals were hunted by Neanderthal man herds of reindeer wild horsebison and mammoth provided suf cient opportunity for hunting Dur-ing the coldest periods the forests disappeared and made room for

52 Steven Mithen emphasises that natural history intelligence technical intelli-gence social and linguistic intelligence of Neanderthal man were all well developedbut there was still a lack of interaction between the four domains of the mind Cogni-tive uidity took place only between the domains of social and linguistic intelligence(Mithen 1996 143 and 147ff) The author of this article has a different opinion In gen-eral the lithic culture of Neanderthal man is the Mousterian which is still simple com-pared to the technology of the upper Palaeolithic On the other hand the lithic culturesare not strictly related to the one or the other human species Homo neanderthalensistoo was found together with the more advanced tools of the upper Palaeolithic whileHomo sapiens was found with the simple tools of the Mousterian culture Thereforedirect connections between a certain human species and its lithic culture cannot beproved The technical skills of the younger H neanderthalensis and early H sapiensobviously did not differ That means that there is no palaeanthropological evidence forthe assumption of fundamental difference between the minds of H neanderthalensisand H sapiens (Henke and Rothe 1999 275 Reynolds 1990 263ff)

Beginning of Religion 431

prairies and tundra The climate became dry with extremely cold win-ters and relatively mild but short summers The prairies were full ofgame which migrated with the seasons53

The Magic of Hunting in the Middle Palaeolithic

The hunting activities of the Palaeolithic man which Mircea Eliadeand other scholars take for granted are only able to be proved with ref-erence to later periods of ice-age At the town of Lehringen near Ver-den an der Aller the skeleton of an elephant had been preserved thathad been killed with the aid of a wooden spear found between the ribsof the animal This is impressive evidence of the fact that Homo nean-derthalensis was able to successfully hunt big game Therefore it canbe assumed that Mircea Eliadersquos precise conceptions of religion duringprehistoric times may at least be correct with regard to the people of theMousterian He describes this religion as ldquomagic-religious conceptionsof Palaeolithic manrdquo as follows54 The documents regarding the reli-gion of the Palaeolithic man are obscure he says but available Theirmeaning can be deciphered if the scholar succeeds in inserting thesedocuments into a semantic system55 This semantic system is alreadygiven by the results of investigations of recent hunter-gatherer commu-nities Their similar lifestyle offers suf cient certainty for identical orvery similar religions of recent hunter-gatherers and Palaeolithic manTherefore Homo neanderthalensi s believed that the animal is a beingquite similar to man but talented with supernatural forces He wasconvinced that gods such as the ldquoMaster of the Animalsrdquo or ldquoSupremeBeingrdquo existed The kill of the animal took place after a complicatedritual On the other hand rites must have existed which were linkedwith a skull-cult and deposits of long bones Similarly Ioan Coulianoargues that ldquoeither similar models of well-known primitive peoplesare referred to or one dispenses with any model The History of Reli-gion can only use the rst option as imperfect as it may be Scholars

53 See Henke and Rothe 1994 52554 Eliade 1978 15ff55 Ibid 18

432 Ina Wunn

have to endeavour to decipher the mental horizon of the people of pre-historic times by using the results of ethnographic and archaeologicalstudiesrdquo56 John Campbell concludes from the myths of known peoplesthat there must be close connections between the religions of Palae-olithic man and recent hunter-gatherers The following conviction isboth precondition and result of his investigations ldquoI nd that its mainresult has been its con rmation of a thought I have long and faithfullyentertained of the unity of the race of man not only in its biology butalso in its spiritual historyrdquo57 He proves his assumption with the helpof a comparison Under the title ldquoThe Stage of Neanderthal Manrdquo thereader nds the detailed description of the life habits of the small anddelicate Negritos of the Andaman Islands in the Gulf of Bengal butCampbell fails to prove the connections between the habits of a peopleof recent tropical Asia and an anatomically different prehistoric peo-ple which lived in boreal climates 100 000 years ago58 Another argu-ment of John Campbellrsquos is founded on archaeological facts The stoneblades of the Mousterian (the material culture of Neanderthal man ismainly Mousterian) are still very similar a wider range of differenttools was unknown at that time This means for Campbell that thecustom of tool-making was carefully handed down from one genera-tion to another comparably to customs of recent bushman culture Thisextraordinary attention is due to a certain feeling of the holy whichwas connected with the manufacturing and use of the tool59 The pass-ing on of Palaeolithic religion to religions of recent hunter-gatherercommunities serves as a proof that the myths of recent peoples origi-nated in the Palaeolithic and have been handed down till today withoutany changes This means that Joseph Campbell constructed a typicalcircular argument Todayrsquos behaviours and myths are taken as proofin order to postulate the existence of the same behaviours and mythsas practised by Palaeolithic man Then the postulate itself is taken as

56 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2757 Campbell 1987 v58 Ibid 365ff59 Ibid 364f

Beginning of Religion 433

a voucher to prove the unchanged existence of those myths from thePalaeolithic up to now

The opinion that Palaeolithic man already had a complicated reli-gion with certain notions of the holy and various rituals can be foundin nearly every religious reference work Fritz Hartmann writes forexample ldquoThe magic of the hunt belongs to this typically human con-ception of the worldrdquo60

Even if the consequences drawn from the archaeologically securedfacts in the past seem frequently exaggerated several sentences in thevolume of Johannes Maringer explain the intention of the authors Itwas the common statement that prehistoric man was a mere beast with-out a developed mind that made the opponents of this point of viewlook for counter-arguments which are no longer defendable in the lightof modern research results61 The use of ethnographic analogies to re-construct prehistoric religion is based on a speci c understanding ofthe evolution of religion In the nineteenth century Charles Darwinrsquostheory of biological evolution in uenced nearly all branches of sci-ence In the elds of the study of religion and anthropology scholarslike Edward Burnett Tylor or James George Frazer developed concep-tions of religious evolution which have strongly determined researchuntil today Tylor as well as Frazer were convinced that they couldprove an ascending development of religion from primitive origins tothe modern religions of the industrial age According to this theory thereligions of recent hunter-gatherer communities can be classi ed asrelics from ancient times62 This means on the contrary that it is pos-sible to reconstruct the consciousness of ancient people with the helpof knowledge about the religion of todayrsquos hunter-gatherer communi-ties However only a brief insight into the multiplicity of so-calledprimitive religions reveals that their contents and symbols are not sim-ilar by any means According to Max Raphael the faith-conceptions of

60 Hartmann 1957 403 Among the latest literature see for example Grim 19981107-1108 and Hultkrantz 1998 746-752

61 Maringer 1956 59ff62 Michaels (ed) 1997 41-60 and 77-89

434 Ina Wunn

recent hunter-gatherer communities cannot be consulted in order to de-rive from them a certain belief of prehistoric man Even people livingon a relatively primitive economical level up to the present day havebeen affected by their past which has in uenced their state of mindAs a result their ideas and religious conceptions changed in the samemanner as the belief system of modern communities did63 The an-thropologist Wilhelm Emil Muumlhlmann acknowledges the arguments ofMax Raphael when he emphasises that all known primitive religionsare younger than theological religions64 Even if ecological and eco-nomical prerequisites of different societies are the same they do notnecessarily have the same or a similar belief system identical ritualssymbols and practices Hermann Schulz emphasises ldquoKulturell aufdas engste verwandte Gruppen koumlnnen einen religioumls-symbolisch undartefaktreichen Ritualismus entwickeln (Sepik-Gebiet) oder innerhalbder elaborierten ritualsymbolische n Medien tendentiell nichtreligioumlseartefakt-arme Programme elaborieren (Kapauku)rdquo65

The arguments show that it is by no means suf cient to nd prooffor the hunting practices of Neanderthal man in order to imply any kindof religion and especially not a de nite and well-known religion

Bear-cult

The existence of the cult of the bear in the middle Palaeolithic pe-riod is taken for granted Aringke Hultkrantz writes ldquoDie Kulturen des ark-

63 Max Raphael writes ldquoMan hat diese Schwierigkeit umgehen wollen durchHeranziehen von Aussagen sogenannter primitiver Kulturvoumllker Diese nur in sehrengen Grenzen moumlgliche Analogie uumlbersieht daszlig auch diese Staumlmme eine Geschichtegehabt haben mdash eine regressive statt der progressiven der Kulturvoumllker Es liegt einunberechtigtes Vorurteil in der Annahme der Einfrierung des Gewesenen denn dielsquoPrimitivenrsquo nden sich selbst wo sie auf dem Stadium der Jagdwirtschaft stehengeblieben sind mit den alten Werkzeugen und Waffen einer anderen Umgebunggegenuumlber die starken den Einzelmenschen an Maumlchtigkeit uumlberragenden Tiere sindersetzt durch wesentlich kleinere und schwaumlchererdquo (Raphael 1978 78)

64 Muumlhlmann 1957 119865 Schulz 1993 189

Beginning of Religion 435

tischen Raumes sind Bruchstuumlcke einer palaumlolithischen Jagdkulturrdquo66

Friedrich Heiler67 refers to similar ideas as those expressed by JosephCampbell who describes the cult of the bear in an interesting buthardly well-grounded manner First Campbell refers to a bear-festivalamong the Ainu After the killing of the captured bear and during theceremonies the skull of the animal is put at the top of a long stick68

In a second step Campbell portrays Neanderthal man in impressiveterms ldquo when the remains of a strangely brutish yet manlike skele-ton were found in a limestone quarry not far from Duumlsseldorf in theValley of Neanderrdquo69 The following descriptions shortly mention thecaves of the Alps where the remains of the bears were detected Theexcavators had the impression that the arrangement of the fossil bonescould hardly be due to nature so they attributed this to the activitiesof H neanderthalensi s who were assumed to have killed the animalsand arranged their bones during certain ceremonies70 It is true thatnearly everywhere in the Arctic primitive peoples know certain ritu-als connected with the hunting of the bear71 The excavators of thecaves Emil Baumlchler and Karl Houmlrmann took these ceremonies of cir-cumpolar peoples to prove their hypothesis of an ancient bear-cult inprehistoric times72 In the following years several discoveries of simi-lar bear-caves seemed to support the hypothesis of cave bear worshipEmil Baumlchler himself discovered bear bone deposits at the Wilden-mannlisloch in Switzerland and in Sloveniarsquos Mornova Cave In 1946Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan excavated seven cave bear skulls arranged in acircle in Furtins Cave Saocircne-et-Loire In 1950 Kurt Ehrenberg secured

66 Hultkrantz 1998 75167 See Heiler 1979 7868 Campbell 1987 334ff69 Ibid 33970 Ibid 341f71 Edsman 1957 84172 Maringer 1956 95ff

436 Ina Wunn

a deposit of long bones arranged together with cave bear skulls in theSalzhofen Cave in the Austrian Alps73

The latest nd of supposed traces of prehistoric cave bear worshipwas published in 1996 In the Rumanian Bihor-Mountains ChristianLascu et al discovered a cave rich in palaeontologica l cave beardeposits74 Scholars such as Johannes Maringer or Aringke Hultkrantzrefer to the reports of the excavators when they interpret the depositsas the remainder of cult practice The historian Karl Narr also gives anaccount of the deposits of cave bear skulls and long bones but remainssceptical75

A detailed discussion of the nds of cave bear bones from a palaeon-tological and ethnographic point of view led to completely differentresults76 The careful and critical use of ethnographic analogues onwhich the theories of a cave bear cult is founded in the end leads toeven contrary results If H neanderthalensi s had known cave bear wor-ship its traces would have been found inside the settlements The re-mains of such a cult would have been the bone deposits of Neanderthalmanrsquos favourite and most dangerous game among which howeverthe bear did not rank Recent peoples who know the bear cult catchor kill a bear in his winter accommodation and bring it to their settle-ment There it is killed and eaten by the villagers under different ritualregulations The bones of the dead game are put into a holy place orare carefully buried near the village but never brought back again tothe dwelling of the bear

The most impressive arguments against cave bear worship comenevertheless from the bone deposits itself Crucial palaeontologica lobjections are to be stated rst of all Both the cave bear (Ursusspelaeus) which was extinct at the end of the last ice age and thebrown bear (Ursus arctos) which spread all over Eurasia since theEem period show a strong preference for cave accommodation There

73 See Lascu et al 1996 19-20 and Maringer 1956 91-9674 See Lascu et al 199675 Narr 1957 1076 Wunn 1999a 3-23

Beginning of Religion 437

they hide during wintertime and give birth to their young The caveswhere the relics of alleged bear worship were found are the naturalhabitat of the animals where they spend the long winters and hidetheir young At those places the bears sometimes died for severalreasons for example age illness lack of food Therefore their bonefossils are bound to be found in those places if they were not carriedoff by carrion eaters or removed by sedimentologica l processes Theoccurrence of cave bear bones in the caves of the ice age which servedgenerations of bear families as shelter is just what a palaeontologis twould expect

The proponents of Palaeolithic bear worship did not only think themere occurrence of bear bones in the caves to be remarkable butalso their alleged assortment and arrangement in which they werefound However there rst takes place an amassment of bear bones incertain places by the activities of the bears themselves as Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan correctly noticed The parts of skeletons of the deceasedanimals which originally are in their anatomical order are thrownin disorder or scattered by later generations of bears Sometimes theyare pressed to the walls where they are relatively protected againstfurther decay77 Also the outweighing of skulls and long bones is aresult of a process of natural decay and not due to human activitiesThe mentioned parts of the skeleton are relatively heavy and compactso that they are more able to resist decomposition processes thanthe small vertebrae ribs foot-bones or hand-bones A result of thoseprocesses is the natural selection of the bone material78 But notonly decomposition in uences the state of the bones During theirhistory the caves were ooded several times as the accumulatedsediments prove Such oodings do not remain without in uence onthe fossil material With high water level and stronger current all loosematerial is either rinsed away or carried for a certain distance andthen dropped at a place where there is a weaker current During theseprocesses the anatomical bone order is radically altered Therefore

77 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 3978 Ziegler 1975 44-45

438 Ina Wunn

the accumulation of several skulls in one place and the absenceof other bones is due to geological and sedimentologica l processesand not to human intervention The oating ability of sediments canbe reduced by prominent parts of the walls or unevenness of the oor resulting in some bone parts being deposited in the proximityof obstacles A concrete example of this effect is the discovery ofseveral skulls deposited in a crosslike pattern in the Cold Cave ofthe Bihor Mountains The obstacle which reduced the transportabilityof the skulls crucially was a stone at which the fossil skulls weredeposited79 Just as little as the assortment of the bone material isproof of human activities so the adjustment of the fossils is anunnatural process The movements of a transport medium be it windsediment or water are transferred to the material to be transportedso that the movement in a special direction leads to its assortmentTherefore the assortment of bear skulls is not due to human activitiesbut to the owing water or other transport mediums in the caves Itcannot be said clearly enough There was no cave bear worship inthe middle Palaeolithic period at all The bear caves show exactlywhat a palaeontologis t would expect Nothing suggests that the naturalprocess of decay and sedimentation was at any time interrupted ordisturbed80

Combined burials of man and cave bear

In connection with assumed bear worship the opinion was heldthat sometimes men and bear were buried together in one grave81 Asevidence served the excavations at Le Reacutegourdou near Lascaux whereunder a hill of debris both the remains of a bear and a Neanderthal manwere preserved The French archaeologist Fabienne May demonstratedthat the remains of the bear bore no connection with the human

79 See Lascu et al 1996 30 plate 380 Wunn 1999a 6ff81 Rust 1986 15

Beginning of Religion 439

skeleton and questioned whether there was a funeral at Le Reacutegourdouat all82

Skull deposits and skull worship

Just as the bear worship was regarded as irrefutable fact there washardly any doubt that Neanderthal man subjected the heads of thedeceased to a special treatment and set them up for ritual purposesOther scholars are convinced that Neanderthal man hunted fellowhumans to kill and eat them83 It is said that the skulls of the killedlater became the focal point of a ritual This hypothesis is suggestedby Ioan Couliano ldquoEinige Schaumldel sind in einer Weise verformtdie den Gedanken an ein Herausloumlsen des Gehirns nahelegenrdquo84

Alfred Rust expresses himself absolutely clearly He is sure that the nds of isolated lower jaws and craniums are closely connected withreligious customs85 Detailed and critically Johannes Maringer arguesthe question of the skull cult He discusses the nds which wereconsidered as proof of the presence of the alleged practices Thereis for example the crushed childlike skull from Gibraltar or the nds of human remains at Weimar-Ehringsdorf and particularly theoutstanding nd of the skull of Monte Circeo which is mentionedby every author as evidence of the described ritual practice Finallyhe comes to the following result ldquoDas Fundbild der Guattari-Grottespricht klar fuumlr einen Kult in dessen Mittelpunkt der Schaumldel standUrspruumlnglich scheint er auf einem Stock aufgesteckt gewesen zusein Einem heiligen Bannkreis gleich umgab ihn der Kranz vonSteinen Der ganze Houmlhlenteil erweckt den Eindruck als habe er den inder vorderen Houmlhle wohnenden Urmenschen als Heiligtum gedientrdquo86

and further ldquoDie Schaumldelsetzungen duumlrften aller Wahrscheinlichkeitnach eine Art Schaumldelkult darstellen in dem das Gedaumlchtnis der

82 Ibid 1583 Ullrich 1978 293ff See also the overview in Henke and Rothe 1999 27784 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2885 Rust 1991 19486 Maringer 1956 80

440 Ina Wunn

Verstorbenen gep egt und ihre Hilfe wie auch ihr Schutz fuumlr die Sippeer eht wurderdquo87 Even Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan agrees that the skull ofMonte Circeo is an intentional deposition of a skull but he refusesto draw any conclusions concerning religious customs88 On the otherhand he can prove that all other nds of isolated heads or jaws arethe result of taphonomic processes89 After a careful re-examinationof the original reports of the excavations Fabienne May states thatnone of the descriptions of the excavations is suf cient to con rm ordisprove the hypothesis of a ritual90 The discovery of a supposed cultsite at Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan where the skull of a child was set upbetween several skulls of ibex does not prove the hypothesis of a cultIn this case the remnants of ibexes and the skull of the child have noconnection at all91 Since it could be shown that even the skull depositof Monte Circeo was not the result of human activities but that thedamages of the skull were due to the work of hungry hyenas the lastargument in favour of a skull cult is disproved92

Cannibalism

Cannibalism has already been mentioned in connection with thedeposition of human skulls Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan expresses him-self as follows ldquoDie Existenz eines religioumlsen Kannibalismus imPalaumlolithikum mag wahrscheinlich sein doch laumlszligt sich dies bei dergegenwaumlrtigen Materiallage absolut nicht beweisen Und dennochspricht kein Autor von der palaumlolithischen Religion ohne fuumlr odergegen die Kannibalismusthese Stellung zu beziehen wobei in groumlszlige-rem Umfang auf ethnographische Beispiele zuruumlckgegriffen wirdrdquo93

But particularly those ethnographic analogies give strong argumentsagainst the hypothesis of prehistoric cannibalism The anthropologis t

87 Ibid 8588 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 5389 Ibid 54-5690 May 1986 1791 Ibid 33-3492 Henke and Rothe 1994 52793 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 56

Beginning of Religion 441

Gabriele Weiss and the archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher discuss thetopic of cannibalism carefully94 They state that the ethnographic ma-terial itself is frequently not convincing because it is based mainly onsensational reports of past adventurers There are no assertions by eye-witnesses but stories of man eaters were always reported by writerswho only stated that they had heard about those customs The cus-tom of cannibalism itself was always stated to have been given upjust several years before the arrival of the traveller95 Frequently theassumption that a certain people was guilty of cannibalism was usedpropagandistically in order to be able to lead a war against this peo-ple or to force them into slavery96 On the other hand it was a wellknown rumour in Africa even up to the beginning of this century thatEuropeans fed on the esh of African children97 It is argued by HeidiPeter-Roumlcher that there is no evidence of cannibalism among recentpeoples at all98 This means that it is nonsense to search for the reasonand the origin of that custom in prehistoric times It cannot be decidedto what extent Sigmund Freud with his hypothesis of the origin of hu-man society must be blamed for evoking the idea of early man-eatersIn his Totem und Tabu he made several statements about the origin ofhuman society claiming that at the beginning of prehistory a group ofhumans was ruled by a despotic patriarch until he was killed and eatenby his sons99 The subtitle of his book ldquoEinige Uumlbereinstimmungen imSeelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotikerrdquo100 re ects however the

94 Weiss 1987 142-159 and Peter-Roumlcher 198995 Volhard 1939 36996 Gabriele Weiss (1987 152) mentions the example of a decree of Queen Isabella

in 1503 who gave permission to enslave the Caribbean Indians because they weresaid to be man-eaters

97 Ibid 15098 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 On the contrary the American anthropologist Christy Turner

is convinced that the Anasazi an Indian people who lived in the southern parts of theUnited States during historical times did human hunting See Turner 1999

99 See Weiss 1987 44-45100 Weiss 1987 44

442 Ina Wunn

opinion of many of his contemporaries and colleagues and contributesto the picture of the mentality of Neanderthal man until today101

The facts on which the theory of prehistoric cannibalism are basedare usually poor Frequently it was suf cient to assume cannibalismexisted if a skeleton was found incomplete or not in anatomical or-der102 It is still considered a strong proof for cannibalism when splithuman bones occur as were excavated at Krapina The defenders ofthe cannibalism thesis argue that the remnants of human bones lookabsolutely similar to the scattered animal bones at the same excava-tion site Therefore they come to the conclusion that Neanderthal mantreated fellow humans in the same way as he treated game This argu-ment is still stressed by the anthropologist s Tim White and Alban De- eur Scattered bones of human beings and deer in the cave of Moula-Guercy show the same scratches103 This argument presupposes how-ever that the humans as well as the animals were killed by Neanderthalman Both the humans and the animals could however have been thevictims of carnivores for example hyena or cave lion or the scratcheson human and animal bones may be due to taphonomic processes104

This thesis would explain the remains of Krapina as well as the ndingsof Moula-Guercy In any case the identical treatment of human andanimal bones and the missing of any traces of a ritual do not promotethe hypothesis of a religious custom In this case Krapina and Moula-Guercy would prove that Neanderthal man hunted other humans formeat This seems however to be unlikely because the hunters of theMousterian lived in a habitat full of game which was for sure easier tokill than humans

101 Campbell 1987 339102 Maringer 1956 81f In the excavation report of the site Weimar-Ehringsdorf

cannibalism is not mentioned at all See Feustel 1989 391-393103 De eur et al 1999 128-131104 It is still more than dif cult to decide whether scratches on bones are due to

human activities to carnivores or to taphonomic processes The topic is still debated

among scientists For an overview see Henke and Rothe 1994 19-25

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

424 Ina Wunn

and evolutionary psychology indicate that the intellectual capability ofthose early forms of hominids is in no way comparable to that of re-cent Homo sapiens As stone tools and remains of meals prove the

rst member of the genus Homo had developed only a very small do-main for technical intelligence and several tiny mental modules forinteraction with the natural world but had not yet full natural historyintelligence32 The discrete domain of social intelligence which theancestor of early hominids had already acquired developed during the

rst steps of human evolution into a more powerful and complex partof the mind Probably even a primitive kind of linguistic intelligencehad started to develop As Steven Mithen emphasises the intellectualcapability of the Homo habilis group was already higher than that ofAustralopithecus but nevertheless ldquolittle more than an elaborate ver-

sion of the mind of the common ancestorrdquo33 Therefore Australopithe-cus Homo rudolfensis and Homo habilisergaster were at the originof a development that encouraged the growth of hominids by forcingthem to occupy the niche of meat-eaters They were competitively suc-cessful because they developed the intellectual facilities allowing them

to use stone tools to serve their needs but not to think in abstract termsMircea Eliade also assumes that early hominids were able to hunt

successfully There is no archaeological evidence for this assumptionIt is certain that both Australopithecus and early Homo occupied the

niche of carrion-eaters Eliade himself was absolutely convinced thateven the rst of the hominids had a kind of religion that resembledin one way or the other the religion of recent hunter-gatherer com-munities He called upon his critics to present evidence on the non-religiosity of early hominids34 The palaeoanthropolog y and evolution-

ary psychology has since provided this evidence

32 Mithen 1996 104ff33 Ibid 11234 Eliade 1978 17

Beginning of Religion 425

2 Religiosity of Homo erectus and his Contemporaries

Homo erectus and his immediate descendants were the rst ho-minids who succeeded in leaving the African continent and to settlealmost everywhere in the Old World35 One of the oldest known Euro-pean fossiles is a jaw of the genus Homo discovered among the peb-bles on the banks of the Neckar river at the village of Mauer near Hei-delberg This jaw of Homo erectus heidelbergensi s is approximately650 000 to 600 000 years old36 Geologically the nd belongs to theperiod of Cromer This is a period between two long-lasting ice-agesthe Guumlnz- and the Mindel-periods when a relatively warm climate en-abled humans to occupy new habitats Primitive stone tools from theNeuwieder Becken and the latest excavations at Burgos in Spain provethat the European continent was inhabited at least 800 000 years ago oreven earlier Information on the life style of Homo erectus could onlybe gained from excavations at Bilzingsleben where an early settlementof Homo erectus could be found Geologically Bilzingsleben belongsto the Holstein period This means that the ndings at this place are notonly 200 000 years younger than the jaw from Mauer but completelyindependent of the rst appearance of a specimen of Homo erectus as aresult of an entire ice-age This period led to a characteristic change of ora and fauna which formed the landscape and ecosystem during the

35 The oldest human fossil of Europe was detected in 1994 in the Gran Dolina ofAtapuerca in Spain These early humans are about 780 000 years old These hominidsnamed Homo antecessor seem to differ signi cantly from the well known (Asian)Homo erectus and the African Homo ergaster which means that the early hominidsof Africa Asia and Europe belong to different species Several scientists emphasisethe following phylogenetic tree Homo antecessor developed from the African Homoergaster and succeeded to settle in Europe Here he became the ancestor of Homoheidelbergensis who himself developed into the European Homo neanderthalensisSee Henke and Rothe 1999 204-217

36 The remnants of four individuals of the species Homo antecessor which weredetected at the excavation site ldquoLa Gran Dolinardquo near Burgos belong to the eldestmembers of the genus Homo in Europe An isolated skull found near Isneria Italyis nearly as old Early tools from France have an age of between one million and twomillion years and prove that Europe was inhabited very early

426 Ina Wunn

rst conquest of Europe by a hominid The distance in time betweenthe ndings of Mauer and Bilzingsleben is re ected in the developmentof the culture While the tools of Homo erectus heidelbergensis werestill simple handaxes the Homo erectus bilzingslebensi s was alreadycapable of manufacturing developed weapons and tools Theoreticallythis made him capable of hunting for game

Anatomically H erectus bilzingslebensi s was more developed thanhis predecessor Therefore the way of life of H erectus heidelbergensismust have been even simpler and less advanced37 The excavation ofthe settlement at Bilzingsleben provides insight into the way of lifeof the younger Homo erectus The archaeological ndings of earlyman prove the following facts At Bilzingsleben a small group of earlyhumans camped at the shore of a small lake in not more than two orthree tents Here they seemed to have occasionally hunted a beaveror other small animals Their stone tools were suitable for huntingsmaller prey whereas no weapon was found which would have beeneffective enough to kill an elephant or a bison The distribution of theelements of the fauna supports this point of view38 Additionally theymay have fed on the corpses of dead animals which were probablyfound frequently along the shore of the lake Surely elephant and rhinobones which were found at the working sites and served as supportor work material originated from dead animals that were not killedby H erectus bilzingslebensi s One could conclude that they also ate sh eggs and vegetables and that the food was most likely cookedThe people of Bilzingsleben were already aware of a certain code ofsocial behaviour and it is also clear that there was some degree ofemotional exchange between certain members of the group There areno indications of any religious activities The comparison of Homoerectus bilzingslebensi s with recent hunter-gatherer communities isnot convincing due to the following facts The popular belief thatH erectus successfully hunted larger game has been disproved Manyof the ndings of fossil bone beds which were said to be due to

37 See Henke and Rothe 1994 407f38 Mania and Weber 1986 20ff

Beginning of Religion 427

the hunting activities of the H erectus are in the near vicinity ofwatering places Here the ungulates frequently became the prey ofpredatory animals Analysis of the individual age of the bones offossil mammals at Bilzingsleben and other Palaeolithic settlements ledto the conclusion that many of those animals died naturally39 The rst evidence that at least the younger Homo erectus was capable ofhunting larger prey came from Schoumlningen near Helmstedt Germanywhere a wooden spear about 15 meters long was found in a huntingcamp inhabited about 400 000 years ago40 Homo erectus had a brainvolume which was still quite small compared to the brain of recentHomo sapiens Only the younger H erectus is supposed to havebeen capable of verbal communication as anatomical investigation shave proven Though there is no direct relationship between brainvolume and intelligence behaviour or certain abilities scholars areconvinced that H erectus was quite primitive compared to H sapiensas the archaeological ndings related to his culture have revealed41

The results of evolutionary psychology seem to prove the followingfacts Obviously technical skills increased dramatically over those ofH habilis Natural history intelligence and social intelligence werealso well developed On the other hand the technical conservatismof Homo erectus over a period of about one million years is strikingThe only explanation for this contradictory evidence is to assume thatthe well developed multiple intelligences of the H erectus were stillcommitted to speci c domains of behaviour with very little interactionbetween them42 Thinking and communication in abstract terms whichare essential for religious awareness probably developed quite late

Though excavations like the camp of Bilzingsleben MarkleebergKaumlrlich or Bad Cannstadt and the results of archaeological psychologydo not support the hypothesis that early man performed any religiousrites and though the discussion of palaeanthropologica l facts prove

39 Henke and Rothe 1994 42840 Thieme 1997 807-81041 See Henke and Rothe1994 42442 Mithen 1996 115ff

428 Ina Wunn

that H erectus was not at all capable of performing complicated rit-uals it is still the opinion among scholars of the History of Religionand several archaeologists that ritual cannibalism was common amongearly human populations Thus Alfred Rust writes ldquoUnique nds fromAsia prove that cannibalism was exercised in the whole worldrdquo43 Al-fred Rust refers to nds of Homo erectus in the caves of Zhoukoudianwhich reveal many similarities to Bilzingsleben44 While Alfred Rustis convinced that the presence of several ldquosmashedrdquo human skulls isa clear sign of ritual cannibalism Johannes Maringer presumes thatskulls and lower jaws are the remnants of the deceased which had beenkept and worshipped by their family Similar customs are still evidentamong members of primitive cultures in Africa or Asia45 The palaean-thropologist s Winfried Henke and Hartmut Rothe express strong andjusti ed doubt about this assertion The analysis of several craniumsof early man gave evidence that the destruction of the skulls was dueto the activities of ancient hyena and normal taphonomic processes46

The archaeologist Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan had already noted in the six-ties ldquoThe conditions of the former excavations of Chou Kou Tien makeit dif cult to even nd a map of the site of skulls The skulls were ex-tracted from solid limestone and not even one of them is near to beingcomplete After decomposing into tiny sections they entered the gen-eral category of the animal remains It is dif cult to understand how themyth of head-collecting Sinanthropus could have assumed a de niteformrdquo47 Another victim of such prejudice is Karl Dietrich Adam withhis hypothesis that the skull of Homo erectus steinheimensis showstraces of having been subjected to postmortal manipulations48 Thedestruction of the base of the skull is his only criterion for the hy-pothesis that stone-age man was frequently the victim of ritual prac-

43 Rust 1991 17544 Ibid 17845 Maringer 1956 64-7146 Rust 1991 178f and Henke and Rothe 1994 42847 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 4948 Adam 1991 218

Beginning of Religion 429

tices Between the death of the individual and the later recovery ofthe fossil a number of taphonomic processes take place which havesigni cant effects on the later fossil One of those effects is the modi- cation of organic matter and its decay the assortment or destructionof hard sections as well as sedimentologica l processes Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan was able to show that the cranium and lower jaws are usuallywell preserved Therefore it is only due to taphonomic processes thatthese individual body parts survive and not at all due to human ac-tivities or postmortal manipulation49 In this connection it is necessaryto emphasise that scholars can only come to a decision based on a se-ries of complex investigations using a scanning electron microscopeas to whether scratches on fossil bones are due to violence caused bya stone tool or the teeth of a predatory animal Since there are no ar-chaeological ndings for the entire Palaeolithic or Neolithic period toprove the opening of the skull by humans none of the speculationsabout possible cult practice connected with human skulls is based onfacts50

3 Religion in the Middle Palaeolithic

From an anthropologica l point of view the European middle Palae-olithic is characterised by Homo neanderthalensi s51 This early form ofHomo sapiens or descendant of Homo heidelbergensis lived over a pe-

49 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 45 5550 Experiments with animal bones have shown that scratches made by stone tools

are absolutely equal to scratches caused by sand Those scratches occur frequentlyduring the process of embedding It is still dif cult to distinguish between traces ofhuman activities and traces of animal bites An examination is only possible with thehelp of a scanning electron microscope See Henke and Rothe 1994 20-24

51 The so-called Neanderthal-problem is however a source of heated debateOnly ten years ago many palaeanthropologists were convinced that Neanderthalman belonged to our species H sapiens His characteristic features were supposedto be due to the extreme climate of the ice-age In the meantime most scientistshave been convinced that Homo neanderthalensis developed directly from Homoheidelbergensis while the modern Homo sapiens developed during the same timein Africa and conquered Europe about 40 000 years ago See Henke and Rothe 1994433ff and Henke and Rothe 1999 272f

430 Ina Wunn

riod of nearly 100 000 years during which the landscape climate andliving conditions changed dramatically These environmental changesmight have contributed to the special anatomical features of the Nean-derthal man Surely the need to adapt to a frequently changing habitatforced H neanderthalensi s to develop sociocultural abilities that wereclosely related to the progressive evolution of intelligence and psycho-logical abilities52 The frequent environmental changes to which H ne-anderthalensis had to adapt made life immensely challenging In thewarmer and humid periods of the Eem period dense forests coveredthe landscape Population migration was only possible in the valleysThe fauna consisted of elephant deer stag aurochs bear and othersSuf cient food-supply in the direct surroundings allows one to believethat Neanderthal man was relatively stationary during this climatic pe-riod The excavated settlement of Weimar-Ehringsdorf was inhabitedduring this time During the initial phase of cooler climate the orachanged Fir and pine trees were common and formed large and humidforests The winters were cold and snow was plentiful even in sum-mertime the temperature remained low Not only non-migrating ani-mals were hunted by Neanderthal man herds of reindeer wild horsebison and mammoth provided suf cient opportunity for hunting Dur-ing the coldest periods the forests disappeared and made room for

52 Steven Mithen emphasises that natural history intelligence technical intelli-gence social and linguistic intelligence of Neanderthal man were all well developedbut there was still a lack of interaction between the four domains of the mind Cogni-tive uidity took place only between the domains of social and linguistic intelligence(Mithen 1996 143 and 147ff) The author of this article has a different opinion In gen-eral the lithic culture of Neanderthal man is the Mousterian which is still simple com-pared to the technology of the upper Palaeolithic On the other hand the lithic culturesare not strictly related to the one or the other human species Homo neanderthalensistoo was found together with the more advanced tools of the upper Palaeolithic whileHomo sapiens was found with the simple tools of the Mousterian culture Thereforedirect connections between a certain human species and its lithic culture cannot beproved The technical skills of the younger H neanderthalensis and early H sapiensobviously did not differ That means that there is no palaeanthropological evidence forthe assumption of fundamental difference between the minds of H neanderthalensisand H sapiens (Henke and Rothe 1999 275 Reynolds 1990 263ff)

Beginning of Religion 431

prairies and tundra The climate became dry with extremely cold win-ters and relatively mild but short summers The prairies were full ofgame which migrated with the seasons53

The Magic of Hunting in the Middle Palaeolithic

The hunting activities of the Palaeolithic man which Mircea Eliadeand other scholars take for granted are only able to be proved with ref-erence to later periods of ice-age At the town of Lehringen near Ver-den an der Aller the skeleton of an elephant had been preserved thathad been killed with the aid of a wooden spear found between the ribsof the animal This is impressive evidence of the fact that Homo nean-derthalensis was able to successfully hunt big game Therefore it canbe assumed that Mircea Eliadersquos precise conceptions of religion duringprehistoric times may at least be correct with regard to the people of theMousterian He describes this religion as ldquomagic-religious conceptionsof Palaeolithic manrdquo as follows54 The documents regarding the reli-gion of the Palaeolithic man are obscure he says but available Theirmeaning can be deciphered if the scholar succeeds in inserting thesedocuments into a semantic system55 This semantic system is alreadygiven by the results of investigations of recent hunter-gatherer commu-nities Their similar lifestyle offers suf cient certainty for identical orvery similar religions of recent hunter-gatherers and Palaeolithic manTherefore Homo neanderthalensi s believed that the animal is a beingquite similar to man but talented with supernatural forces He wasconvinced that gods such as the ldquoMaster of the Animalsrdquo or ldquoSupremeBeingrdquo existed The kill of the animal took place after a complicatedritual On the other hand rites must have existed which were linkedwith a skull-cult and deposits of long bones Similarly Ioan Coulianoargues that ldquoeither similar models of well-known primitive peoplesare referred to or one dispenses with any model The History of Reli-gion can only use the rst option as imperfect as it may be Scholars

53 See Henke and Rothe 1994 52554 Eliade 1978 15ff55 Ibid 18

432 Ina Wunn

have to endeavour to decipher the mental horizon of the people of pre-historic times by using the results of ethnographic and archaeologicalstudiesrdquo56 John Campbell concludes from the myths of known peoplesthat there must be close connections between the religions of Palae-olithic man and recent hunter-gatherers The following conviction isboth precondition and result of his investigations ldquoI nd that its mainresult has been its con rmation of a thought I have long and faithfullyentertained of the unity of the race of man not only in its biology butalso in its spiritual historyrdquo57 He proves his assumption with the helpof a comparison Under the title ldquoThe Stage of Neanderthal Manrdquo thereader nds the detailed description of the life habits of the small anddelicate Negritos of the Andaman Islands in the Gulf of Bengal butCampbell fails to prove the connections between the habits of a peopleof recent tropical Asia and an anatomically different prehistoric peo-ple which lived in boreal climates 100 000 years ago58 Another argu-ment of John Campbellrsquos is founded on archaeological facts The stoneblades of the Mousterian (the material culture of Neanderthal man ismainly Mousterian) are still very similar a wider range of differenttools was unknown at that time This means for Campbell that thecustom of tool-making was carefully handed down from one genera-tion to another comparably to customs of recent bushman culture Thisextraordinary attention is due to a certain feeling of the holy whichwas connected with the manufacturing and use of the tool59 The pass-ing on of Palaeolithic religion to religions of recent hunter-gatherercommunities serves as a proof that the myths of recent peoples origi-nated in the Palaeolithic and have been handed down till today withoutany changes This means that Joseph Campbell constructed a typicalcircular argument Todayrsquos behaviours and myths are taken as proofin order to postulate the existence of the same behaviours and mythsas practised by Palaeolithic man Then the postulate itself is taken as

56 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2757 Campbell 1987 v58 Ibid 365ff59 Ibid 364f

Beginning of Religion 433

a voucher to prove the unchanged existence of those myths from thePalaeolithic up to now

The opinion that Palaeolithic man already had a complicated reli-gion with certain notions of the holy and various rituals can be foundin nearly every religious reference work Fritz Hartmann writes forexample ldquoThe magic of the hunt belongs to this typically human con-ception of the worldrdquo60

Even if the consequences drawn from the archaeologically securedfacts in the past seem frequently exaggerated several sentences in thevolume of Johannes Maringer explain the intention of the authors Itwas the common statement that prehistoric man was a mere beast with-out a developed mind that made the opponents of this point of viewlook for counter-arguments which are no longer defendable in the lightof modern research results61 The use of ethnographic analogies to re-construct prehistoric religion is based on a speci c understanding ofthe evolution of religion In the nineteenth century Charles Darwinrsquostheory of biological evolution in uenced nearly all branches of sci-ence In the elds of the study of religion and anthropology scholarslike Edward Burnett Tylor or James George Frazer developed concep-tions of religious evolution which have strongly determined researchuntil today Tylor as well as Frazer were convinced that they couldprove an ascending development of religion from primitive origins tothe modern religions of the industrial age According to this theory thereligions of recent hunter-gatherer communities can be classi ed asrelics from ancient times62 This means on the contrary that it is pos-sible to reconstruct the consciousness of ancient people with the helpof knowledge about the religion of todayrsquos hunter-gatherer communi-ties However only a brief insight into the multiplicity of so-calledprimitive religions reveals that their contents and symbols are not sim-ilar by any means According to Max Raphael the faith-conceptions of

60 Hartmann 1957 403 Among the latest literature see for example Grim 19981107-1108 and Hultkrantz 1998 746-752

61 Maringer 1956 59ff62 Michaels (ed) 1997 41-60 and 77-89

434 Ina Wunn

recent hunter-gatherer communities cannot be consulted in order to de-rive from them a certain belief of prehistoric man Even people livingon a relatively primitive economical level up to the present day havebeen affected by their past which has in uenced their state of mindAs a result their ideas and religious conceptions changed in the samemanner as the belief system of modern communities did63 The an-thropologist Wilhelm Emil Muumlhlmann acknowledges the arguments ofMax Raphael when he emphasises that all known primitive religionsare younger than theological religions64 Even if ecological and eco-nomical prerequisites of different societies are the same they do notnecessarily have the same or a similar belief system identical ritualssymbols and practices Hermann Schulz emphasises ldquoKulturell aufdas engste verwandte Gruppen koumlnnen einen religioumls-symbolisch undartefaktreichen Ritualismus entwickeln (Sepik-Gebiet) oder innerhalbder elaborierten ritualsymbolische n Medien tendentiell nichtreligioumlseartefakt-arme Programme elaborieren (Kapauku)rdquo65

The arguments show that it is by no means suf cient to nd prooffor the hunting practices of Neanderthal man in order to imply any kindof religion and especially not a de nite and well-known religion

Bear-cult

The existence of the cult of the bear in the middle Palaeolithic pe-riod is taken for granted Aringke Hultkrantz writes ldquoDie Kulturen des ark-

63 Max Raphael writes ldquoMan hat diese Schwierigkeit umgehen wollen durchHeranziehen von Aussagen sogenannter primitiver Kulturvoumllker Diese nur in sehrengen Grenzen moumlgliche Analogie uumlbersieht daszlig auch diese Staumlmme eine Geschichtegehabt haben mdash eine regressive statt der progressiven der Kulturvoumllker Es liegt einunberechtigtes Vorurteil in der Annahme der Einfrierung des Gewesenen denn dielsquoPrimitivenrsquo nden sich selbst wo sie auf dem Stadium der Jagdwirtschaft stehengeblieben sind mit den alten Werkzeugen und Waffen einer anderen Umgebunggegenuumlber die starken den Einzelmenschen an Maumlchtigkeit uumlberragenden Tiere sindersetzt durch wesentlich kleinere und schwaumlchererdquo (Raphael 1978 78)

64 Muumlhlmann 1957 119865 Schulz 1993 189

Beginning of Religion 435

tischen Raumes sind Bruchstuumlcke einer palaumlolithischen Jagdkulturrdquo66

Friedrich Heiler67 refers to similar ideas as those expressed by JosephCampbell who describes the cult of the bear in an interesting buthardly well-grounded manner First Campbell refers to a bear-festivalamong the Ainu After the killing of the captured bear and during theceremonies the skull of the animal is put at the top of a long stick68

In a second step Campbell portrays Neanderthal man in impressiveterms ldquo when the remains of a strangely brutish yet manlike skele-ton were found in a limestone quarry not far from Duumlsseldorf in theValley of Neanderrdquo69 The following descriptions shortly mention thecaves of the Alps where the remains of the bears were detected Theexcavators had the impression that the arrangement of the fossil bonescould hardly be due to nature so they attributed this to the activitiesof H neanderthalensi s who were assumed to have killed the animalsand arranged their bones during certain ceremonies70 It is true thatnearly everywhere in the Arctic primitive peoples know certain ritu-als connected with the hunting of the bear71 The excavators of thecaves Emil Baumlchler and Karl Houmlrmann took these ceremonies of cir-cumpolar peoples to prove their hypothesis of an ancient bear-cult inprehistoric times72 In the following years several discoveries of simi-lar bear-caves seemed to support the hypothesis of cave bear worshipEmil Baumlchler himself discovered bear bone deposits at the Wilden-mannlisloch in Switzerland and in Sloveniarsquos Mornova Cave In 1946Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan excavated seven cave bear skulls arranged in acircle in Furtins Cave Saocircne-et-Loire In 1950 Kurt Ehrenberg secured

66 Hultkrantz 1998 75167 See Heiler 1979 7868 Campbell 1987 334ff69 Ibid 33970 Ibid 341f71 Edsman 1957 84172 Maringer 1956 95ff

436 Ina Wunn

a deposit of long bones arranged together with cave bear skulls in theSalzhofen Cave in the Austrian Alps73

The latest nd of supposed traces of prehistoric cave bear worshipwas published in 1996 In the Rumanian Bihor-Mountains ChristianLascu et al discovered a cave rich in palaeontologica l cave beardeposits74 Scholars such as Johannes Maringer or Aringke Hultkrantzrefer to the reports of the excavators when they interpret the depositsas the remainder of cult practice The historian Karl Narr also gives anaccount of the deposits of cave bear skulls and long bones but remainssceptical75

A detailed discussion of the nds of cave bear bones from a palaeon-tological and ethnographic point of view led to completely differentresults76 The careful and critical use of ethnographic analogues onwhich the theories of a cave bear cult is founded in the end leads toeven contrary results If H neanderthalensi s had known cave bear wor-ship its traces would have been found inside the settlements The re-mains of such a cult would have been the bone deposits of Neanderthalmanrsquos favourite and most dangerous game among which howeverthe bear did not rank Recent peoples who know the bear cult catchor kill a bear in his winter accommodation and bring it to their settle-ment There it is killed and eaten by the villagers under different ritualregulations The bones of the dead game are put into a holy place orare carefully buried near the village but never brought back again tothe dwelling of the bear

The most impressive arguments against cave bear worship comenevertheless from the bone deposits itself Crucial palaeontologica lobjections are to be stated rst of all Both the cave bear (Ursusspelaeus) which was extinct at the end of the last ice age and thebrown bear (Ursus arctos) which spread all over Eurasia since theEem period show a strong preference for cave accommodation There

73 See Lascu et al 1996 19-20 and Maringer 1956 91-9674 See Lascu et al 199675 Narr 1957 1076 Wunn 1999a 3-23

Beginning of Religion 437

they hide during wintertime and give birth to their young The caveswhere the relics of alleged bear worship were found are the naturalhabitat of the animals where they spend the long winters and hidetheir young At those places the bears sometimes died for severalreasons for example age illness lack of food Therefore their bonefossils are bound to be found in those places if they were not carriedoff by carrion eaters or removed by sedimentologica l processes Theoccurrence of cave bear bones in the caves of the ice age which servedgenerations of bear families as shelter is just what a palaeontologis twould expect

The proponents of Palaeolithic bear worship did not only think themere occurrence of bear bones in the caves to be remarkable butalso their alleged assortment and arrangement in which they werefound However there rst takes place an amassment of bear bones incertain places by the activities of the bears themselves as Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan correctly noticed The parts of skeletons of the deceasedanimals which originally are in their anatomical order are thrownin disorder or scattered by later generations of bears Sometimes theyare pressed to the walls where they are relatively protected againstfurther decay77 Also the outweighing of skulls and long bones is aresult of a process of natural decay and not due to human activitiesThe mentioned parts of the skeleton are relatively heavy and compactso that they are more able to resist decomposition processes thanthe small vertebrae ribs foot-bones or hand-bones A result of thoseprocesses is the natural selection of the bone material78 But notonly decomposition in uences the state of the bones During theirhistory the caves were ooded several times as the accumulatedsediments prove Such oodings do not remain without in uence onthe fossil material With high water level and stronger current all loosematerial is either rinsed away or carried for a certain distance andthen dropped at a place where there is a weaker current During theseprocesses the anatomical bone order is radically altered Therefore

77 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 3978 Ziegler 1975 44-45

438 Ina Wunn

the accumulation of several skulls in one place and the absenceof other bones is due to geological and sedimentologica l processesand not to human intervention The oating ability of sediments canbe reduced by prominent parts of the walls or unevenness of the oor resulting in some bone parts being deposited in the proximityof obstacles A concrete example of this effect is the discovery ofseveral skulls deposited in a crosslike pattern in the Cold Cave ofthe Bihor Mountains The obstacle which reduced the transportabilityof the skulls crucially was a stone at which the fossil skulls weredeposited79 Just as little as the assortment of the bone material isproof of human activities so the adjustment of the fossils is anunnatural process The movements of a transport medium be it windsediment or water are transferred to the material to be transportedso that the movement in a special direction leads to its assortmentTherefore the assortment of bear skulls is not due to human activitiesbut to the owing water or other transport mediums in the caves Itcannot be said clearly enough There was no cave bear worship inthe middle Palaeolithic period at all The bear caves show exactlywhat a palaeontologis t would expect Nothing suggests that the naturalprocess of decay and sedimentation was at any time interrupted ordisturbed80

Combined burials of man and cave bear

In connection with assumed bear worship the opinion was heldthat sometimes men and bear were buried together in one grave81 Asevidence served the excavations at Le Reacutegourdou near Lascaux whereunder a hill of debris both the remains of a bear and a Neanderthal manwere preserved The French archaeologist Fabienne May demonstratedthat the remains of the bear bore no connection with the human

79 See Lascu et al 1996 30 plate 380 Wunn 1999a 6ff81 Rust 1986 15

Beginning of Religion 439

skeleton and questioned whether there was a funeral at Le Reacutegourdouat all82

Skull deposits and skull worship

Just as the bear worship was regarded as irrefutable fact there washardly any doubt that Neanderthal man subjected the heads of thedeceased to a special treatment and set them up for ritual purposesOther scholars are convinced that Neanderthal man hunted fellowhumans to kill and eat them83 It is said that the skulls of the killedlater became the focal point of a ritual This hypothesis is suggestedby Ioan Couliano ldquoEinige Schaumldel sind in einer Weise verformtdie den Gedanken an ein Herausloumlsen des Gehirns nahelegenrdquo84

Alfred Rust expresses himself absolutely clearly He is sure that the nds of isolated lower jaws and craniums are closely connected withreligious customs85 Detailed and critically Johannes Maringer arguesthe question of the skull cult He discusses the nds which wereconsidered as proof of the presence of the alleged practices Thereis for example the crushed childlike skull from Gibraltar or the nds of human remains at Weimar-Ehringsdorf and particularly theoutstanding nd of the skull of Monte Circeo which is mentionedby every author as evidence of the described ritual practice Finallyhe comes to the following result ldquoDas Fundbild der Guattari-Grottespricht klar fuumlr einen Kult in dessen Mittelpunkt der Schaumldel standUrspruumlnglich scheint er auf einem Stock aufgesteckt gewesen zusein Einem heiligen Bannkreis gleich umgab ihn der Kranz vonSteinen Der ganze Houmlhlenteil erweckt den Eindruck als habe er den inder vorderen Houmlhle wohnenden Urmenschen als Heiligtum gedientrdquo86

and further ldquoDie Schaumldelsetzungen duumlrften aller Wahrscheinlichkeitnach eine Art Schaumldelkult darstellen in dem das Gedaumlchtnis der

82 Ibid 1583 Ullrich 1978 293ff See also the overview in Henke and Rothe 1999 27784 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2885 Rust 1991 19486 Maringer 1956 80

440 Ina Wunn

Verstorbenen gep egt und ihre Hilfe wie auch ihr Schutz fuumlr die Sippeer eht wurderdquo87 Even Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan agrees that the skull ofMonte Circeo is an intentional deposition of a skull but he refusesto draw any conclusions concerning religious customs88 On the otherhand he can prove that all other nds of isolated heads or jaws arethe result of taphonomic processes89 After a careful re-examinationof the original reports of the excavations Fabienne May states thatnone of the descriptions of the excavations is suf cient to con rm ordisprove the hypothesis of a ritual90 The discovery of a supposed cultsite at Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan where the skull of a child was set upbetween several skulls of ibex does not prove the hypothesis of a cultIn this case the remnants of ibexes and the skull of the child have noconnection at all91 Since it could be shown that even the skull depositof Monte Circeo was not the result of human activities but that thedamages of the skull were due to the work of hungry hyenas the lastargument in favour of a skull cult is disproved92

Cannibalism

Cannibalism has already been mentioned in connection with thedeposition of human skulls Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan expresses him-self as follows ldquoDie Existenz eines religioumlsen Kannibalismus imPalaumlolithikum mag wahrscheinlich sein doch laumlszligt sich dies bei dergegenwaumlrtigen Materiallage absolut nicht beweisen Und dennochspricht kein Autor von der palaumlolithischen Religion ohne fuumlr odergegen die Kannibalismusthese Stellung zu beziehen wobei in groumlszlige-rem Umfang auf ethnographische Beispiele zuruumlckgegriffen wirdrdquo93

But particularly those ethnographic analogies give strong argumentsagainst the hypothesis of prehistoric cannibalism The anthropologis t

87 Ibid 8588 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 5389 Ibid 54-5690 May 1986 1791 Ibid 33-3492 Henke and Rothe 1994 52793 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 56

Beginning of Religion 441

Gabriele Weiss and the archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher discuss thetopic of cannibalism carefully94 They state that the ethnographic ma-terial itself is frequently not convincing because it is based mainly onsensational reports of past adventurers There are no assertions by eye-witnesses but stories of man eaters were always reported by writerswho only stated that they had heard about those customs The cus-tom of cannibalism itself was always stated to have been given upjust several years before the arrival of the traveller95 Frequently theassumption that a certain people was guilty of cannibalism was usedpropagandistically in order to be able to lead a war against this peo-ple or to force them into slavery96 On the other hand it was a wellknown rumour in Africa even up to the beginning of this century thatEuropeans fed on the esh of African children97 It is argued by HeidiPeter-Roumlcher that there is no evidence of cannibalism among recentpeoples at all98 This means that it is nonsense to search for the reasonand the origin of that custom in prehistoric times It cannot be decidedto what extent Sigmund Freud with his hypothesis of the origin of hu-man society must be blamed for evoking the idea of early man-eatersIn his Totem und Tabu he made several statements about the origin ofhuman society claiming that at the beginning of prehistory a group ofhumans was ruled by a despotic patriarch until he was killed and eatenby his sons99 The subtitle of his book ldquoEinige Uumlbereinstimmungen imSeelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotikerrdquo100 re ects however the

94 Weiss 1987 142-159 and Peter-Roumlcher 198995 Volhard 1939 36996 Gabriele Weiss (1987 152) mentions the example of a decree of Queen Isabella

in 1503 who gave permission to enslave the Caribbean Indians because they weresaid to be man-eaters

97 Ibid 15098 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 On the contrary the American anthropologist Christy Turner

is convinced that the Anasazi an Indian people who lived in the southern parts of theUnited States during historical times did human hunting See Turner 1999

99 See Weiss 1987 44-45100 Weiss 1987 44

442 Ina Wunn

opinion of many of his contemporaries and colleagues and contributesto the picture of the mentality of Neanderthal man until today101

The facts on which the theory of prehistoric cannibalism are basedare usually poor Frequently it was suf cient to assume cannibalismexisted if a skeleton was found incomplete or not in anatomical or-der102 It is still considered a strong proof for cannibalism when splithuman bones occur as were excavated at Krapina The defenders ofthe cannibalism thesis argue that the remnants of human bones lookabsolutely similar to the scattered animal bones at the same excava-tion site Therefore they come to the conclusion that Neanderthal mantreated fellow humans in the same way as he treated game This argu-ment is still stressed by the anthropologist s Tim White and Alban De- eur Scattered bones of human beings and deer in the cave of Moula-Guercy show the same scratches103 This argument presupposes how-ever that the humans as well as the animals were killed by Neanderthalman Both the humans and the animals could however have been thevictims of carnivores for example hyena or cave lion or the scratcheson human and animal bones may be due to taphonomic processes104

This thesis would explain the remains of Krapina as well as the ndingsof Moula-Guercy In any case the identical treatment of human andanimal bones and the missing of any traces of a ritual do not promotethe hypothesis of a religious custom In this case Krapina and Moula-Guercy would prove that Neanderthal man hunted other humans formeat This seems however to be unlikely because the hunters of theMousterian lived in a habitat full of game which was for sure easier tokill than humans

101 Campbell 1987 339102 Maringer 1956 81f In the excavation report of the site Weimar-Ehringsdorf

cannibalism is not mentioned at all See Feustel 1989 391-393103 De eur et al 1999 128-131104 It is still more than dif cult to decide whether scratches on bones are due to

human activities to carnivores or to taphonomic processes The topic is still debated

among scientists For an overview see Henke and Rothe 1994 19-25

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

Beginning of Religion 425

2 Religiosity of Homo erectus and his Contemporaries

Homo erectus and his immediate descendants were the rst ho-minids who succeeded in leaving the African continent and to settlealmost everywhere in the Old World35 One of the oldest known Euro-pean fossiles is a jaw of the genus Homo discovered among the peb-bles on the banks of the Neckar river at the village of Mauer near Hei-delberg This jaw of Homo erectus heidelbergensi s is approximately650 000 to 600 000 years old36 Geologically the nd belongs to theperiod of Cromer This is a period between two long-lasting ice-agesthe Guumlnz- and the Mindel-periods when a relatively warm climate en-abled humans to occupy new habitats Primitive stone tools from theNeuwieder Becken and the latest excavations at Burgos in Spain provethat the European continent was inhabited at least 800 000 years ago oreven earlier Information on the life style of Homo erectus could onlybe gained from excavations at Bilzingsleben where an early settlementof Homo erectus could be found Geologically Bilzingsleben belongsto the Holstein period This means that the ndings at this place are notonly 200 000 years younger than the jaw from Mauer but completelyindependent of the rst appearance of a specimen of Homo erectus as aresult of an entire ice-age This period led to a characteristic change of ora and fauna which formed the landscape and ecosystem during the

35 The oldest human fossil of Europe was detected in 1994 in the Gran Dolina ofAtapuerca in Spain These early humans are about 780 000 years old These hominidsnamed Homo antecessor seem to differ signi cantly from the well known (Asian)Homo erectus and the African Homo ergaster which means that the early hominidsof Africa Asia and Europe belong to different species Several scientists emphasisethe following phylogenetic tree Homo antecessor developed from the African Homoergaster and succeeded to settle in Europe Here he became the ancestor of Homoheidelbergensis who himself developed into the European Homo neanderthalensisSee Henke and Rothe 1999 204-217

36 The remnants of four individuals of the species Homo antecessor which weredetected at the excavation site ldquoLa Gran Dolinardquo near Burgos belong to the eldestmembers of the genus Homo in Europe An isolated skull found near Isneria Italyis nearly as old Early tools from France have an age of between one million and twomillion years and prove that Europe was inhabited very early

426 Ina Wunn

rst conquest of Europe by a hominid The distance in time betweenthe ndings of Mauer and Bilzingsleben is re ected in the developmentof the culture While the tools of Homo erectus heidelbergensis werestill simple handaxes the Homo erectus bilzingslebensi s was alreadycapable of manufacturing developed weapons and tools Theoreticallythis made him capable of hunting for game

Anatomically H erectus bilzingslebensi s was more developed thanhis predecessor Therefore the way of life of H erectus heidelbergensismust have been even simpler and less advanced37 The excavation ofthe settlement at Bilzingsleben provides insight into the way of lifeof the younger Homo erectus The archaeological ndings of earlyman prove the following facts At Bilzingsleben a small group of earlyhumans camped at the shore of a small lake in not more than two orthree tents Here they seemed to have occasionally hunted a beaveror other small animals Their stone tools were suitable for huntingsmaller prey whereas no weapon was found which would have beeneffective enough to kill an elephant or a bison The distribution of theelements of the fauna supports this point of view38 Additionally theymay have fed on the corpses of dead animals which were probablyfound frequently along the shore of the lake Surely elephant and rhinobones which were found at the working sites and served as supportor work material originated from dead animals that were not killedby H erectus bilzingslebensi s One could conclude that they also ate sh eggs and vegetables and that the food was most likely cookedThe people of Bilzingsleben were already aware of a certain code ofsocial behaviour and it is also clear that there was some degree ofemotional exchange between certain members of the group There areno indications of any religious activities The comparison of Homoerectus bilzingslebensi s with recent hunter-gatherer communities isnot convincing due to the following facts The popular belief thatH erectus successfully hunted larger game has been disproved Manyof the ndings of fossil bone beds which were said to be due to

37 See Henke and Rothe 1994 407f38 Mania and Weber 1986 20ff

Beginning of Religion 427

the hunting activities of the H erectus are in the near vicinity ofwatering places Here the ungulates frequently became the prey ofpredatory animals Analysis of the individual age of the bones offossil mammals at Bilzingsleben and other Palaeolithic settlements ledto the conclusion that many of those animals died naturally39 The rst evidence that at least the younger Homo erectus was capable ofhunting larger prey came from Schoumlningen near Helmstedt Germanywhere a wooden spear about 15 meters long was found in a huntingcamp inhabited about 400 000 years ago40 Homo erectus had a brainvolume which was still quite small compared to the brain of recentHomo sapiens Only the younger H erectus is supposed to havebeen capable of verbal communication as anatomical investigation shave proven Though there is no direct relationship between brainvolume and intelligence behaviour or certain abilities scholars areconvinced that H erectus was quite primitive compared to H sapiensas the archaeological ndings related to his culture have revealed41

The results of evolutionary psychology seem to prove the followingfacts Obviously technical skills increased dramatically over those ofH habilis Natural history intelligence and social intelligence werealso well developed On the other hand the technical conservatismof Homo erectus over a period of about one million years is strikingThe only explanation for this contradictory evidence is to assume thatthe well developed multiple intelligences of the H erectus were stillcommitted to speci c domains of behaviour with very little interactionbetween them42 Thinking and communication in abstract terms whichare essential for religious awareness probably developed quite late

Though excavations like the camp of Bilzingsleben MarkleebergKaumlrlich or Bad Cannstadt and the results of archaeological psychologydo not support the hypothesis that early man performed any religiousrites and though the discussion of palaeanthropologica l facts prove

39 Henke and Rothe 1994 42840 Thieme 1997 807-81041 See Henke and Rothe1994 42442 Mithen 1996 115ff

428 Ina Wunn

that H erectus was not at all capable of performing complicated rit-uals it is still the opinion among scholars of the History of Religionand several archaeologists that ritual cannibalism was common amongearly human populations Thus Alfred Rust writes ldquoUnique nds fromAsia prove that cannibalism was exercised in the whole worldrdquo43 Al-fred Rust refers to nds of Homo erectus in the caves of Zhoukoudianwhich reveal many similarities to Bilzingsleben44 While Alfred Rustis convinced that the presence of several ldquosmashedrdquo human skulls isa clear sign of ritual cannibalism Johannes Maringer presumes thatskulls and lower jaws are the remnants of the deceased which had beenkept and worshipped by their family Similar customs are still evidentamong members of primitive cultures in Africa or Asia45 The palaean-thropologist s Winfried Henke and Hartmut Rothe express strong andjusti ed doubt about this assertion The analysis of several craniumsof early man gave evidence that the destruction of the skulls was dueto the activities of ancient hyena and normal taphonomic processes46

The archaeologist Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan had already noted in the six-ties ldquoThe conditions of the former excavations of Chou Kou Tien makeit dif cult to even nd a map of the site of skulls The skulls were ex-tracted from solid limestone and not even one of them is near to beingcomplete After decomposing into tiny sections they entered the gen-eral category of the animal remains It is dif cult to understand how themyth of head-collecting Sinanthropus could have assumed a de niteformrdquo47 Another victim of such prejudice is Karl Dietrich Adam withhis hypothesis that the skull of Homo erectus steinheimensis showstraces of having been subjected to postmortal manipulations48 Thedestruction of the base of the skull is his only criterion for the hy-pothesis that stone-age man was frequently the victim of ritual prac-

43 Rust 1991 17544 Ibid 17845 Maringer 1956 64-7146 Rust 1991 178f and Henke and Rothe 1994 42847 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 4948 Adam 1991 218

Beginning of Religion 429

tices Between the death of the individual and the later recovery ofthe fossil a number of taphonomic processes take place which havesigni cant effects on the later fossil One of those effects is the modi- cation of organic matter and its decay the assortment or destructionof hard sections as well as sedimentologica l processes Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan was able to show that the cranium and lower jaws are usuallywell preserved Therefore it is only due to taphonomic processes thatthese individual body parts survive and not at all due to human ac-tivities or postmortal manipulation49 In this connection it is necessaryto emphasise that scholars can only come to a decision based on a se-ries of complex investigations using a scanning electron microscopeas to whether scratches on fossil bones are due to violence caused bya stone tool or the teeth of a predatory animal Since there are no ar-chaeological ndings for the entire Palaeolithic or Neolithic period toprove the opening of the skull by humans none of the speculationsabout possible cult practice connected with human skulls is based onfacts50

3 Religion in the Middle Palaeolithic

From an anthropologica l point of view the European middle Palae-olithic is characterised by Homo neanderthalensi s51 This early form ofHomo sapiens or descendant of Homo heidelbergensis lived over a pe-

49 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 45 5550 Experiments with animal bones have shown that scratches made by stone tools

are absolutely equal to scratches caused by sand Those scratches occur frequentlyduring the process of embedding It is still dif cult to distinguish between traces ofhuman activities and traces of animal bites An examination is only possible with thehelp of a scanning electron microscope See Henke and Rothe 1994 20-24

51 The so-called Neanderthal-problem is however a source of heated debateOnly ten years ago many palaeanthropologists were convinced that Neanderthalman belonged to our species H sapiens His characteristic features were supposedto be due to the extreme climate of the ice-age In the meantime most scientistshave been convinced that Homo neanderthalensis developed directly from Homoheidelbergensis while the modern Homo sapiens developed during the same timein Africa and conquered Europe about 40 000 years ago See Henke and Rothe 1994433ff and Henke and Rothe 1999 272f

430 Ina Wunn

riod of nearly 100 000 years during which the landscape climate andliving conditions changed dramatically These environmental changesmight have contributed to the special anatomical features of the Nean-derthal man Surely the need to adapt to a frequently changing habitatforced H neanderthalensi s to develop sociocultural abilities that wereclosely related to the progressive evolution of intelligence and psycho-logical abilities52 The frequent environmental changes to which H ne-anderthalensis had to adapt made life immensely challenging In thewarmer and humid periods of the Eem period dense forests coveredthe landscape Population migration was only possible in the valleysThe fauna consisted of elephant deer stag aurochs bear and othersSuf cient food-supply in the direct surroundings allows one to believethat Neanderthal man was relatively stationary during this climatic pe-riod The excavated settlement of Weimar-Ehringsdorf was inhabitedduring this time During the initial phase of cooler climate the orachanged Fir and pine trees were common and formed large and humidforests The winters were cold and snow was plentiful even in sum-mertime the temperature remained low Not only non-migrating ani-mals were hunted by Neanderthal man herds of reindeer wild horsebison and mammoth provided suf cient opportunity for hunting Dur-ing the coldest periods the forests disappeared and made room for

52 Steven Mithen emphasises that natural history intelligence technical intelli-gence social and linguistic intelligence of Neanderthal man were all well developedbut there was still a lack of interaction between the four domains of the mind Cogni-tive uidity took place only between the domains of social and linguistic intelligence(Mithen 1996 143 and 147ff) The author of this article has a different opinion In gen-eral the lithic culture of Neanderthal man is the Mousterian which is still simple com-pared to the technology of the upper Palaeolithic On the other hand the lithic culturesare not strictly related to the one or the other human species Homo neanderthalensistoo was found together with the more advanced tools of the upper Palaeolithic whileHomo sapiens was found with the simple tools of the Mousterian culture Thereforedirect connections between a certain human species and its lithic culture cannot beproved The technical skills of the younger H neanderthalensis and early H sapiensobviously did not differ That means that there is no palaeanthropological evidence forthe assumption of fundamental difference between the minds of H neanderthalensisand H sapiens (Henke and Rothe 1999 275 Reynolds 1990 263ff)

Beginning of Religion 431

prairies and tundra The climate became dry with extremely cold win-ters and relatively mild but short summers The prairies were full ofgame which migrated with the seasons53

The Magic of Hunting in the Middle Palaeolithic

The hunting activities of the Palaeolithic man which Mircea Eliadeand other scholars take for granted are only able to be proved with ref-erence to later periods of ice-age At the town of Lehringen near Ver-den an der Aller the skeleton of an elephant had been preserved thathad been killed with the aid of a wooden spear found between the ribsof the animal This is impressive evidence of the fact that Homo nean-derthalensis was able to successfully hunt big game Therefore it canbe assumed that Mircea Eliadersquos precise conceptions of religion duringprehistoric times may at least be correct with regard to the people of theMousterian He describes this religion as ldquomagic-religious conceptionsof Palaeolithic manrdquo as follows54 The documents regarding the reli-gion of the Palaeolithic man are obscure he says but available Theirmeaning can be deciphered if the scholar succeeds in inserting thesedocuments into a semantic system55 This semantic system is alreadygiven by the results of investigations of recent hunter-gatherer commu-nities Their similar lifestyle offers suf cient certainty for identical orvery similar religions of recent hunter-gatherers and Palaeolithic manTherefore Homo neanderthalensi s believed that the animal is a beingquite similar to man but talented with supernatural forces He wasconvinced that gods such as the ldquoMaster of the Animalsrdquo or ldquoSupremeBeingrdquo existed The kill of the animal took place after a complicatedritual On the other hand rites must have existed which were linkedwith a skull-cult and deposits of long bones Similarly Ioan Coulianoargues that ldquoeither similar models of well-known primitive peoplesare referred to or one dispenses with any model The History of Reli-gion can only use the rst option as imperfect as it may be Scholars

53 See Henke and Rothe 1994 52554 Eliade 1978 15ff55 Ibid 18

432 Ina Wunn

have to endeavour to decipher the mental horizon of the people of pre-historic times by using the results of ethnographic and archaeologicalstudiesrdquo56 John Campbell concludes from the myths of known peoplesthat there must be close connections between the religions of Palae-olithic man and recent hunter-gatherers The following conviction isboth precondition and result of his investigations ldquoI nd that its mainresult has been its con rmation of a thought I have long and faithfullyentertained of the unity of the race of man not only in its biology butalso in its spiritual historyrdquo57 He proves his assumption with the helpof a comparison Under the title ldquoThe Stage of Neanderthal Manrdquo thereader nds the detailed description of the life habits of the small anddelicate Negritos of the Andaman Islands in the Gulf of Bengal butCampbell fails to prove the connections between the habits of a peopleof recent tropical Asia and an anatomically different prehistoric peo-ple which lived in boreal climates 100 000 years ago58 Another argu-ment of John Campbellrsquos is founded on archaeological facts The stoneblades of the Mousterian (the material culture of Neanderthal man ismainly Mousterian) are still very similar a wider range of differenttools was unknown at that time This means for Campbell that thecustom of tool-making was carefully handed down from one genera-tion to another comparably to customs of recent bushman culture Thisextraordinary attention is due to a certain feeling of the holy whichwas connected with the manufacturing and use of the tool59 The pass-ing on of Palaeolithic religion to religions of recent hunter-gatherercommunities serves as a proof that the myths of recent peoples origi-nated in the Palaeolithic and have been handed down till today withoutany changes This means that Joseph Campbell constructed a typicalcircular argument Todayrsquos behaviours and myths are taken as proofin order to postulate the existence of the same behaviours and mythsas practised by Palaeolithic man Then the postulate itself is taken as

56 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2757 Campbell 1987 v58 Ibid 365ff59 Ibid 364f

Beginning of Religion 433

a voucher to prove the unchanged existence of those myths from thePalaeolithic up to now

The opinion that Palaeolithic man already had a complicated reli-gion with certain notions of the holy and various rituals can be foundin nearly every religious reference work Fritz Hartmann writes forexample ldquoThe magic of the hunt belongs to this typically human con-ception of the worldrdquo60

Even if the consequences drawn from the archaeologically securedfacts in the past seem frequently exaggerated several sentences in thevolume of Johannes Maringer explain the intention of the authors Itwas the common statement that prehistoric man was a mere beast with-out a developed mind that made the opponents of this point of viewlook for counter-arguments which are no longer defendable in the lightof modern research results61 The use of ethnographic analogies to re-construct prehistoric religion is based on a speci c understanding ofthe evolution of religion In the nineteenth century Charles Darwinrsquostheory of biological evolution in uenced nearly all branches of sci-ence In the elds of the study of religion and anthropology scholarslike Edward Burnett Tylor or James George Frazer developed concep-tions of religious evolution which have strongly determined researchuntil today Tylor as well as Frazer were convinced that they couldprove an ascending development of religion from primitive origins tothe modern religions of the industrial age According to this theory thereligions of recent hunter-gatherer communities can be classi ed asrelics from ancient times62 This means on the contrary that it is pos-sible to reconstruct the consciousness of ancient people with the helpof knowledge about the religion of todayrsquos hunter-gatherer communi-ties However only a brief insight into the multiplicity of so-calledprimitive religions reveals that their contents and symbols are not sim-ilar by any means According to Max Raphael the faith-conceptions of

60 Hartmann 1957 403 Among the latest literature see for example Grim 19981107-1108 and Hultkrantz 1998 746-752

61 Maringer 1956 59ff62 Michaels (ed) 1997 41-60 and 77-89

434 Ina Wunn

recent hunter-gatherer communities cannot be consulted in order to de-rive from them a certain belief of prehistoric man Even people livingon a relatively primitive economical level up to the present day havebeen affected by their past which has in uenced their state of mindAs a result their ideas and religious conceptions changed in the samemanner as the belief system of modern communities did63 The an-thropologist Wilhelm Emil Muumlhlmann acknowledges the arguments ofMax Raphael when he emphasises that all known primitive religionsare younger than theological religions64 Even if ecological and eco-nomical prerequisites of different societies are the same they do notnecessarily have the same or a similar belief system identical ritualssymbols and practices Hermann Schulz emphasises ldquoKulturell aufdas engste verwandte Gruppen koumlnnen einen religioumls-symbolisch undartefaktreichen Ritualismus entwickeln (Sepik-Gebiet) oder innerhalbder elaborierten ritualsymbolische n Medien tendentiell nichtreligioumlseartefakt-arme Programme elaborieren (Kapauku)rdquo65

The arguments show that it is by no means suf cient to nd prooffor the hunting practices of Neanderthal man in order to imply any kindof religion and especially not a de nite and well-known religion

Bear-cult

The existence of the cult of the bear in the middle Palaeolithic pe-riod is taken for granted Aringke Hultkrantz writes ldquoDie Kulturen des ark-

63 Max Raphael writes ldquoMan hat diese Schwierigkeit umgehen wollen durchHeranziehen von Aussagen sogenannter primitiver Kulturvoumllker Diese nur in sehrengen Grenzen moumlgliche Analogie uumlbersieht daszlig auch diese Staumlmme eine Geschichtegehabt haben mdash eine regressive statt der progressiven der Kulturvoumllker Es liegt einunberechtigtes Vorurteil in der Annahme der Einfrierung des Gewesenen denn dielsquoPrimitivenrsquo nden sich selbst wo sie auf dem Stadium der Jagdwirtschaft stehengeblieben sind mit den alten Werkzeugen und Waffen einer anderen Umgebunggegenuumlber die starken den Einzelmenschen an Maumlchtigkeit uumlberragenden Tiere sindersetzt durch wesentlich kleinere und schwaumlchererdquo (Raphael 1978 78)

64 Muumlhlmann 1957 119865 Schulz 1993 189

Beginning of Religion 435

tischen Raumes sind Bruchstuumlcke einer palaumlolithischen Jagdkulturrdquo66

Friedrich Heiler67 refers to similar ideas as those expressed by JosephCampbell who describes the cult of the bear in an interesting buthardly well-grounded manner First Campbell refers to a bear-festivalamong the Ainu After the killing of the captured bear and during theceremonies the skull of the animal is put at the top of a long stick68

In a second step Campbell portrays Neanderthal man in impressiveterms ldquo when the remains of a strangely brutish yet manlike skele-ton were found in a limestone quarry not far from Duumlsseldorf in theValley of Neanderrdquo69 The following descriptions shortly mention thecaves of the Alps where the remains of the bears were detected Theexcavators had the impression that the arrangement of the fossil bonescould hardly be due to nature so they attributed this to the activitiesof H neanderthalensi s who were assumed to have killed the animalsand arranged their bones during certain ceremonies70 It is true thatnearly everywhere in the Arctic primitive peoples know certain ritu-als connected with the hunting of the bear71 The excavators of thecaves Emil Baumlchler and Karl Houmlrmann took these ceremonies of cir-cumpolar peoples to prove their hypothesis of an ancient bear-cult inprehistoric times72 In the following years several discoveries of simi-lar bear-caves seemed to support the hypothesis of cave bear worshipEmil Baumlchler himself discovered bear bone deposits at the Wilden-mannlisloch in Switzerland and in Sloveniarsquos Mornova Cave In 1946Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan excavated seven cave bear skulls arranged in acircle in Furtins Cave Saocircne-et-Loire In 1950 Kurt Ehrenberg secured

66 Hultkrantz 1998 75167 See Heiler 1979 7868 Campbell 1987 334ff69 Ibid 33970 Ibid 341f71 Edsman 1957 84172 Maringer 1956 95ff

436 Ina Wunn

a deposit of long bones arranged together with cave bear skulls in theSalzhofen Cave in the Austrian Alps73

The latest nd of supposed traces of prehistoric cave bear worshipwas published in 1996 In the Rumanian Bihor-Mountains ChristianLascu et al discovered a cave rich in palaeontologica l cave beardeposits74 Scholars such as Johannes Maringer or Aringke Hultkrantzrefer to the reports of the excavators when they interpret the depositsas the remainder of cult practice The historian Karl Narr also gives anaccount of the deposits of cave bear skulls and long bones but remainssceptical75

A detailed discussion of the nds of cave bear bones from a palaeon-tological and ethnographic point of view led to completely differentresults76 The careful and critical use of ethnographic analogues onwhich the theories of a cave bear cult is founded in the end leads toeven contrary results If H neanderthalensi s had known cave bear wor-ship its traces would have been found inside the settlements The re-mains of such a cult would have been the bone deposits of Neanderthalmanrsquos favourite and most dangerous game among which howeverthe bear did not rank Recent peoples who know the bear cult catchor kill a bear in his winter accommodation and bring it to their settle-ment There it is killed and eaten by the villagers under different ritualregulations The bones of the dead game are put into a holy place orare carefully buried near the village but never brought back again tothe dwelling of the bear

The most impressive arguments against cave bear worship comenevertheless from the bone deposits itself Crucial palaeontologica lobjections are to be stated rst of all Both the cave bear (Ursusspelaeus) which was extinct at the end of the last ice age and thebrown bear (Ursus arctos) which spread all over Eurasia since theEem period show a strong preference for cave accommodation There

73 See Lascu et al 1996 19-20 and Maringer 1956 91-9674 See Lascu et al 199675 Narr 1957 1076 Wunn 1999a 3-23

Beginning of Religion 437

they hide during wintertime and give birth to their young The caveswhere the relics of alleged bear worship were found are the naturalhabitat of the animals where they spend the long winters and hidetheir young At those places the bears sometimes died for severalreasons for example age illness lack of food Therefore their bonefossils are bound to be found in those places if they were not carriedoff by carrion eaters or removed by sedimentologica l processes Theoccurrence of cave bear bones in the caves of the ice age which servedgenerations of bear families as shelter is just what a palaeontologis twould expect

The proponents of Palaeolithic bear worship did not only think themere occurrence of bear bones in the caves to be remarkable butalso their alleged assortment and arrangement in which they werefound However there rst takes place an amassment of bear bones incertain places by the activities of the bears themselves as Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan correctly noticed The parts of skeletons of the deceasedanimals which originally are in their anatomical order are thrownin disorder or scattered by later generations of bears Sometimes theyare pressed to the walls where they are relatively protected againstfurther decay77 Also the outweighing of skulls and long bones is aresult of a process of natural decay and not due to human activitiesThe mentioned parts of the skeleton are relatively heavy and compactso that they are more able to resist decomposition processes thanthe small vertebrae ribs foot-bones or hand-bones A result of thoseprocesses is the natural selection of the bone material78 But notonly decomposition in uences the state of the bones During theirhistory the caves were ooded several times as the accumulatedsediments prove Such oodings do not remain without in uence onthe fossil material With high water level and stronger current all loosematerial is either rinsed away or carried for a certain distance andthen dropped at a place where there is a weaker current During theseprocesses the anatomical bone order is radically altered Therefore

77 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 3978 Ziegler 1975 44-45

438 Ina Wunn

the accumulation of several skulls in one place and the absenceof other bones is due to geological and sedimentologica l processesand not to human intervention The oating ability of sediments canbe reduced by prominent parts of the walls or unevenness of the oor resulting in some bone parts being deposited in the proximityof obstacles A concrete example of this effect is the discovery ofseveral skulls deposited in a crosslike pattern in the Cold Cave ofthe Bihor Mountains The obstacle which reduced the transportabilityof the skulls crucially was a stone at which the fossil skulls weredeposited79 Just as little as the assortment of the bone material isproof of human activities so the adjustment of the fossils is anunnatural process The movements of a transport medium be it windsediment or water are transferred to the material to be transportedso that the movement in a special direction leads to its assortmentTherefore the assortment of bear skulls is not due to human activitiesbut to the owing water or other transport mediums in the caves Itcannot be said clearly enough There was no cave bear worship inthe middle Palaeolithic period at all The bear caves show exactlywhat a palaeontologis t would expect Nothing suggests that the naturalprocess of decay and sedimentation was at any time interrupted ordisturbed80

Combined burials of man and cave bear

In connection with assumed bear worship the opinion was heldthat sometimes men and bear were buried together in one grave81 Asevidence served the excavations at Le Reacutegourdou near Lascaux whereunder a hill of debris both the remains of a bear and a Neanderthal manwere preserved The French archaeologist Fabienne May demonstratedthat the remains of the bear bore no connection with the human

79 See Lascu et al 1996 30 plate 380 Wunn 1999a 6ff81 Rust 1986 15

Beginning of Religion 439

skeleton and questioned whether there was a funeral at Le Reacutegourdouat all82

Skull deposits and skull worship

Just as the bear worship was regarded as irrefutable fact there washardly any doubt that Neanderthal man subjected the heads of thedeceased to a special treatment and set them up for ritual purposesOther scholars are convinced that Neanderthal man hunted fellowhumans to kill and eat them83 It is said that the skulls of the killedlater became the focal point of a ritual This hypothesis is suggestedby Ioan Couliano ldquoEinige Schaumldel sind in einer Weise verformtdie den Gedanken an ein Herausloumlsen des Gehirns nahelegenrdquo84

Alfred Rust expresses himself absolutely clearly He is sure that the nds of isolated lower jaws and craniums are closely connected withreligious customs85 Detailed and critically Johannes Maringer arguesthe question of the skull cult He discusses the nds which wereconsidered as proof of the presence of the alleged practices Thereis for example the crushed childlike skull from Gibraltar or the nds of human remains at Weimar-Ehringsdorf and particularly theoutstanding nd of the skull of Monte Circeo which is mentionedby every author as evidence of the described ritual practice Finallyhe comes to the following result ldquoDas Fundbild der Guattari-Grottespricht klar fuumlr einen Kult in dessen Mittelpunkt der Schaumldel standUrspruumlnglich scheint er auf einem Stock aufgesteckt gewesen zusein Einem heiligen Bannkreis gleich umgab ihn der Kranz vonSteinen Der ganze Houmlhlenteil erweckt den Eindruck als habe er den inder vorderen Houmlhle wohnenden Urmenschen als Heiligtum gedientrdquo86

and further ldquoDie Schaumldelsetzungen duumlrften aller Wahrscheinlichkeitnach eine Art Schaumldelkult darstellen in dem das Gedaumlchtnis der

82 Ibid 1583 Ullrich 1978 293ff See also the overview in Henke and Rothe 1999 27784 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2885 Rust 1991 19486 Maringer 1956 80

440 Ina Wunn

Verstorbenen gep egt und ihre Hilfe wie auch ihr Schutz fuumlr die Sippeer eht wurderdquo87 Even Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan agrees that the skull ofMonte Circeo is an intentional deposition of a skull but he refusesto draw any conclusions concerning religious customs88 On the otherhand he can prove that all other nds of isolated heads or jaws arethe result of taphonomic processes89 After a careful re-examinationof the original reports of the excavations Fabienne May states thatnone of the descriptions of the excavations is suf cient to con rm ordisprove the hypothesis of a ritual90 The discovery of a supposed cultsite at Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan where the skull of a child was set upbetween several skulls of ibex does not prove the hypothesis of a cultIn this case the remnants of ibexes and the skull of the child have noconnection at all91 Since it could be shown that even the skull depositof Monte Circeo was not the result of human activities but that thedamages of the skull were due to the work of hungry hyenas the lastargument in favour of a skull cult is disproved92

Cannibalism

Cannibalism has already been mentioned in connection with thedeposition of human skulls Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan expresses him-self as follows ldquoDie Existenz eines religioumlsen Kannibalismus imPalaumlolithikum mag wahrscheinlich sein doch laumlszligt sich dies bei dergegenwaumlrtigen Materiallage absolut nicht beweisen Und dennochspricht kein Autor von der palaumlolithischen Religion ohne fuumlr odergegen die Kannibalismusthese Stellung zu beziehen wobei in groumlszlige-rem Umfang auf ethnographische Beispiele zuruumlckgegriffen wirdrdquo93

But particularly those ethnographic analogies give strong argumentsagainst the hypothesis of prehistoric cannibalism The anthropologis t

87 Ibid 8588 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 5389 Ibid 54-5690 May 1986 1791 Ibid 33-3492 Henke and Rothe 1994 52793 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 56

Beginning of Religion 441

Gabriele Weiss and the archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher discuss thetopic of cannibalism carefully94 They state that the ethnographic ma-terial itself is frequently not convincing because it is based mainly onsensational reports of past adventurers There are no assertions by eye-witnesses but stories of man eaters were always reported by writerswho only stated that they had heard about those customs The cus-tom of cannibalism itself was always stated to have been given upjust several years before the arrival of the traveller95 Frequently theassumption that a certain people was guilty of cannibalism was usedpropagandistically in order to be able to lead a war against this peo-ple or to force them into slavery96 On the other hand it was a wellknown rumour in Africa even up to the beginning of this century thatEuropeans fed on the esh of African children97 It is argued by HeidiPeter-Roumlcher that there is no evidence of cannibalism among recentpeoples at all98 This means that it is nonsense to search for the reasonand the origin of that custom in prehistoric times It cannot be decidedto what extent Sigmund Freud with his hypothesis of the origin of hu-man society must be blamed for evoking the idea of early man-eatersIn his Totem und Tabu he made several statements about the origin ofhuman society claiming that at the beginning of prehistory a group ofhumans was ruled by a despotic patriarch until he was killed and eatenby his sons99 The subtitle of his book ldquoEinige Uumlbereinstimmungen imSeelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotikerrdquo100 re ects however the

94 Weiss 1987 142-159 and Peter-Roumlcher 198995 Volhard 1939 36996 Gabriele Weiss (1987 152) mentions the example of a decree of Queen Isabella

in 1503 who gave permission to enslave the Caribbean Indians because they weresaid to be man-eaters

97 Ibid 15098 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 On the contrary the American anthropologist Christy Turner

is convinced that the Anasazi an Indian people who lived in the southern parts of theUnited States during historical times did human hunting See Turner 1999

99 See Weiss 1987 44-45100 Weiss 1987 44

442 Ina Wunn

opinion of many of his contemporaries and colleagues and contributesto the picture of the mentality of Neanderthal man until today101

The facts on which the theory of prehistoric cannibalism are basedare usually poor Frequently it was suf cient to assume cannibalismexisted if a skeleton was found incomplete or not in anatomical or-der102 It is still considered a strong proof for cannibalism when splithuman bones occur as were excavated at Krapina The defenders ofthe cannibalism thesis argue that the remnants of human bones lookabsolutely similar to the scattered animal bones at the same excava-tion site Therefore they come to the conclusion that Neanderthal mantreated fellow humans in the same way as he treated game This argu-ment is still stressed by the anthropologist s Tim White and Alban De- eur Scattered bones of human beings and deer in the cave of Moula-Guercy show the same scratches103 This argument presupposes how-ever that the humans as well as the animals were killed by Neanderthalman Both the humans and the animals could however have been thevictims of carnivores for example hyena or cave lion or the scratcheson human and animal bones may be due to taphonomic processes104

This thesis would explain the remains of Krapina as well as the ndingsof Moula-Guercy In any case the identical treatment of human andanimal bones and the missing of any traces of a ritual do not promotethe hypothesis of a religious custom In this case Krapina and Moula-Guercy would prove that Neanderthal man hunted other humans formeat This seems however to be unlikely because the hunters of theMousterian lived in a habitat full of game which was for sure easier tokill than humans

101 Campbell 1987 339102 Maringer 1956 81f In the excavation report of the site Weimar-Ehringsdorf

cannibalism is not mentioned at all See Feustel 1989 391-393103 De eur et al 1999 128-131104 It is still more than dif cult to decide whether scratches on bones are due to

human activities to carnivores or to taphonomic processes The topic is still debated

among scientists For an overview see Henke and Rothe 1994 19-25

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

426 Ina Wunn

rst conquest of Europe by a hominid The distance in time betweenthe ndings of Mauer and Bilzingsleben is re ected in the developmentof the culture While the tools of Homo erectus heidelbergensis werestill simple handaxes the Homo erectus bilzingslebensi s was alreadycapable of manufacturing developed weapons and tools Theoreticallythis made him capable of hunting for game

Anatomically H erectus bilzingslebensi s was more developed thanhis predecessor Therefore the way of life of H erectus heidelbergensismust have been even simpler and less advanced37 The excavation ofthe settlement at Bilzingsleben provides insight into the way of lifeof the younger Homo erectus The archaeological ndings of earlyman prove the following facts At Bilzingsleben a small group of earlyhumans camped at the shore of a small lake in not more than two orthree tents Here they seemed to have occasionally hunted a beaveror other small animals Their stone tools were suitable for huntingsmaller prey whereas no weapon was found which would have beeneffective enough to kill an elephant or a bison The distribution of theelements of the fauna supports this point of view38 Additionally theymay have fed on the corpses of dead animals which were probablyfound frequently along the shore of the lake Surely elephant and rhinobones which were found at the working sites and served as supportor work material originated from dead animals that were not killedby H erectus bilzingslebensi s One could conclude that they also ate sh eggs and vegetables and that the food was most likely cookedThe people of Bilzingsleben were already aware of a certain code ofsocial behaviour and it is also clear that there was some degree ofemotional exchange between certain members of the group There areno indications of any religious activities The comparison of Homoerectus bilzingslebensi s with recent hunter-gatherer communities isnot convincing due to the following facts The popular belief thatH erectus successfully hunted larger game has been disproved Manyof the ndings of fossil bone beds which were said to be due to

37 See Henke and Rothe 1994 407f38 Mania and Weber 1986 20ff

Beginning of Religion 427

the hunting activities of the H erectus are in the near vicinity ofwatering places Here the ungulates frequently became the prey ofpredatory animals Analysis of the individual age of the bones offossil mammals at Bilzingsleben and other Palaeolithic settlements ledto the conclusion that many of those animals died naturally39 The rst evidence that at least the younger Homo erectus was capable ofhunting larger prey came from Schoumlningen near Helmstedt Germanywhere a wooden spear about 15 meters long was found in a huntingcamp inhabited about 400 000 years ago40 Homo erectus had a brainvolume which was still quite small compared to the brain of recentHomo sapiens Only the younger H erectus is supposed to havebeen capable of verbal communication as anatomical investigation shave proven Though there is no direct relationship between brainvolume and intelligence behaviour or certain abilities scholars areconvinced that H erectus was quite primitive compared to H sapiensas the archaeological ndings related to his culture have revealed41

The results of evolutionary psychology seem to prove the followingfacts Obviously technical skills increased dramatically over those ofH habilis Natural history intelligence and social intelligence werealso well developed On the other hand the technical conservatismof Homo erectus over a period of about one million years is strikingThe only explanation for this contradictory evidence is to assume thatthe well developed multiple intelligences of the H erectus were stillcommitted to speci c domains of behaviour with very little interactionbetween them42 Thinking and communication in abstract terms whichare essential for religious awareness probably developed quite late

Though excavations like the camp of Bilzingsleben MarkleebergKaumlrlich or Bad Cannstadt and the results of archaeological psychologydo not support the hypothesis that early man performed any religiousrites and though the discussion of palaeanthropologica l facts prove

39 Henke and Rothe 1994 42840 Thieme 1997 807-81041 See Henke and Rothe1994 42442 Mithen 1996 115ff

428 Ina Wunn

that H erectus was not at all capable of performing complicated rit-uals it is still the opinion among scholars of the History of Religionand several archaeologists that ritual cannibalism was common amongearly human populations Thus Alfred Rust writes ldquoUnique nds fromAsia prove that cannibalism was exercised in the whole worldrdquo43 Al-fred Rust refers to nds of Homo erectus in the caves of Zhoukoudianwhich reveal many similarities to Bilzingsleben44 While Alfred Rustis convinced that the presence of several ldquosmashedrdquo human skulls isa clear sign of ritual cannibalism Johannes Maringer presumes thatskulls and lower jaws are the remnants of the deceased which had beenkept and worshipped by their family Similar customs are still evidentamong members of primitive cultures in Africa or Asia45 The palaean-thropologist s Winfried Henke and Hartmut Rothe express strong andjusti ed doubt about this assertion The analysis of several craniumsof early man gave evidence that the destruction of the skulls was dueto the activities of ancient hyena and normal taphonomic processes46

The archaeologist Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan had already noted in the six-ties ldquoThe conditions of the former excavations of Chou Kou Tien makeit dif cult to even nd a map of the site of skulls The skulls were ex-tracted from solid limestone and not even one of them is near to beingcomplete After decomposing into tiny sections they entered the gen-eral category of the animal remains It is dif cult to understand how themyth of head-collecting Sinanthropus could have assumed a de niteformrdquo47 Another victim of such prejudice is Karl Dietrich Adam withhis hypothesis that the skull of Homo erectus steinheimensis showstraces of having been subjected to postmortal manipulations48 Thedestruction of the base of the skull is his only criterion for the hy-pothesis that stone-age man was frequently the victim of ritual prac-

43 Rust 1991 17544 Ibid 17845 Maringer 1956 64-7146 Rust 1991 178f and Henke and Rothe 1994 42847 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 4948 Adam 1991 218

Beginning of Religion 429

tices Between the death of the individual and the later recovery ofthe fossil a number of taphonomic processes take place which havesigni cant effects on the later fossil One of those effects is the modi- cation of organic matter and its decay the assortment or destructionof hard sections as well as sedimentologica l processes Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan was able to show that the cranium and lower jaws are usuallywell preserved Therefore it is only due to taphonomic processes thatthese individual body parts survive and not at all due to human ac-tivities or postmortal manipulation49 In this connection it is necessaryto emphasise that scholars can only come to a decision based on a se-ries of complex investigations using a scanning electron microscopeas to whether scratches on fossil bones are due to violence caused bya stone tool or the teeth of a predatory animal Since there are no ar-chaeological ndings for the entire Palaeolithic or Neolithic period toprove the opening of the skull by humans none of the speculationsabout possible cult practice connected with human skulls is based onfacts50

3 Religion in the Middle Palaeolithic

From an anthropologica l point of view the European middle Palae-olithic is characterised by Homo neanderthalensi s51 This early form ofHomo sapiens or descendant of Homo heidelbergensis lived over a pe-

49 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 45 5550 Experiments with animal bones have shown that scratches made by stone tools

are absolutely equal to scratches caused by sand Those scratches occur frequentlyduring the process of embedding It is still dif cult to distinguish between traces ofhuman activities and traces of animal bites An examination is only possible with thehelp of a scanning electron microscope See Henke and Rothe 1994 20-24

51 The so-called Neanderthal-problem is however a source of heated debateOnly ten years ago many palaeanthropologists were convinced that Neanderthalman belonged to our species H sapiens His characteristic features were supposedto be due to the extreme climate of the ice-age In the meantime most scientistshave been convinced that Homo neanderthalensis developed directly from Homoheidelbergensis while the modern Homo sapiens developed during the same timein Africa and conquered Europe about 40 000 years ago See Henke and Rothe 1994433ff and Henke and Rothe 1999 272f

430 Ina Wunn

riod of nearly 100 000 years during which the landscape climate andliving conditions changed dramatically These environmental changesmight have contributed to the special anatomical features of the Nean-derthal man Surely the need to adapt to a frequently changing habitatforced H neanderthalensi s to develop sociocultural abilities that wereclosely related to the progressive evolution of intelligence and psycho-logical abilities52 The frequent environmental changes to which H ne-anderthalensis had to adapt made life immensely challenging In thewarmer and humid periods of the Eem period dense forests coveredthe landscape Population migration was only possible in the valleysThe fauna consisted of elephant deer stag aurochs bear and othersSuf cient food-supply in the direct surroundings allows one to believethat Neanderthal man was relatively stationary during this climatic pe-riod The excavated settlement of Weimar-Ehringsdorf was inhabitedduring this time During the initial phase of cooler climate the orachanged Fir and pine trees were common and formed large and humidforests The winters were cold and snow was plentiful even in sum-mertime the temperature remained low Not only non-migrating ani-mals were hunted by Neanderthal man herds of reindeer wild horsebison and mammoth provided suf cient opportunity for hunting Dur-ing the coldest periods the forests disappeared and made room for

52 Steven Mithen emphasises that natural history intelligence technical intelli-gence social and linguistic intelligence of Neanderthal man were all well developedbut there was still a lack of interaction between the four domains of the mind Cogni-tive uidity took place only between the domains of social and linguistic intelligence(Mithen 1996 143 and 147ff) The author of this article has a different opinion In gen-eral the lithic culture of Neanderthal man is the Mousterian which is still simple com-pared to the technology of the upper Palaeolithic On the other hand the lithic culturesare not strictly related to the one or the other human species Homo neanderthalensistoo was found together with the more advanced tools of the upper Palaeolithic whileHomo sapiens was found with the simple tools of the Mousterian culture Thereforedirect connections between a certain human species and its lithic culture cannot beproved The technical skills of the younger H neanderthalensis and early H sapiensobviously did not differ That means that there is no palaeanthropological evidence forthe assumption of fundamental difference between the minds of H neanderthalensisand H sapiens (Henke and Rothe 1999 275 Reynolds 1990 263ff)

Beginning of Religion 431

prairies and tundra The climate became dry with extremely cold win-ters and relatively mild but short summers The prairies were full ofgame which migrated with the seasons53

The Magic of Hunting in the Middle Palaeolithic

The hunting activities of the Palaeolithic man which Mircea Eliadeand other scholars take for granted are only able to be proved with ref-erence to later periods of ice-age At the town of Lehringen near Ver-den an der Aller the skeleton of an elephant had been preserved thathad been killed with the aid of a wooden spear found between the ribsof the animal This is impressive evidence of the fact that Homo nean-derthalensis was able to successfully hunt big game Therefore it canbe assumed that Mircea Eliadersquos precise conceptions of religion duringprehistoric times may at least be correct with regard to the people of theMousterian He describes this religion as ldquomagic-religious conceptionsof Palaeolithic manrdquo as follows54 The documents regarding the reli-gion of the Palaeolithic man are obscure he says but available Theirmeaning can be deciphered if the scholar succeeds in inserting thesedocuments into a semantic system55 This semantic system is alreadygiven by the results of investigations of recent hunter-gatherer commu-nities Their similar lifestyle offers suf cient certainty for identical orvery similar religions of recent hunter-gatherers and Palaeolithic manTherefore Homo neanderthalensi s believed that the animal is a beingquite similar to man but talented with supernatural forces He wasconvinced that gods such as the ldquoMaster of the Animalsrdquo or ldquoSupremeBeingrdquo existed The kill of the animal took place after a complicatedritual On the other hand rites must have existed which were linkedwith a skull-cult and deposits of long bones Similarly Ioan Coulianoargues that ldquoeither similar models of well-known primitive peoplesare referred to or one dispenses with any model The History of Reli-gion can only use the rst option as imperfect as it may be Scholars

53 See Henke and Rothe 1994 52554 Eliade 1978 15ff55 Ibid 18

432 Ina Wunn

have to endeavour to decipher the mental horizon of the people of pre-historic times by using the results of ethnographic and archaeologicalstudiesrdquo56 John Campbell concludes from the myths of known peoplesthat there must be close connections between the religions of Palae-olithic man and recent hunter-gatherers The following conviction isboth precondition and result of his investigations ldquoI nd that its mainresult has been its con rmation of a thought I have long and faithfullyentertained of the unity of the race of man not only in its biology butalso in its spiritual historyrdquo57 He proves his assumption with the helpof a comparison Under the title ldquoThe Stage of Neanderthal Manrdquo thereader nds the detailed description of the life habits of the small anddelicate Negritos of the Andaman Islands in the Gulf of Bengal butCampbell fails to prove the connections between the habits of a peopleof recent tropical Asia and an anatomically different prehistoric peo-ple which lived in boreal climates 100 000 years ago58 Another argu-ment of John Campbellrsquos is founded on archaeological facts The stoneblades of the Mousterian (the material culture of Neanderthal man ismainly Mousterian) are still very similar a wider range of differenttools was unknown at that time This means for Campbell that thecustom of tool-making was carefully handed down from one genera-tion to another comparably to customs of recent bushman culture Thisextraordinary attention is due to a certain feeling of the holy whichwas connected with the manufacturing and use of the tool59 The pass-ing on of Palaeolithic religion to religions of recent hunter-gatherercommunities serves as a proof that the myths of recent peoples origi-nated in the Palaeolithic and have been handed down till today withoutany changes This means that Joseph Campbell constructed a typicalcircular argument Todayrsquos behaviours and myths are taken as proofin order to postulate the existence of the same behaviours and mythsas practised by Palaeolithic man Then the postulate itself is taken as

56 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2757 Campbell 1987 v58 Ibid 365ff59 Ibid 364f

Beginning of Religion 433

a voucher to prove the unchanged existence of those myths from thePalaeolithic up to now

The opinion that Palaeolithic man already had a complicated reli-gion with certain notions of the holy and various rituals can be foundin nearly every religious reference work Fritz Hartmann writes forexample ldquoThe magic of the hunt belongs to this typically human con-ception of the worldrdquo60

Even if the consequences drawn from the archaeologically securedfacts in the past seem frequently exaggerated several sentences in thevolume of Johannes Maringer explain the intention of the authors Itwas the common statement that prehistoric man was a mere beast with-out a developed mind that made the opponents of this point of viewlook for counter-arguments which are no longer defendable in the lightof modern research results61 The use of ethnographic analogies to re-construct prehistoric religion is based on a speci c understanding ofthe evolution of religion In the nineteenth century Charles Darwinrsquostheory of biological evolution in uenced nearly all branches of sci-ence In the elds of the study of religion and anthropology scholarslike Edward Burnett Tylor or James George Frazer developed concep-tions of religious evolution which have strongly determined researchuntil today Tylor as well as Frazer were convinced that they couldprove an ascending development of religion from primitive origins tothe modern religions of the industrial age According to this theory thereligions of recent hunter-gatherer communities can be classi ed asrelics from ancient times62 This means on the contrary that it is pos-sible to reconstruct the consciousness of ancient people with the helpof knowledge about the religion of todayrsquos hunter-gatherer communi-ties However only a brief insight into the multiplicity of so-calledprimitive religions reveals that their contents and symbols are not sim-ilar by any means According to Max Raphael the faith-conceptions of

60 Hartmann 1957 403 Among the latest literature see for example Grim 19981107-1108 and Hultkrantz 1998 746-752

61 Maringer 1956 59ff62 Michaels (ed) 1997 41-60 and 77-89

434 Ina Wunn

recent hunter-gatherer communities cannot be consulted in order to de-rive from them a certain belief of prehistoric man Even people livingon a relatively primitive economical level up to the present day havebeen affected by their past which has in uenced their state of mindAs a result their ideas and religious conceptions changed in the samemanner as the belief system of modern communities did63 The an-thropologist Wilhelm Emil Muumlhlmann acknowledges the arguments ofMax Raphael when he emphasises that all known primitive religionsare younger than theological religions64 Even if ecological and eco-nomical prerequisites of different societies are the same they do notnecessarily have the same or a similar belief system identical ritualssymbols and practices Hermann Schulz emphasises ldquoKulturell aufdas engste verwandte Gruppen koumlnnen einen religioumls-symbolisch undartefaktreichen Ritualismus entwickeln (Sepik-Gebiet) oder innerhalbder elaborierten ritualsymbolische n Medien tendentiell nichtreligioumlseartefakt-arme Programme elaborieren (Kapauku)rdquo65

The arguments show that it is by no means suf cient to nd prooffor the hunting practices of Neanderthal man in order to imply any kindof religion and especially not a de nite and well-known religion

Bear-cult

The existence of the cult of the bear in the middle Palaeolithic pe-riod is taken for granted Aringke Hultkrantz writes ldquoDie Kulturen des ark-

63 Max Raphael writes ldquoMan hat diese Schwierigkeit umgehen wollen durchHeranziehen von Aussagen sogenannter primitiver Kulturvoumllker Diese nur in sehrengen Grenzen moumlgliche Analogie uumlbersieht daszlig auch diese Staumlmme eine Geschichtegehabt haben mdash eine regressive statt der progressiven der Kulturvoumllker Es liegt einunberechtigtes Vorurteil in der Annahme der Einfrierung des Gewesenen denn dielsquoPrimitivenrsquo nden sich selbst wo sie auf dem Stadium der Jagdwirtschaft stehengeblieben sind mit den alten Werkzeugen und Waffen einer anderen Umgebunggegenuumlber die starken den Einzelmenschen an Maumlchtigkeit uumlberragenden Tiere sindersetzt durch wesentlich kleinere und schwaumlchererdquo (Raphael 1978 78)

64 Muumlhlmann 1957 119865 Schulz 1993 189

Beginning of Religion 435

tischen Raumes sind Bruchstuumlcke einer palaumlolithischen Jagdkulturrdquo66

Friedrich Heiler67 refers to similar ideas as those expressed by JosephCampbell who describes the cult of the bear in an interesting buthardly well-grounded manner First Campbell refers to a bear-festivalamong the Ainu After the killing of the captured bear and during theceremonies the skull of the animal is put at the top of a long stick68

In a second step Campbell portrays Neanderthal man in impressiveterms ldquo when the remains of a strangely brutish yet manlike skele-ton were found in a limestone quarry not far from Duumlsseldorf in theValley of Neanderrdquo69 The following descriptions shortly mention thecaves of the Alps where the remains of the bears were detected Theexcavators had the impression that the arrangement of the fossil bonescould hardly be due to nature so they attributed this to the activitiesof H neanderthalensi s who were assumed to have killed the animalsand arranged their bones during certain ceremonies70 It is true thatnearly everywhere in the Arctic primitive peoples know certain ritu-als connected with the hunting of the bear71 The excavators of thecaves Emil Baumlchler and Karl Houmlrmann took these ceremonies of cir-cumpolar peoples to prove their hypothesis of an ancient bear-cult inprehistoric times72 In the following years several discoveries of simi-lar bear-caves seemed to support the hypothesis of cave bear worshipEmil Baumlchler himself discovered bear bone deposits at the Wilden-mannlisloch in Switzerland and in Sloveniarsquos Mornova Cave In 1946Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan excavated seven cave bear skulls arranged in acircle in Furtins Cave Saocircne-et-Loire In 1950 Kurt Ehrenberg secured

66 Hultkrantz 1998 75167 See Heiler 1979 7868 Campbell 1987 334ff69 Ibid 33970 Ibid 341f71 Edsman 1957 84172 Maringer 1956 95ff

436 Ina Wunn

a deposit of long bones arranged together with cave bear skulls in theSalzhofen Cave in the Austrian Alps73

The latest nd of supposed traces of prehistoric cave bear worshipwas published in 1996 In the Rumanian Bihor-Mountains ChristianLascu et al discovered a cave rich in palaeontologica l cave beardeposits74 Scholars such as Johannes Maringer or Aringke Hultkrantzrefer to the reports of the excavators when they interpret the depositsas the remainder of cult practice The historian Karl Narr also gives anaccount of the deposits of cave bear skulls and long bones but remainssceptical75

A detailed discussion of the nds of cave bear bones from a palaeon-tological and ethnographic point of view led to completely differentresults76 The careful and critical use of ethnographic analogues onwhich the theories of a cave bear cult is founded in the end leads toeven contrary results If H neanderthalensi s had known cave bear wor-ship its traces would have been found inside the settlements The re-mains of such a cult would have been the bone deposits of Neanderthalmanrsquos favourite and most dangerous game among which howeverthe bear did not rank Recent peoples who know the bear cult catchor kill a bear in his winter accommodation and bring it to their settle-ment There it is killed and eaten by the villagers under different ritualregulations The bones of the dead game are put into a holy place orare carefully buried near the village but never brought back again tothe dwelling of the bear

The most impressive arguments against cave bear worship comenevertheless from the bone deposits itself Crucial palaeontologica lobjections are to be stated rst of all Both the cave bear (Ursusspelaeus) which was extinct at the end of the last ice age and thebrown bear (Ursus arctos) which spread all over Eurasia since theEem period show a strong preference for cave accommodation There

73 See Lascu et al 1996 19-20 and Maringer 1956 91-9674 See Lascu et al 199675 Narr 1957 1076 Wunn 1999a 3-23

Beginning of Religion 437

they hide during wintertime and give birth to their young The caveswhere the relics of alleged bear worship were found are the naturalhabitat of the animals where they spend the long winters and hidetheir young At those places the bears sometimes died for severalreasons for example age illness lack of food Therefore their bonefossils are bound to be found in those places if they were not carriedoff by carrion eaters or removed by sedimentologica l processes Theoccurrence of cave bear bones in the caves of the ice age which servedgenerations of bear families as shelter is just what a palaeontologis twould expect

The proponents of Palaeolithic bear worship did not only think themere occurrence of bear bones in the caves to be remarkable butalso their alleged assortment and arrangement in which they werefound However there rst takes place an amassment of bear bones incertain places by the activities of the bears themselves as Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan correctly noticed The parts of skeletons of the deceasedanimals which originally are in their anatomical order are thrownin disorder or scattered by later generations of bears Sometimes theyare pressed to the walls where they are relatively protected againstfurther decay77 Also the outweighing of skulls and long bones is aresult of a process of natural decay and not due to human activitiesThe mentioned parts of the skeleton are relatively heavy and compactso that they are more able to resist decomposition processes thanthe small vertebrae ribs foot-bones or hand-bones A result of thoseprocesses is the natural selection of the bone material78 But notonly decomposition in uences the state of the bones During theirhistory the caves were ooded several times as the accumulatedsediments prove Such oodings do not remain without in uence onthe fossil material With high water level and stronger current all loosematerial is either rinsed away or carried for a certain distance andthen dropped at a place where there is a weaker current During theseprocesses the anatomical bone order is radically altered Therefore

77 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 3978 Ziegler 1975 44-45

438 Ina Wunn

the accumulation of several skulls in one place and the absenceof other bones is due to geological and sedimentologica l processesand not to human intervention The oating ability of sediments canbe reduced by prominent parts of the walls or unevenness of the oor resulting in some bone parts being deposited in the proximityof obstacles A concrete example of this effect is the discovery ofseveral skulls deposited in a crosslike pattern in the Cold Cave ofthe Bihor Mountains The obstacle which reduced the transportabilityof the skulls crucially was a stone at which the fossil skulls weredeposited79 Just as little as the assortment of the bone material isproof of human activities so the adjustment of the fossils is anunnatural process The movements of a transport medium be it windsediment or water are transferred to the material to be transportedso that the movement in a special direction leads to its assortmentTherefore the assortment of bear skulls is not due to human activitiesbut to the owing water or other transport mediums in the caves Itcannot be said clearly enough There was no cave bear worship inthe middle Palaeolithic period at all The bear caves show exactlywhat a palaeontologis t would expect Nothing suggests that the naturalprocess of decay and sedimentation was at any time interrupted ordisturbed80

Combined burials of man and cave bear

In connection with assumed bear worship the opinion was heldthat sometimes men and bear were buried together in one grave81 Asevidence served the excavations at Le Reacutegourdou near Lascaux whereunder a hill of debris both the remains of a bear and a Neanderthal manwere preserved The French archaeologist Fabienne May demonstratedthat the remains of the bear bore no connection with the human

79 See Lascu et al 1996 30 plate 380 Wunn 1999a 6ff81 Rust 1986 15

Beginning of Religion 439

skeleton and questioned whether there was a funeral at Le Reacutegourdouat all82

Skull deposits and skull worship

Just as the bear worship was regarded as irrefutable fact there washardly any doubt that Neanderthal man subjected the heads of thedeceased to a special treatment and set them up for ritual purposesOther scholars are convinced that Neanderthal man hunted fellowhumans to kill and eat them83 It is said that the skulls of the killedlater became the focal point of a ritual This hypothesis is suggestedby Ioan Couliano ldquoEinige Schaumldel sind in einer Weise verformtdie den Gedanken an ein Herausloumlsen des Gehirns nahelegenrdquo84

Alfred Rust expresses himself absolutely clearly He is sure that the nds of isolated lower jaws and craniums are closely connected withreligious customs85 Detailed and critically Johannes Maringer arguesthe question of the skull cult He discusses the nds which wereconsidered as proof of the presence of the alleged practices Thereis for example the crushed childlike skull from Gibraltar or the nds of human remains at Weimar-Ehringsdorf and particularly theoutstanding nd of the skull of Monte Circeo which is mentionedby every author as evidence of the described ritual practice Finallyhe comes to the following result ldquoDas Fundbild der Guattari-Grottespricht klar fuumlr einen Kult in dessen Mittelpunkt der Schaumldel standUrspruumlnglich scheint er auf einem Stock aufgesteckt gewesen zusein Einem heiligen Bannkreis gleich umgab ihn der Kranz vonSteinen Der ganze Houmlhlenteil erweckt den Eindruck als habe er den inder vorderen Houmlhle wohnenden Urmenschen als Heiligtum gedientrdquo86

and further ldquoDie Schaumldelsetzungen duumlrften aller Wahrscheinlichkeitnach eine Art Schaumldelkult darstellen in dem das Gedaumlchtnis der

82 Ibid 1583 Ullrich 1978 293ff See also the overview in Henke and Rothe 1999 27784 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2885 Rust 1991 19486 Maringer 1956 80

440 Ina Wunn

Verstorbenen gep egt und ihre Hilfe wie auch ihr Schutz fuumlr die Sippeer eht wurderdquo87 Even Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan agrees that the skull ofMonte Circeo is an intentional deposition of a skull but he refusesto draw any conclusions concerning religious customs88 On the otherhand he can prove that all other nds of isolated heads or jaws arethe result of taphonomic processes89 After a careful re-examinationof the original reports of the excavations Fabienne May states thatnone of the descriptions of the excavations is suf cient to con rm ordisprove the hypothesis of a ritual90 The discovery of a supposed cultsite at Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan where the skull of a child was set upbetween several skulls of ibex does not prove the hypothesis of a cultIn this case the remnants of ibexes and the skull of the child have noconnection at all91 Since it could be shown that even the skull depositof Monte Circeo was not the result of human activities but that thedamages of the skull were due to the work of hungry hyenas the lastargument in favour of a skull cult is disproved92

Cannibalism

Cannibalism has already been mentioned in connection with thedeposition of human skulls Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan expresses him-self as follows ldquoDie Existenz eines religioumlsen Kannibalismus imPalaumlolithikum mag wahrscheinlich sein doch laumlszligt sich dies bei dergegenwaumlrtigen Materiallage absolut nicht beweisen Und dennochspricht kein Autor von der palaumlolithischen Religion ohne fuumlr odergegen die Kannibalismusthese Stellung zu beziehen wobei in groumlszlige-rem Umfang auf ethnographische Beispiele zuruumlckgegriffen wirdrdquo93

But particularly those ethnographic analogies give strong argumentsagainst the hypothesis of prehistoric cannibalism The anthropologis t

87 Ibid 8588 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 5389 Ibid 54-5690 May 1986 1791 Ibid 33-3492 Henke and Rothe 1994 52793 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 56

Beginning of Religion 441

Gabriele Weiss and the archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher discuss thetopic of cannibalism carefully94 They state that the ethnographic ma-terial itself is frequently not convincing because it is based mainly onsensational reports of past adventurers There are no assertions by eye-witnesses but stories of man eaters were always reported by writerswho only stated that they had heard about those customs The cus-tom of cannibalism itself was always stated to have been given upjust several years before the arrival of the traveller95 Frequently theassumption that a certain people was guilty of cannibalism was usedpropagandistically in order to be able to lead a war against this peo-ple or to force them into slavery96 On the other hand it was a wellknown rumour in Africa even up to the beginning of this century thatEuropeans fed on the esh of African children97 It is argued by HeidiPeter-Roumlcher that there is no evidence of cannibalism among recentpeoples at all98 This means that it is nonsense to search for the reasonand the origin of that custom in prehistoric times It cannot be decidedto what extent Sigmund Freud with his hypothesis of the origin of hu-man society must be blamed for evoking the idea of early man-eatersIn his Totem und Tabu he made several statements about the origin ofhuman society claiming that at the beginning of prehistory a group ofhumans was ruled by a despotic patriarch until he was killed and eatenby his sons99 The subtitle of his book ldquoEinige Uumlbereinstimmungen imSeelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotikerrdquo100 re ects however the

94 Weiss 1987 142-159 and Peter-Roumlcher 198995 Volhard 1939 36996 Gabriele Weiss (1987 152) mentions the example of a decree of Queen Isabella

in 1503 who gave permission to enslave the Caribbean Indians because they weresaid to be man-eaters

97 Ibid 15098 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 On the contrary the American anthropologist Christy Turner

is convinced that the Anasazi an Indian people who lived in the southern parts of theUnited States during historical times did human hunting See Turner 1999

99 See Weiss 1987 44-45100 Weiss 1987 44

442 Ina Wunn

opinion of many of his contemporaries and colleagues and contributesto the picture of the mentality of Neanderthal man until today101

The facts on which the theory of prehistoric cannibalism are basedare usually poor Frequently it was suf cient to assume cannibalismexisted if a skeleton was found incomplete or not in anatomical or-der102 It is still considered a strong proof for cannibalism when splithuman bones occur as were excavated at Krapina The defenders ofthe cannibalism thesis argue that the remnants of human bones lookabsolutely similar to the scattered animal bones at the same excava-tion site Therefore they come to the conclusion that Neanderthal mantreated fellow humans in the same way as he treated game This argu-ment is still stressed by the anthropologist s Tim White and Alban De- eur Scattered bones of human beings and deer in the cave of Moula-Guercy show the same scratches103 This argument presupposes how-ever that the humans as well as the animals were killed by Neanderthalman Both the humans and the animals could however have been thevictims of carnivores for example hyena or cave lion or the scratcheson human and animal bones may be due to taphonomic processes104

This thesis would explain the remains of Krapina as well as the ndingsof Moula-Guercy In any case the identical treatment of human andanimal bones and the missing of any traces of a ritual do not promotethe hypothesis of a religious custom In this case Krapina and Moula-Guercy would prove that Neanderthal man hunted other humans formeat This seems however to be unlikely because the hunters of theMousterian lived in a habitat full of game which was for sure easier tokill than humans

101 Campbell 1987 339102 Maringer 1956 81f In the excavation report of the site Weimar-Ehringsdorf

cannibalism is not mentioned at all See Feustel 1989 391-393103 De eur et al 1999 128-131104 It is still more than dif cult to decide whether scratches on bones are due to

human activities to carnivores or to taphonomic processes The topic is still debated

among scientists For an overview see Henke and Rothe 1994 19-25

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

Beginning of Religion 427

the hunting activities of the H erectus are in the near vicinity ofwatering places Here the ungulates frequently became the prey ofpredatory animals Analysis of the individual age of the bones offossil mammals at Bilzingsleben and other Palaeolithic settlements ledto the conclusion that many of those animals died naturally39 The rst evidence that at least the younger Homo erectus was capable ofhunting larger prey came from Schoumlningen near Helmstedt Germanywhere a wooden spear about 15 meters long was found in a huntingcamp inhabited about 400 000 years ago40 Homo erectus had a brainvolume which was still quite small compared to the brain of recentHomo sapiens Only the younger H erectus is supposed to havebeen capable of verbal communication as anatomical investigation shave proven Though there is no direct relationship between brainvolume and intelligence behaviour or certain abilities scholars areconvinced that H erectus was quite primitive compared to H sapiensas the archaeological ndings related to his culture have revealed41

The results of evolutionary psychology seem to prove the followingfacts Obviously technical skills increased dramatically over those ofH habilis Natural history intelligence and social intelligence werealso well developed On the other hand the technical conservatismof Homo erectus over a period of about one million years is strikingThe only explanation for this contradictory evidence is to assume thatthe well developed multiple intelligences of the H erectus were stillcommitted to speci c domains of behaviour with very little interactionbetween them42 Thinking and communication in abstract terms whichare essential for religious awareness probably developed quite late

Though excavations like the camp of Bilzingsleben MarkleebergKaumlrlich or Bad Cannstadt and the results of archaeological psychologydo not support the hypothesis that early man performed any religiousrites and though the discussion of palaeanthropologica l facts prove

39 Henke and Rothe 1994 42840 Thieme 1997 807-81041 See Henke and Rothe1994 42442 Mithen 1996 115ff

428 Ina Wunn

that H erectus was not at all capable of performing complicated rit-uals it is still the opinion among scholars of the History of Religionand several archaeologists that ritual cannibalism was common amongearly human populations Thus Alfred Rust writes ldquoUnique nds fromAsia prove that cannibalism was exercised in the whole worldrdquo43 Al-fred Rust refers to nds of Homo erectus in the caves of Zhoukoudianwhich reveal many similarities to Bilzingsleben44 While Alfred Rustis convinced that the presence of several ldquosmashedrdquo human skulls isa clear sign of ritual cannibalism Johannes Maringer presumes thatskulls and lower jaws are the remnants of the deceased which had beenkept and worshipped by their family Similar customs are still evidentamong members of primitive cultures in Africa or Asia45 The palaean-thropologist s Winfried Henke and Hartmut Rothe express strong andjusti ed doubt about this assertion The analysis of several craniumsof early man gave evidence that the destruction of the skulls was dueto the activities of ancient hyena and normal taphonomic processes46

The archaeologist Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan had already noted in the six-ties ldquoThe conditions of the former excavations of Chou Kou Tien makeit dif cult to even nd a map of the site of skulls The skulls were ex-tracted from solid limestone and not even one of them is near to beingcomplete After decomposing into tiny sections they entered the gen-eral category of the animal remains It is dif cult to understand how themyth of head-collecting Sinanthropus could have assumed a de niteformrdquo47 Another victim of such prejudice is Karl Dietrich Adam withhis hypothesis that the skull of Homo erectus steinheimensis showstraces of having been subjected to postmortal manipulations48 Thedestruction of the base of the skull is his only criterion for the hy-pothesis that stone-age man was frequently the victim of ritual prac-

43 Rust 1991 17544 Ibid 17845 Maringer 1956 64-7146 Rust 1991 178f and Henke and Rothe 1994 42847 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 4948 Adam 1991 218

Beginning of Religion 429

tices Between the death of the individual and the later recovery ofthe fossil a number of taphonomic processes take place which havesigni cant effects on the later fossil One of those effects is the modi- cation of organic matter and its decay the assortment or destructionof hard sections as well as sedimentologica l processes Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan was able to show that the cranium and lower jaws are usuallywell preserved Therefore it is only due to taphonomic processes thatthese individual body parts survive and not at all due to human ac-tivities or postmortal manipulation49 In this connection it is necessaryto emphasise that scholars can only come to a decision based on a se-ries of complex investigations using a scanning electron microscopeas to whether scratches on fossil bones are due to violence caused bya stone tool or the teeth of a predatory animal Since there are no ar-chaeological ndings for the entire Palaeolithic or Neolithic period toprove the opening of the skull by humans none of the speculationsabout possible cult practice connected with human skulls is based onfacts50

3 Religion in the Middle Palaeolithic

From an anthropologica l point of view the European middle Palae-olithic is characterised by Homo neanderthalensi s51 This early form ofHomo sapiens or descendant of Homo heidelbergensis lived over a pe-

49 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 45 5550 Experiments with animal bones have shown that scratches made by stone tools

are absolutely equal to scratches caused by sand Those scratches occur frequentlyduring the process of embedding It is still dif cult to distinguish between traces ofhuman activities and traces of animal bites An examination is only possible with thehelp of a scanning electron microscope See Henke and Rothe 1994 20-24

51 The so-called Neanderthal-problem is however a source of heated debateOnly ten years ago many palaeanthropologists were convinced that Neanderthalman belonged to our species H sapiens His characteristic features were supposedto be due to the extreme climate of the ice-age In the meantime most scientistshave been convinced that Homo neanderthalensis developed directly from Homoheidelbergensis while the modern Homo sapiens developed during the same timein Africa and conquered Europe about 40 000 years ago See Henke and Rothe 1994433ff and Henke and Rothe 1999 272f

430 Ina Wunn

riod of nearly 100 000 years during which the landscape climate andliving conditions changed dramatically These environmental changesmight have contributed to the special anatomical features of the Nean-derthal man Surely the need to adapt to a frequently changing habitatforced H neanderthalensi s to develop sociocultural abilities that wereclosely related to the progressive evolution of intelligence and psycho-logical abilities52 The frequent environmental changes to which H ne-anderthalensis had to adapt made life immensely challenging In thewarmer and humid periods of the Eem period dense forests coveredthe landscape Population migration was only possible in the valleysThe fauna consisted of elephant deer stag aurochs bear and othersSuf cient food-supply in the direct surroundings allows one to believethat Neanderthal man was relatively stationary during this climatic pe-riod The excavated settlement of Weimar-Ehringsdorf was inhabitedduring this time During the initial phase of cooler climate the orachanged Fir and pine trees were common and formed large and humidforests The winters were cold and snow was plentiful even in sum-mertime the temperature remained low Not only non-migrating ani-mals were hunted by Neanderthal man herds of reindeer wild horsebison and mammoth provided suf cient opportunity for hunting Dur-ing the coldest periods the forests disappeared and made room for

52 Steven Mithen emphasises that natural history intelligence technical intelli-gence social and linguistic intelligence of Neanderthal man were all well developedbut there was still a lack of interaction between the four domains of the mind Cogni-tive uidity took place only between the domains of social and linguistic intelligence(Mithen 1996 143 and 147ff) The author of this article has a different opinion In gen-eral the lithic culture of Neanderthal man is the Mousterian which is still simple com-pared to the technology of the upper Palaeolithic On the other hand the lithic culturesare not strictly related to the one or the other human species Homo neanderthalensistoo was found together with the more advanced tools of the upper Palaeolithic whileHomo sapiens was found with the simple tools of the Mousterian culture Thereforedirect connections between a certain human species and its lithic culture cannot beproved The technical skills of the younger H neanderthalensis and early H sapiensobviously did not differ That means that there is no palaeanthropological evidence forthe assumption of fundamental difference between the minds of H neanderthalensisand H sapiens (Henke and Rothe 1999 275 Reynolds 1990 263ff)

Beginning of Religion 431

prairies and tundra The climate became dry with extremely cold win-ters and relatively mild but short summers The prairies were full ofgame which migrated with the seasons53

The Magic of Hunting in the Middle Palaeolithic

The hunting activities of the Palaeolithic man which Mircea Eliadeand other scholars take for granted are only able to be proved with ref-erence to later periods of ice-age At the town of Lehringen near Ver-den an der Aller the skeleton of an elephant had been preserved thathad been killed with the aid of a wooden spear found between the ribsof the animal This is impressive evidence of the fact that Homo nean-derthalensis was able to successfully hunt big game Therefore it canbe assumed that Mircea Eliadersquos precise conceptions of religion duringprehistoric times may at least be correct with regard to the people of theMousterian He describes this religion as ldquomagic-religious conceptionsof Palaeolithic manrdquo as follows54 The documents regarding the reli-gion of the Palaeolithic man are obscure he says but available Theirmeaning can be deciphered if the scholar succeeds in inserting thesedocuments into a semantic system55 This semantic system is alreadygiven by the results of investigations of recent hunter-gatherer commu-nities Their similar lifestyle offers suf cient certainty for identical orvery similar religions of recent hunter-gatherers and Palaeolithic manTherefore Homo neanderthalensi s believed that the animal is a beingquite similar to man but talented with supernatural forces He wasconvinced that gods such as the ldquoMaster of the Animalsrdquo or ldquoSupremeBeingrdquo existed The kill of the animal took place after a complicatedritual On the other hand rites must have existed which were linkedwith a skull-cult and deposits of long bones Similarly Ioan Coulianoargues that ldquoeither similar models of well-known primitive peoplesare referred to or one dispenses with any model The History of Reli-gion can only use the rst option as imperfect as it may be Scholars

53 See Henke and Rothe 1994 52554 Eliade 1978 15ff55 Ibid 18

432 Ina Wunn

have to endeavour to decipher the mental horizon of the people of pre-historic times by using the results of ethnographic and archaeologicalstudiesrdquo56 John Campbell concludes from the myths of known peoplesthat there must be close connections between the religions of Palae-olithic man and recent hunter-gatherers The following conviction isboth precondition and result of his investigations ldquoI nd that its mainresult has been its con rmation of a thought I have long and faithfullyentertained of the unity of the race of man not only in its biology butalso in its spiritual historyrdquo57 He proves his assumption with the helpof a comparison Under the title ldquoThe Stage of Neanderthal Manrdquo thereader nds the detailed description of the life habits of the small anddelicate Negritos of the Andaman Islands in the Gulf of Bengal butCampbell fails to prove the connections between the habits of a peopleof recent tropical Asia and an anatomically different prehistoric peo-ple which lived in boreal climates 100 000 years ago58 Another argu-ment of John Campbellrsquos is founded on archaeological facts The stoneblades of the Mousterian (the material culture of Neanderthal man ismainly Mousterian) are still very similar a wider range of differenttools was unknown at that time This means for Campbell that thecustom of tool-making was carefully handed down from one genera-tion to another comparably to customs of recent bushman culture Thisextraordinary attention is due to a certain feeling of the holy whichwas connected with the manufacturing and use of the tool59 The pass-ing on of Palaeolithic religion to religions of recent hunter-gatherercommunities serves as a proof that the myths of recent peoples origi-nated in the Palaeolithic and have been handed down till today withoutany changes This means that Joseph Campbell constructed a typicalcircular argument Todayrsquos behaviours and myths are taken as proofin order to postulate the existence of the same behaviours and mythsas practised by Palaeolithic man Then the postulate itself is taken as

56 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2757 Campbell 1987 v58 Ibid 365ff59 Ibid 364f

Beginning of Religion 433

a voucher to prove the unchanged existence of those myths from thePalaeolithic up to now

The opinion that Palaeolithic man already had a complicated reli-gion with certain notions of the holy and various rituals can be foundin nearly every religious reference work Fritz Hartmann writes forexample ldquoThe magic of the hunt belongs to this typically human con-ception of the worldrdquo60

Even if the consequences drawn from the archaeologically securedfacts in the past seem frequently exaggerated several sentences in thevolume of Johannes Maringer explain the intention of the authors Itwas the common statement that prehistoric man was a mere beast with-out a developed mind that made the opponents of this point of viewlook for counter-arguments which are no longer defendable in the lightof modern research results61 The use of ethnographic analogies to re-construct prehistoric religion is based on a speci c understanding ofthe evolution of religion In the nineteenth century Charles Darwinrsquostheory of biological evolution in uenced nearly all branches of sci-ence In the elds of the study of religion and anthropology scholarslike Edward Burnett Tylor or James George Frazer developed concep-tions of religious evolution which have strongly determined researchuntil today Tylor as well as Frazer were convinced that they couldprove an ascending development of religion from primitive origins tothe modern religions of the industrial age According to this theory thereligions of recent hunter-gatherer communities can be classi ed asrelics from ancient times62 This means on the contrary that it is pos-sible to reconstruct the consciousness of ancient people with the helpof knowledge about the religion of todayrsquos hunter-gatherer communi-ties However only a brief insight into the multiplicity of so-calledprimitive religions reveals that their contents and symbols are not sim-ilar by any means According to Max Raphael the faith-conceptions of

60 Hartmann 1957 403 Among the latest literature see for example Grim 19981107-1108 and Hultkrantz 1998 746-752

61 Maringer 1956 59ff62 Michaels (ed) 1997 41-60 and 77-89

434 Ina Wunn

recent hunter-gatherer communities cannot be consulted in order to de-rive from them a certain belief of prehistoric man Even people livingon a relatively primitive economical level up to the present day havebeen affected by their past which has in uenced their state of mindAs a result their ideas and religious conceptions changed in the samemanner as the belief system of modern communities did63 The an-thropologist Wilhelm Emil Muumlhlmann acknowledges the arguments ofMax Raphael when he emphasises that all known primitive religionsare younger than theological religions64 Even if ecological and eco-nomical prerequisites of different societies are the same they do notnecessarily have the same or a similar belief system identical ritualssymbols and practices Hermann Schulz emphasises ldquoKulturell aufdas engste verwandte Gruppen koumlnnen einen religioumls-symbolisch undartefaktreichen Ritualismus entwickeln (Sepik-Gebiet) oder innerhalbder elaborierten ritualsymbolische n Medien tendentiell nichtreligioumlseartefakt-arme Programme elaborieren (Kapauku)rdquo65

The arguments show that it is by no means suf cient to nd prooffor the hunting practices of Neanderthal man in order to imply any kindof religion and especially not a de nite and well-known religion

Bear-cult

The existence of the cult of the bear in the middle Palaeolithic pe-riod is taken for granted Aringke Hultkrantz writes ldquoDie Kulturen des ark-

63 Max Raphael writes ldquoMan hat diese Schwierigkeit umgehen wollen durchHeranziehen von Aussagen sogenannter primitiver Kulturvoumllker Diese nur in sehrengen Grenzen moumlgliche Analogie uumlbersieht daszlig auch diese Staumlmme eine Geschichtegehabt haben mdash eine regressive statt der progressiven der Kulturvoumllker Es liegt einunberechtigtes Vorurteil in der Annahme der Einfrierung des Gewesenen denn dielsquoPrimitivenrsquo nden sich selbst wo sie auf dem Stadium der Jagdwirtschaft stehengeblieben sind mit den alten Werkzeugen und Waffen einer anderen Umgebunggegenuumlber die starken den Einzelmenschen an Maumlchtigkeit uumlberragenden Tiere sindersetzt durch wesentlich kleinere und schwaumlchererdquo (Raphael 1978 78)

64 Muumlhlmann 1957 119865 Schulz 1993 189

Beginning of Religion 435

tischen Raumes sind Bruchstuumlcke einer palaumlolithischen Jagdkulturrdquo66

Friedrich Heiler67 refers to similar ideas as those expressed by JosephCampbell who describes the cult of the bear in an interesting buthardly well-grounded manner First Campbell refers to a bear-festivalamong the Ainu After the killing of the captured bear and during theceremonies the skull of the animal is put at the top of a long stick68

In a second step Campbell portrays Neanderthal man in impressiveterms ldquo when the remains of a strangely brutish yet manlike skele-ton were found in a limestone quarry not far from Duumlsseldorf in theValley of Neanderrdquo69 The following descriptions shortly mention thecaves of the Alps where the remains of the bears were detected Theexcavators had the impression that the arrangement of the fossil bonescould hardly be due to nature so they attributed this to the activitiesof H neanderthalensi s who were assumed to have killed the animalsand arranged their bones during certain ceremonies70 It is true thatnearly everywhere in the Arctic primitive peoples know certain ritu-als connected with the hunting of the bear71 The excavators of thecaves Emil Baumlchler and Karl Houmlrmann took these ceremonies of cir-cumpolar peoples to prove their hypothesis of an ancient bear-cult inprehistoric times72 In the following years several discoveries of simi-lar bear-caves seemed to support the hypothesis of cave bear worshipEmil Baumlchler himself discovered bear bone deposits at the Wilden-mannlisloch in Switzerland and in Sloveniarsquos Mornova Cave In 1946Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan excavated seven cave bear skulls arranged in acircle in Furtins Cave Saocircne-et-Loire In 1950 Kurt Ehrenberg secured

66 Hultkrantz 1998 75167 See Heiler 1979 7868 Campbell 1987 334ff69 Ibid 33970 Ibid 341f71 Edsman 1957 84172 Maringer 1956 95ff

436 Ina Wunn

a deposit of long bones arranged together with cave bear skulls in theSalzhofen Cave in the Austrian Alps73

The latest nd of supposed traces of prehistoric cave bear worshipwas published in 1996 In the Rumanian Bihor-Mountains ChristianLascu et al discovered a cave rich in palaeontologica l cave beardeposits74 Scholars such as Johannes Maringer or Aringke Hultkrantzrefer to the reports of the excavators when they interpret the depositsas the remainder of cult practice The historian Karl Narr also gives anaccount of the deposits of cave bear skulls and long bones but remainssceptical75

A detailed discussion of the nds of cave bear bones from a palaeon-tological and ethnographic point of view led to completely differentresults76 The careful and critical use of ethnographic analogues onwhich the theories of a cave bear cult is founded in the end leads toeven contrary results If H neanderthalensi s had known cave bear wor-ship its traces would have been found inside the settlements The re-mains of such a cult would have been the bone deposits of Neanderthalmanrsquos favourite and most dangerous game among which howeverthe bear did not rank Recent peoples who know the bear cult catchor kill a bear in his winter accommodation and bring it to their settle-ment There it is killed and eaten by the villagers under different ritualregulations The bones of the dead game are put into a holy place orare carefully buried near the village but never brought back again tothe dwelling of the bear

The most impressive arguments against cave bear worship comenevertheless from the bone deposits itself Crucial palaeontologica lobjections are to be stated rst of all Both the cave bear (Ursusspelaeus) which was extinct at the end of the last ice age and thebrown bear (Ursus arctos) which spread all over Eurasia since theEem period show a strong preference for cave accommodation There

73 See Lascu et al 1996 19-20 and Maringer 1956 91-9674 See Lascu et al 199675 Narr 1957 1076 Wunn 1999a 3-23

Beginning of Religion 437

they hide during wintertime and give birth to their young The caveswhere the relics of alleged bear worship were found are the naturalhabitat of the animals where they spend the long winters and hidetheir young At those places the bears sometimes died for severalreasons for example age illness lack of food Therefore their bonefossils are bound to be found in those places if they were not carriedoff by carrion eaters or removed by sedimentologica l processes Theoccurrence of cave bear bones in the caves of the ice age which servedgenerations of bear families as shelter is just what a palaeontologis twould expect

The proponents of Palaeolithic bear worship did not only think themere occurrence of bear bones in the caves to be remarkable butalso their alleged assortment and arrangement in which they werefound However there rst takes place an amassment of bear bones incertain places by the activities of the bears themselves as Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan correctly noticed The parts of skeletons of the deceasedanimals which originally are in their anatomical order are thrownin disorder or scattered by later generations of bears Sometimes theyare pressed to the walls where they are relatively protected againstfurther decay77 Also the outweighing of skulls and long bones is aresult of a process of natural decay and not due to human activitiesThe mentioned parts of the skeleton are relatively heavy and compactso that they are more able to resist decomposition processes thanthe small vertebrae ribs foot-bones or hand-bones A result of thoseprocesses is the natural selection of the bone material78 But notonly decomposition in uences the state of the bones During theirhistory the caves were ooded several times as the accumulatedsediments prove Such oodings do not remain without in uence onthe fossil material With high water level and stronger current all loosematerial is either rinsed away or carried for a certain distance andthen dropped at a place where there is a weaker current During theseprocesses the anatomical bone order is radically altered Therefore

77 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 3978 Ziegler 1975 44-45

438 Ina Wunn

the accumulation of several skulls in one place and the absenceof other bones is due to geological and sedimentologica l processesand not to human intervention The oating ability of sediments canbe reduced by prominent parts of the walls or unevenness of the oor resulting in some bone parts being deposited in the proximityof obstacles A concrete example of this effect is the discovery ofseveral skulls deposited in a crosslike pattern in the Cold Cave ofthe Bihor Mountains The obstacle which reduced the transportabilityof the skulls crucially was a stone at which the fossil skulls weredeposited79 Just as little as the assortment of the bone material isproof of human activities so the adjustment of the fossils is anunnatural process The movements of a transport medium be it windsediment or water are transferred to the material to be transportedso that the movement in a special direction leads to its assortmentTherefore the assortment of bear skulls is not due to human activitiesbut to the owing water or other transport mediums in the caves Itcannot be said clearly enough There was no cave bear worship inthe middle Palaeolithic period at all The bear caves show exactlywhat a palaeontologis t would expect Nothing suggests that the naturalprocess of decay and sedimentation was at any time interrupted ordisturbed80

Combined burials of man and cave bear

In connection with assumed bear worship the opinion was heldthat sometimes men and bear were buried together in one grave81 Asevidence served the excavations at Le Reacutegourdou near Lascaux whereunder a hill of debris both the remains of a bear and a Neanderthal manwere preserved The French archaeologist Fabienne May demonstratedthat the remains of the bear bore no connection with the human

79 See Lascu et al 1996 30 plate 380 Wunn 1999a 6ff81 Rust 1986 15

Beginning of Religion 439

skeleton and questioned whether there was a funeral at Le Reacutegourdouat all82

Skull deposits and skull worship

Just as the bear worship was regarded as irrefutable fact there washardly any doubt that Neanderthal man subjected the heads of thedeceased to a special treatment and set them up for ritual purposesOther scholars are convinced that Neanderthal man hunted fellowhumans to kill and eat them83 It is said that the skulls of the killedlater became the focal point of a ritual This hypothesis is suggestedby Ioan Couliano ldquoEinige Schaumldel sind in einer Weise verformtdie den Gedanken an ein Herausloumlsen des Gehirns nahelegenrdquo84

Alfred Rust expresses himself absolutely clearly He is sure that the nds of isolated lower jaws and craniums are closely connected withreligious customs85 Detailed and critically Johannes Maringer arguesthe question of the skull cult He discusses the nds which wereconsidered as proof of the presence of the alleged practices Thereis for example the crushed childlike skull from Gibraltar or the nds of human remains at Weimar-Ehringsdorf and particularly theoutstanding nd of the skull of Monte Circeo which is mentionedby every author as evidence of the described ritual practice Finallyhe comes to the following result ldquoDas Fundbild der Guattari-Grottespricht klar fuumlr einen Kult in dessen Mittelpunkt der Schaumldel standUrspruumlnglich scheint er auf einem Stock aufgesteckt gewesen zusein Einem heiligen Bannkreis gleich umgab ihn der Kranz vonSteinen Der ganze Houmlhlenteil erweckt den Eindruck als habe er den inder vorderen Houmlhle wohnenden Urmenschen als Heiligtum gedientrdquo86

and further ldquoDie Schaumldelsetzungen duumlrften aller Wahrscheinlichkeitnach eine Art Schaumldelkult darstellen in dem das Gedaumlchtnis der

82 Ibid 1583 Ullrich 1978 293ff See also the overview in Henke and Rothe 1999 27784 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2885 Rust 1991 19486 Maringer 1956 80

440 Ina Wunn

Verstorbenen gep egt und ihre Hilfe wie auch ihr Schutz fuumlr die Sippeer eht wurderdquo87 Even Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan agrees that the skull ofMonte Circeo is an intentional deposition of a skull but he refusesto draw any conclusions concerning religious customs88 On the otherhand he can prove that all other nds of isolated heads or jaws arethe result of taphonomic processes89 After a careful re-examinationof the original reports of the excavations Fabienne May states thatnone of the descriptions of the excavations is suf cient to con rm ordisprove the hypothesis of a ritual90 The discovery of a supposed cultsite at Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan where the skull of a child was set upbetween several skulls of ibex does not prove the hypothesis of a cultIn this case the remnants of ibexes and the skull of the child have noconnection at all91 Since it could be shown that even the skull depositof Monte Circeo was not the result of human activities but that thedamages of the skull were due to the work of hungry hyenas the lastargument in favour of a skull cult is disproved92

Cannibalism

Cannibalism has already been mentioned in connection with thedeposition of human skulls Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan expresses him-self as follows ldquoDie Existenz eines religioumlsen Kannibalismus imPalaumlolithikum mag wahrscheinlich sein doch laumlszligt sich dies bei dergegenwaumlrtigen Materiallage absolut nicht beweisen Und dennochspricht kein Autor von der palaumlolithischen Religion ohne fuumlr odergegen die Kannibalismusthese Stellung zu beziehen wobei in groumlszlige-rem Umfang auf ethnographische Beispiele zuruumlckgegriffen wirdrdquo93

But particularly those ethnographic analogies give strong argumentsagainst the hypothesis of prehistoric cannibalism The anthropologis t

87 Ibid 8588 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 5389 Ibid 54-5690 May 1986 1791 Ibid 33-3492 Henke and Rothe 1994 52793 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 56

Beginning of Religion 441

Gabriele Weiss and the archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher discuss thetopic of cannibalism carefully94 They state that the ethnographic ma-terial itself is frequently not convincing because it is based mainly onsensational reports of past adventurers There are no assertions by eye-witnesses but stories of man eaters were always reported by writerswho only stated that they had heard about those customs The cus-tom of cannibalism itself was always stated to have been given upjust several years before the arrival of the traveller95 Frequently theassumption that a certain people was guilty of cannibalism was usedpropagandistically in order to be able to lead a war against this peo-ple or to force them into slavery96 On the other hand it was a wellknown rumour in Africa even up to the beginning of this century thatEuropeans fed on the esh of African children97 It is argued by HeidiPeter-Roumlcher that there is no evidence of cannibalism among recentpeoples at all98 This means that it is nonsense to search for the reasonand the origin of that custom in prehistoric times It cannot be decidedto what extent Sigmund Freud with his hypothesis of the origin of hu-man society must be blamed for evoking the idea of early man-eatersIn his Totem und Tabu he made several statements about the origin ofhuman society claiming that at the beginning of prehistory a group ofhumans was ruled by a despotic patriarch until he was killed and eatenby his sons99 The subtitle of his book ldquoEinige Uumlbereinstimmungen imSeelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotikerrdquo100 re ects however the

94 Weiss 1987 142-159 and Peter-Roumlcher 198995 Volhard 1939 36996 Gabriele Weiss (1987 152) mentions the example of a decree of Queen Isabella

in 1503 who gave permission to enslave the Caribbean Indians because they weresaid to be man-eaters

97 Ibid 15098 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 On the contrary the American anthropologist Christy Turner

is convinced that the Anasazi an Indian people who lived in the southern parts of theUnited States during historical times did human hunting See Turner 1999

99 See Weiss 1987 44-45100 Weiss 1987 44

442 Ina Wunn

opinion of many of his contemporaries and colleagues and contributesto the picture of the mentality of Neanderthal man until today101

The facts on which the theory of prehistoric cannibalism are basedare usually poor Frequently it was suf cient to assume cannibalismexisted if a skeleton was found incomplete or not in anatomical or-der102 It is still considered a strong proof for cannibalism when splithuman bones occur as were excavated at Krapina The defenders ofthe cannibalism thesis argue that the remnants of human bones lookabsolutely similar to the scattered animal bones at the same excava-tion site Therefore they come to the conclusion that Neanderthal mantreated fellow humans in the same way as he treated game This argu-ment is still stressed by the anthropologist s Tim White and Alban De- eur Scattered bones of human beings and deer in the cave of Moula-Guercy show the same scratches103 This argument presupposes how-ever that the humans as well as the animals were killed by Neanderthalman Both the humans and the animals could however have been thevictims of carnivores for example hyena or cave lion or the scratcheson human and animal bones may be due to taphonomic processes104

This thesis would explain the remains of Krapina as well as the ndingsof Moula-Guercy In any case the identical treatment of human andanimal bones and the missing of any traces of a ritual do not promotethe hypothesis of a religious custom In this case Krapina and Moula-Guercy would prove that Neanderthal man hunted other humans formeat This seems however to be unlikely because the hunters of theMousterian lived in a habitat full of game which was for sure easier tokill than humans

101 Campbell 1987 339102 Maringer 1956 81f In the excavation report of the site Weimar-Ehringsdorf

cannibalism is not mentioned at all See Feustel 1989 391-393103 De eur et al 1999 128-131104 It is still more than dif cult to decide whether scratches on bones are due to

human activities to carnivores or to taphonomic processes The topic is still debated

among scientists For an overview see Henke and Rothe 1994 19-25

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

428 Ina Wunn

that H erectus was not at all capable of performing complicated rit-uals it is still the opinion among scholars of the History of Religionand several archaeologists that ritual cannibalism was common amongearly human populations Thus Alfred Rust writes ldquoUnique nds fromAsia prove that cannibalism was exercised in the whole worldrdquo43 Al-fred Rust refers to nds of Homo erectus in the caves of Zhoukoudianwhich reveal many similarities to Bilzingsleben44 While Alfred Rustis convinced that the presence of several ldquosmashedrdquo human skulls isa clear sign of ritual cannibalism Johannes Maringer presumes thatskulls and lower jaws are the remnants of the deceased which had beenkept and worshipped by their family Similar customs are still evidentamong members of primitive cultures in Africa or Asia45 The palaean-thropologist s Winfried Henke and Hartmut Rothe express strong andjusti ed doubt about this assertion The analysis of several craniumsof early man gave evidence that the destruction of the skulls was dueto the activities of ancient hyena and normal taphonomic processes46

The archaeologist Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan had already noted in the six-ties ldquoThe conditions of the former excavations of Chou Kou Tien makeit dif cult to even nd a map of the site of skulls The skulls were ex-tracted from solid limestone and not even one of them is near to beingcomplete After decomposing into tiny sections they entered the gen-eral category of the animal remains It is dif cult to understand how themyth of head-collecting Sinanthropus could have assumed a de niteformrdquo47 Another victim of such prejudice is Karl Dietrich Adam withhis hypothesis that the skull of Homo erectus steinheimensis showstraces of having been subjected to postmortal manipulations48 Thedestruction of the base of the skull is his only criterion for the hy-pothesis that stone-age man was frequently the victim of ritual prac-

43 Rust 1991 17544 Ibid 17845 Maringer 1956 64-7146 Rust 1991 178f and Henke and Rothe 1994 42847 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 4948 Adam 1991 218

Beginning of Religion 429

tices Between the death of the individual and the later recovery ofthe fossil a number of taphonomic processes take place which havesigni cant effects on the later fossil One of those effects is the modi- cation of organic matter and its decay the assortment or destructionof hard sections as well as sedimentologica l processes Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan was able to show that the cranium and lower jaws are usuallywell preserved Therefore it is only due to taphonomic processes thatthese individual body parts survive and not at all due to human ac-tivities or postmortal manipulation49 In this connection it is necessaryto emphasise that scholars can only come to a decision based on a se-ries of complex investigations using a scanning electron microscopeas to whether scratches on fossil bones are due to violence caused bya stone tool or the teeth of a predatory animal Since there are no ar-chaeological ndings for the entire Palaeolithic or Neolithic period toprove the opening of the skull by humans none of the speculationsabout possible cult practice connected with human skulls is based onfacts50

3 Religion in the Middle Palaeolithic

From an anthropologica l point of view the European middle Palae-olithic is characterised by Homo neanderthalensi s51 This early form ofHomo sapiens or descendant of Homo heidelbergensis lived over a pe-

49 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 45 5550 Experiments with animal bones have shown that scratches made by stone tools

are absolutely equal to scratches caused by sand Those scratches occur frequentlyduring the process of embedding It is still dif cult to distinguish between traces ofhuman activities and traces of animal bites An examination is only possible with thehelp of a scanning electron microscope See Henke and Rothe 1994 20-24

51 The so-called Neanderthal-problem is however a source of heated debateOnly ten years ago many palaeanthropologists were convinced that Neanderthalman belonged to our species H sapiens His characteristic features were supposedto be due to the extreme climate of the ice-age In the meantime most scientistshave been convinced that Homo neanderthalensis developed directly from Homoheidelbergensis while the modern Homo sapiens developed during the same timein Africa and conquered Europe about 40 000 years ago See Henke and Rothe 1994433ff and Henke and Rothe 1999 272f

430 Ina Wunn

riod of nearly 100 000 years during which the landscape climate andliving conditions changed dramatically These environmental changesmight have contributed to the special anatomical features of the Nean-derthal man Surely the need to adapt to a frequently changing habitatforced H neanderthalensi s to develop sociocultural abilities that wereclosely related to the progressive evolution of intelligence and psycho-logical abilities52 The frequent environmental changes to which H ne-anderthalensis had to adapt made life immensely challenging In thewarmer and humid periods of the Eem period dense forests coveredthe landscape Population migration was only possible in the valleysThe fauna consisted of elephant deer stag aurochs bear and othersSuf cient food-supply in the direct surroundings allows one to believethat Neanderthal man was relatively stationary during this climatic pe-riod The excavated settlement of Weimar-Ehringsdorf was inhabitedduring this time During the initial phase of cooler climate the orachanged Fir and pine trees were common and formed large and humidforests The winters were cold and snow was plentiful even in sum-mertime the temperature remained low Not only non-migrating ani-mals were hunted by Neanderthal man herds of reindeer wild horsebison and mammoth provided suf cient opportunity for hunting Dur-ing the coldest periods the forests disappeared and made room for

52 Steven Mithen emphasises that natural history intelligence technical intelli-gence social and linguistic intelligence of Neanderthal man were all well developedbut there was still a lack of interaction between the four domains of the mind Cogni-tive uidity took place only between the domains of social and linguistic intelligence(Mithen 1996 143 and 147ff) The author of this article has a different opinion In gen-eral the lithic culture of Neanderthal man is the Mousterian which is still simple com-pared to the technology of the upper Palaeolithic On the other hand the lithic culturesare not strictly related to the one or the other human species Homo neanderthalensistoo was found together with the more advanced tools of the upper Palaeolithic whileHomo sapiens was found with the simple tools of the Mousterian culture Thereforedirect connections between a certain human species and its lithic culture cannot beproved The technical skills of the younger H neanderthalensis and early H sapiensobviously did not differ That means that there is no palaeanthropological evidence forthe assumption of fundamental difference between the minds of H neanderthalensisand H sapiens (Henke and Rothe 1999 275 Reynolds 1990 263ff)

Beginning of Religion 431

prairies and tundra The climate became dry with extremely cold win-ters and relatively mild but short summers The prairies were full ofgame which migrated with the seasons53

The Magic of Hunting in the Middle Palaeolithic

The hunting activities of the Palaeolithic man which Mircea Eliadeand other scholars take for granted are only able to be proved with ref-erence to later periods of ice-age At the town of Lehringen near Ver-den an der Aller the skeleton of an elephant had been preserved thathad been killed with the aid of a wooden spear found between the ribsof the animal This is impressive evidence of the fact that Homo nean-derthalensis was able to successfully hunt big game Therefore it canbe assumed that Mircea Eliadersquos precise conceptions of religion duringprehistoric times may at least be correct with regard to the people of theMousterian He describes this religion as ldquomagic-religious conceptionsof Palaeolithic manrdquo as follows54 The documents regarding the reli-gion of the Palaeolithic man are obscure he says but available Theirmeaning can be deciphered if the scholar succeeds in inserting thesedocuments into a semantic system55 This semantic system is alreadygiven by the results of investigations of recent hunter-gatherer commu-nities Their similar lifestyle offers suf cient certainty for identical orvery similar religions of recent hunter-gatherers and Palaeolithic manTherefore Homo neanderthalensi s believed that the animal is a beingquite similar to man but talented with supernatural forces He wasconvinced that gods such as the ldquoMaster of the Animalsrdquo or ldquoSupremeBeingrdquo existed The kill of the animal took place after a complicatedritual On the other hand rites must have existed which were linkedwith a skull-cult and deposits of long bones Similarly Ioan Coulianoargues that ldquoeither similar models of well-known primitive peoplesare referred to or one dispenses with any model The History of Reli-gion can only use the rst option as imperfect as it may be Scholars

53 See Henke and Rothe 1994 52554 Eliade 1978 15ff55 Ibid 18

432 Ina Wunn

have to endeavour to decipher the mental horizon of the people of pre-historic times by using the results of ethnographic and archaeologicalstudiesrdquo56 John Campbell concludes from the myths of known peoplesthat there must be close connections between the religions of Palae-olithic man and recent hunter-gatherers The following conviction isboth precondition and result of his investigations ldquoI nd that its mainresult has been its con rmation of a thought I have long and faithfullyentertained of the unity of the race of man not only in its biology butalso in its spiritual historyrdquo57 He proves his assumption with the helpof a comparison Under the title ldquoThe Stage of Neanderthal Manrdquo thereader nds the detailed description of the life habits of the small anddelicate Negritos of the Andaman Islands in the Gulf of Bengal butCampbell fails to prove the connections between the habits of a peopleof recent tropical Asia and an anatomically different prehistoric peo-ple which lived in boreal climates 100 000 years ago58 Another argu-ment of John Campbellrsquos is founded on archaeological facts The stoneblades of the Mousterian (the material culture of Neanderthal man ismainly Mousterian) are still very similar a wider range of differenttools was unknown at that time This means for Campbell that thecustom of tool-making was carefully handed down from one genera-tion to another comparably to customs of recent bushman culture Thisextraordinary attention is due to a certain feeling of the holy whichwas connected with the manufacturing and use of the tool59 The pass-ing on of Palaeolithic religion to religions of recent hunter-gatherercommunities serves as a proof that the myths of recent peoples origi-nated in the Palaeolithic and have been handed down till today withoutany changes This means that Joseph Campbell constructed a typicalcircular argument Todayrsquos behaviours and myths are taken as proofin order to postulate the existence of the same behaviours and mythsas practised by Palaeolithic man Then the postulate itself is taken as

56 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2757 Campbell 1987 v58 Ibid 365ff59 Ibid 364f

Beginning of Religion 433

a voucher to prove the unchanged existence of those myths from thePalaeolithic up to now

The opinion that Palaeolithic man already had a complicated reli-gion with certain notions of the holy and various rituals can be foundin nearly every religious reference work Fritz Hartmann writes forexample ldquoThe magic of the hunt belongs to this typically human con-ception of the worldrdquo60

Even if the consequences drawn from the archaeologically securedfacts in the past seem frequently exaggerated several sentences in thevolume of Johannes Maringer explain the intention of the authors Itwas the common statement that prehistoric man was a mere beast with-out a developed mind that made the opponents of this point of viewlook for counter-arguments which are no longer defendable in the lightof modern research results61 The use of ethnographic analogies to re-construct prehistoric religion is based on a speci c understanding ofthe evolution of religion In the nineteenth century Charles Darwinrsquostheory of biological evolution in uenced nearly all branches of sci-ence In the elds of the study of religion and anthropology scholarslike Edward Burnett Tylor or James George Frazer developed concep-tions of religious evolution which have strongly determined researchuntil today Tylor as well as Frazer were convinced that they couldprove an ascending development of religion from primitive origins tothe modern religions of the industrial age According to this theory thereligions of recent hunter-gatherer communities can be classi ed asrelics from ancient times62 This means on the contrary that it is pos-sible to reconstruct the consciousness of ancient people with the helpof knowledge about the religion of todayrsquos hunter-gatherer communi-ties However only a brief insight into the multiplicity of so-calledprimitive religions reveals that their contents and symbols are not sim-ilar by any means According to Max Raphael the faith-conceptions of

60 Hartmann 1957 403 Among the latest literature see for example Grim 19981107-1108 and Hultkrantz 1998 746-752

61 Maringer 1956 59ff62 Michaels (ed) 1997 41-60 and 77-89

434 Ina Wunn

recent hunter-gatherer communities cannot be consulted in order to de-rive from them a certain belief of prehistoric man Even people livingon a relatively primitive economical level up to the present day havebeen affected by their past which has in uenced their state of mindAs a result their ideas and religious conceptions changed in the samemanner as the belief system of modern communities did63 The an-thropologist Wilhelm Emil Muumlhlmann acknowledges the arguments ofMax Raphael when he emphasises that all known primitive religionsare younger than theological religions64 Even if ecological and eco-nomical prerequisites of different societies are the same they do notnecessarily have the same or a similar belief system identical ritualssymbols and practices Hermann Schulz emphasises ldquoKulturell aufdas engste verwandte Gruppen koumlnnen einen religioumls-symbolisch undartefaktreichen Ritualismus entwickeln (Sepik-Gebiet) oder innerhalbder elaborierten ritualsymbolische n Medien tendentiell nichtreligioumlseartefakt-arme Programme elaborieren (Kapauku)rdquo65

The arguments show that it is by no means suf cient to nd prooffor the hunting practices of Neanderthal man in order to imply any kindof religion and especially not a de nite and well-known religion

Bear-cult

The existence of the cult of the bear in the middle Palaeolithic pe-riod is taken for granted Aringke Hultkrantz writes ldquoDie Kulturen des ark-

63 Max Raphael writes ldquoMan hat diese Schwierigkeit umgehen wollen durchHeranziehen von Aussagen sogenannter primitiver Kulturvoumllker Diese nur in sehrengen Grenzen moumlgliche Analogie uumlbersieht daszlig auch diese Staumlmme eine Geschichtegehabt haben mdash eine regressive statt der progressiven der Kulturvoumllker Es liegt einunberechtigtes Vorurteil in der Annahme der Einfrierung des Gewesenen denn dielsquoPrimitivenrsquo nden sich selbst wo sie auf dem Stadium der Jagdwirtschaft stehengeblieben sind mit den alten Werkzeugen und Waffen einer anderen Umgebunggegenuumlber die starken den Einzelmenschen an Maumlchtigkeit uumlberragenden Tiere sindersetzt durch wesentlich kleinere und schwaumlchererdquo (Raphael 1978 78)

64 Muumlhlmann 1957 119865 Schulz 1993 189

Beginning of Religion 435

tischen Raumes sind Bruchstuumlcke einer palaumlolithischen Jagdkulturrdquo66

Friedrich Heiler67 refers to similar ideas as those expressed by JosephCampbell who describes the cult of the bear in an interesting buthardly well-grounded manner First Campbell refers to a bear-festivalamong the Ainu After the killing of the captured bear and during theceremonies the skull of the animal is put at the top of a long stick68

In a second step Campbell portrays Neanderthal man in impressiveterms ldquo when the remains of a strangely brutish yet manlike skele-ton were found in a limestone quarry not far from Duumlsseldorf in theValley of Neanderrdquo69 The following descriptions shortly mention thecaves of the Alps where the remains of the bears were detected Theexcavators had the impression that the arrangement of the fossil bonescould hardly be due to nature so they attributed this to the activitiesof H neanderthalensi s who were assumed to have killed the animalsand arranged their bones during certain ceremonies70 It is true thatnearly everywhere in the Arctic primitive peoples know certain ritu-als connected with the hunting of the bear71 The excavators of thecaves Emil Baumlchler and Karl Houmlrmann took these ceremonies of cir-cumpolar peoples to prove their hypothesis of an ancient bear-cult inprehistoric times72 In the following years several discoveries of simi-lar bear-caves seemed to support the hypothesis of cave bear worshipEmil Baumlchler himself discovered bear bone deposits at the Wilden-mannlisloch in Switzerland and in Sloveniarsquos Mornova Cave In 1946Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan excavated seven cave bear skulls arranged in acircle in Furtins Cave Saocircne-et-Loire In 1950 Kurt Ehrenberg secured

66 Hultkrantz 1998 75167 See Heiler 1979 7868 Campbell 1987 334ff69 Ibid 33970 Ibid 341f71 Edsman 1957 84172 Maringer 1956 95ff

436 Ina Wunn

a deposit of long bones arranged together with cave bear skulls in theSalzhofen Cave in the Austrian Alps73

The latest nd of supposed traces of prehistoric cave bear worshipwas published in 1996 In the Rumanian Bihor-Mountains ChristianLascu et al discovered a cave rich in palaeontologica l cave beardeposits74 Scholars such as Johannes Maringer or Aringke Hultkrantzrefer to the reports of the excavators when they interpret the depositsas the remainder of cult practice The historian Karl Narr also gives anaccount of the deposits of cave bear skulls and long bones but remainssceptical75

A detailed discussion of the nds of cave bear bones from a palaeon-tological and ethnographic point of view led to completely differentresults76 The careful and critical use of ethnographic analogues onwhich the theories of a cave bear cult is founded in the end leads toeven contrary results If H neanderthalensi s had known cave bear wor-ship its traces would have been found inside the settlements The re-mains of such a cult would have been the bone deposits of Neanderthalmanrsquos favourite and most dangerous game among which howeverthe bear did not rank Recent peoples who know the bear cult catchor kill a bear in his winter accommodation and bring it to their settle-ment There it is killed and eaten by the villagers under different ritualregulations The bones of the dead game are put into a holy place orare carefully buried near the village but never brought back again tothe dwelling of the bear

The most impressive arguments against cave bear worship comenevertheless from the bone deposits itself Crucial palaeontologica lobjections are to be stated rst of all Both the cave bear (Ursusspelaeus) which was extinct at the end of the last ice age and thebrown bear (Ursus arctos) which spread all over Eurasia since theEem period show a strong preference for cave accommodation There

73 See Lascu et al 1996 19-20 and Maringer 1956 91-9674 See Lascu et al 199675 Narr 1957 1076 Wunn 1999a 3-23

Beginning of Religion 437

they hide during wintertime and give birth to their young The caveswhere the relics of alleged bear worship were found are the naturalhabitat of the animals where they spend the long winters and hidetheir young At those places the bears sometimes died for severalreasons for example age illness lack of food Therefore their bonefossils are bound to be found in those places if they were not carriedoff by carrion eaters or removed by sedimentologica l processes Theoccurrence of cave bear bones in the caves of the ice age which servedgenerations of bear families as shelter is just what a palaeontologis twould expect

The proponents of Palaeolithic bear worship did not only think themere occurrence of bear bones in the caves to be remarkable butalso their alleged assortment and arrangement in which they werefound However there rst takes place an amassment of bear bones incertain places by the activities of the bears themselves as Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan correctly noticed The parts of skeletons of the deceasedanimals which originally are in their anatomical order are thrownin disorder or scattered by later generations of bears Sometimes theyare pressed to the walls where they are relatively protected againstfurther decay77 Also the outweighing of skulls and long bones is aresult of a process of natural decay and not due to human activitiesThe mentioned parts of the skeleton are relatively heavy and compactso that they are more able to resist decomposition processes thanthe small vertebrae ribs foot-bones or hand-bones A result of thoseprocesses is the natural selection of the bone material78 But notonly decomposition in uences the state of the bones During theirhistory the caves were ooded several times as the accumulatedsediments prove Such oodings do not remain without in uence onthe fossil material With high water level and stronger current all loosematerial is either rinsed away or carried for a certain distance andthen dropped at a place where there is a weaker current During theseprocesses the anatomical bone order is radically altered Therefore

77 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 3978 Ziegler 1975 44-45

438 Ina Wunn

the accumulation of several skulls in one place and the absenceof other bones is due to geological and sedimentologica l processesand not to human intervention The oating ability of sediments canbe reduced by prominent parts of the walls or unevenness of the oor resulting in some bone parts being deposited in the proximityof obstacles A concrete example of this effect is the discovery ofseveral skulls deposited in a crosslike pattern in the Cold Cave ofthe Bihor Mountains The obstacle which reduced the transportabilityof the skulls crucially was a stone at which the fossil skulls weredeposited79 Just as little as the assortment of the bone material isproof of human activities so the adjustment of the fossils is anunnatural process The movements of a transport medium be it windsediment or water are transferred to the material to be transportedso that the movement in a special direction leads to its assortmentTherefore the assortment of bear skulls is not due to human activitiesbut to the owing water or other transport mediums in the caves Itcannot be said clearly enough There was no cave bear worship inthe middle Palaeolithic period at all The bear caves show exactlywhat a palaeontologis t would expect Nothing suggests that the naturalprocess of decay and sedimentation was at any time interrupted ordisturbed80

Combined burials of man and cave bear

In connection with assumed bear worship the opinion was heldthat sometimes men and bear were buried together in one grave81 Asevidence served the excavations at Le Reacutegourdou near Lascaux whereunder a hill of debris both the remains of a bear and a Neanderthal manwere preserved The French archaeologist Fabienne May demonstratedthat the remains of the bear bore no connection with the human

79 See Lascu et al 1996 30 plate 380 Wunn 1999a 6ff81 Rust 1986 15

Beginning of Religion 439

skeleton and questioned whether there was a funeral at Le Reacutegourdouat all82

Skull deposits and skull worship

Just as the bear worship was regarded as irrefutable fact there washardly any doubt that Neanderthal man subjected the heads of thedeceased to a special treatment and set them up for ritual purposesOther scholars are convinced that Neanderthal man hunted fellowhumans to kill and eat them83 It is said that the skulls of the killedlater became the focal point of a ritual This hypothesis is suggestedby Ioan Couliano ldquoEinige Schaumldel sind in einer Weise verformtdie den Gedanken an ein Herausloumlsen des Gehirns nahelegenrdquo84

Alfred Rust expresses himself absolutely clearly He is sure that the nds of isolated lower jaws and craniums are closely connected withreligious customs85 Detailed and critically Johannes Maringer arguesthe question of the skull cult He discusses the nds which wereconsidered as proof of the presence of the alleged practices Thereis for example the crushed childlike skull from Gibraltar or the nds of human remains at Weimar-Ehringsdorf and particularly theoutstanding nd of the skull of Monte Circeo which is mentionedby every author as evidence of the described ritual practice Finallyhe comes to the following result ldquoDas Fundbild der Guattari-Grottespricht klar fuumlr einen Kult in dessen Mittelpunkt der Schaumldel standUrspruumlnglich scheint er auf einem Stock aufgesteckt gewesen zusein Einem heiligen Bannkreis gleich umgab ihn der Kranz vonSteinen Der ganze Houmlhlenteil erweckt den Eindruck als habe er den inder vorderen Houmlhle wohnenden Urmenschen als Heiligtum gedientrdquo86

and further ldquoDie Schaumldelsetzungen duumlrften aller Wahrscheinlichkeitnach eine Art Schaumldelkult darstellen in dem das Gedaumlchtnis der

82 Ibid 1583 Ullrich 1978 293ff See also the overview in Henke and Rothe 1999 27784 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2885 Rust 1991 19486 Maringer 1956 80

440 Ina Wunn

Verstorbenen gep egt und ihre Hilfe wie auch ihr Schutz fuumlr die Sippeer eht wurderdquo87 Even Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan agrees that the skull ofMonte Circeo is an intentional deposition of a skull but he refusesto draw any conclusions concerning religious customs88 On the otherhand he can prove that all other nds of isolated heads or jaws arethe result of taphonomic processes89 After a careful re-examinationof the original reports of the excavations Fabienne May states thatnone of the descriptions of the excavations is suf cient to con rm ordisprove the hypothesis of a ritual90 The discovery of a supposed cultsite at Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan where the skull of a child was set upbetween several skulls of ibex does not prove the hypothesis of a cultIn this case the remnants of ibexes and the skull of the child have noconnection at all91 Since it could be shown that even the skull depositof Monte Circeo was not the result of human activities but that thedamages of the skull were due to the work of hungry hyenas the lastargument in favour of a skull cult is disproved92

Cannibalism

Cannibalism has already been mentioned in connection with thedeposition of human skulls Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan expresses him-self as follows ldquoDie Existenz eines religioumlsen Kannibalismus imPalaumlolithikum mag wahrscheinlich sein doch laumlszligt sich dies bei dergegenwaumlrtigen Materiallage absolut nicht beweisen Und dennochspricht kein Autor von der palaumlolithischen Religion ohne fuumlr odergegen die Kannibalismusthese Stellung zu beziehen wobei in groumlszlige-rem Umfang auf ethnographische Beispiele zuruumlckgegriffen wirdrdquo93

But particularly those ethnographic analogies give strong argumentsagainst the hypothesis of prehistoric cannibalism The anthropologis t

87 Ibid 8588 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 5389 Ibid 54-5690 May 1986 1791 Ibid 33-3492 Henke and Rothe 1994 52793 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 56

Beginning of Religion 441

Gabriele Weiss and the archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher discuss thetopic of cannibalism carefully94 They state that the ethnographic ma-terial itself is frequently not convincing because it is based mainly onsensational reports of past adventurers There are no assertions by eye-witnesses but stories of man eaters were always reported by writerswho only stated that they had heard about those customs The cus-tom of cannibalism itself was always stated to have been given upjust several years before the arrival of the traveller95 Frequently theassumption that a certain people was guilty of cannibalism was usedpropagandistically in order to be able to lead a war against this peo-ple or to force them into slavery96 On the other hand it was a wellknown rumour in Africa even up to the beginning of this century thatEuropeans fed on the esh of African children97 It is argued by HeidiPeter-Roumlcher that there is no evidence of cannibalism among recentpeoples at all98 This means that it is nonsense to search for the reasonand the origin of that custom in prehistoric times It cannot be decidedto what extent Sigmund Freud with his hypothesis of the origin of hu-man society must be blamed for evoking the idea of early man-eatersIn his Totem und Tabu he made several statements about the origin ofhuman society claiming that at the beginning of prehistory a group ofhumans was ruled by a despotic patriarch until he was killed and eatenby his sons99 The subtitle of his book ldquoEinige Uumlbereinstimmungen imSeelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotikerrdquo100 re ects however the

94 Weiss 1987 142-159 and Peter-Roumlcher 198995 Volhard 1939 36996 Gabriele Weiss (1987 152) mentions the example of a decree of Queen Isabella

in 1503 who gave permission to enslave the Caribbean Indians because they weresaid to be man-eaters

97 Ibid 15098 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 On the contrary the American anthropologist Christy Turner

is convinced that the Anasazi an Indian people who lived in the southern parts of theUnited States during historical times did human hunting See Turner 1999

99 See Weiss 1987 44-45100 Weiss 1987 44

442 Ina Wunn

opinion of many of his contemporaries and colleagues and contributesto the picture of the mentality of Neanderthal man until today101

The facts on which the theory of prehistoric cannibalism are basedare usually poor Frequently it was suf cient to assume cannibalismexisted if a skeleton was found incomplete or not in anatomical or-der102 It is still considered a strong proof for cannibalism when splithuman bones occur as were excavated at Krapina The defenders ofthe cannibalism thesis argue that the remnants of human bones lookabsolutely similar to the scattered animal bones at the same excava-tion site Therefore they come to the conclusion that Neanderthal mantreated fellow humans in the same way as he treated game This argu-ment is still stressed by the anthropologist s Tim White and Alban De- eur Scattered bones of human beings and deer in the cave of Moula-Guercy show the same scratches103 This argument presupposes how-ever that the humans as well as the animals were killed by Neanderthalman Both the humans and the animals could however have been thevictims of carnivores for example hyena or cave lion or the scratcheson human and animal bones may be due to taphonomic processes104

This thesis would explain the remains of Krapina as well as the ndingsof Moula-Guercy In any case the identical treatment of human andanimal bones and the missing of any traces of a ritual do not promotethe hypothesis of a religious custom In this case Krapina and Moula-Guercy would prove that Neanderthal man hunted other humans formeat This seems however to be unlikely because the hunters of theMousterian lived in a habitat full of game which was for sure easier tokill than humans

101 Campbell 1987 339102 Maringer 1956 81f In the excavation report of the site Weimar-Ehringsdorf

cannibalism is not mentioned at all See Feustel 1989 391-393103 De eur et al 1999 128-131104 It is still more than dif cult to decide whether scratches on bones are due to

human activities to carnivores or to taphonomic processes The topic is still debated

among scientists For an overview see Henke and Rothe 1994 19-25

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

Beginning of Religion 429

tices Between the death of the individual and the later recovery ofthe fossil a number of taphonomic processes take place which havesigni cant effects on the later fossil One of those effects is the modi- cation of organic matter and its decay the assortment or destructionof hard sections as well as sedimentologica l processes Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan was able to show that the cranium and lower jaws are usuallywell preserved Therefore it is only due to taphonomic processes thatthese individual body parts survive and not at all due to human ac-tivities or postmortal manipulation49 In this connection it is necessaryto emphasise that scholars can only come to a decision based on a se-ries of complex investigations using a scanning electron microscopeas to whether scratches on fossil bones are due to violence caused bya stone tool or the teeth of a predatory animal Since there are no ar-chaeological ndings for the entire Palaeolithic or Neolithic period toprove the opening of the skull by humans none of the speculationsabout possible cult practice connected with human skulls is based onfacts50

3 Religion in the Middle Palaeolithic

From an anthropologica l point of view the European middle Palae-olithic is characterised by Homo neanderthalensi s51 This early form ofHomo sapiens or descendant of Homo heidelbergensis lived over a pe-

49 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 45 5550 Experiments with animal bones have shown that scratches made by stone tools

are absolutely equal to scratches caused by sand Those scratches occur frequentlyduring the process of embedding It is still dif cult to distinguish between traces ofhuman activities and traces of animal bites An examination is only possible with thehelp of a scanning electron microscope See Henke and Rothe 1994 20-24

51 The so-called Neanderthal-problem is however a source of heated debateOnly ten years ago many palaeanthropologists were convinced that Neanderthalman belonged to our species H sapiens His characteristic features were supposedto be due to the extreme climate of the ice-age In the meantime most scientistshave been convinced that Homo neanderthalensis developed directly from Homoheidelbergensis while the modern Homo sapiens developed during the same timein Africa and conquered Europe about 40 000 years ago See Henke and Rothe 1994433ff and Henke and Rothe 1999 272f

430 Ina Wunn

riod of nearly 100 000 years during which the landscape climate andliving conditions changed dramatically These environmental changesmight have contributed to the special anatomical features of the Nean-derthal man Surely the need to adapt to a frequently changing habitatforced H neanderthalensi s to develop sociocultural abilities that wereclosely related to the progressive evolution of intelligence and psycho-logical abilities52 The frequent environmental changes to which H ne-anderthalensis had to adapt made life immensely challenging In thewarmer and humid periods of the Eem period dense forests coveredthe landscape Population migration was only possible in the valleysThe fauna consisted of elephant deer stag aurochs bear and othersSuf cient food-supply in the direct surroundings allows one to believethat Neanderthal man was relatively stationary during this climatic pe-riod The excavated settlement of Weimar-Ehringsdorf was inhabitedduring this time During the initial phase of cooler climate the orachanged Fir and pine trees were common and formed large and humidforests The winters were cold and snow was plentiful even in sum-mertime the temperature remained low Not only non-migrating ani-mals were hunted by Neanderthal man herds of reindeer wild horsebison and mammoth provided suf cient opportunity for hunting Dur-ing the coldest periods the forests disappeared and made room for

52 Steven Mithen emphasises that natural history intelligence technical intelli-gence social and linguistic intelligence of Neanderthal man were all well developedbut there was still a lack of interaction between the four domains of the mind Cogni-tive uidity took place only between the domains of social and linguistic intelligence(Mithen 1996 143 and 147ff) The author of this article has a different opinion In gen-eral the lithic culture of Neanderthal man is the Mousterian which is still simple com-pared to the technology of the upper Palaeolithic On the other hand the lithic culturesare not strictly related to the one or the other human species Homo neanderthalensistoo was found together with the more advanced tools of the upper Palaeolithic whileHomo sapiens was found with the simple tools of the Mousterian culture Thereforedirect connections between a certain human species and its lithic culture cannot beproved The technical skills of the younger H neanderthalensis and early H sapiensobviously did not differ That means that there is no palaeanthropological evidence forthe assumption of fundamental difference between the minds of H neanderthalensisand H sapiens (Henke and Rothe 1999 275 Reynolds 1990 263ff)

Beginning of Religion 431

prairies and tundra The climate became dry with extremely cold win-ters and relatively mild but short summers The prairies were full ofgame which migrated with the seasons53

The Magic of Hunting in the Middle Palaeolithic

The hunting activities of the Palaeolithic man which Mircea Eliadeand other scholars take for granted are only able to be proved with ref-erence to later periods of ice-age At the town of Lehringen near Ver-den an der Aller the skeleton of an elephant had been preserved thathad been killed with the aid of a wooden spear found between the ribsof the animal This is impressive evidence of the fact that Homo nean-derthalensis was able to successfully hunt big game Therefore it canbe assumed that Mircea Eliadersquos precise conceptions of religion duringprehistoric times may at least be correct with regard to the people of theMousterian He describes this religion as ldquomagic-religious conceptionsof Palaeolithic manrdquo as follows54 The documents regarding the reli-gion of the Palaeolithic man are obscure he says but available Theirmeaning can be deciphered if the scholar succeeds in inserting thesedocuments into a semantic system55 This semantic system is alreadygiven by the results of investigations of recent hunter-gatherer commu-nities Their similar lifestyle offers suf cient certainty for identical orvery similar religions of recent hunter-gatherers and Palaeolithic manTherefore Homo neanderthalensi s believed that the animal is a beingquite similar to man but talented with supernatural forces He wasconvinced that gods such as the ldquoMaster of the Animalsrdquo or ldquoSupremeBeingrdquo existed The kill of the animal took place after a complicatedritual On the other hand rites must have existed which were linkedwith a skull-cult and deposits of long bones Similarly Ioan Coulianoargues that ldquoeither similar models of well-known primitive peoplesare referred to or one dispenses with any model The History of Reli-gion can only use the rst option as imperfect as it may be Scholars

53 See Henke and Rothe 1994 52554 Eliade 1978 15ff55 Ibid 18

432 Ina Wunn

have to endeavour to decipher the mental horizon of the people of pre-historic times by using the results of ethnographic and archaeologicalstudiesrdquo56 John Campbell concludes from the myths of known peoplesthat there must be close connections between the religions of Palae-olithic man and recent hunter-gatherers The following conviction isboth precondition and result of his investigations ldquoI nd that its mainresult has been its con rmation of a thought I have long and faithfullyentertained of the unity of the race of man not only in its biology butalso in its spiritual historyrdquo57 He proves his assumption with the helpof a comparison Under the title ldquoThe Stage of Neanderthal Manrdquo thereader nds the detailed description of the life habits of the small anddelicate Negritos of the Andaman Islands in the Gulf of Bengal butCampbell fails to prove the connections between the habits of a peopleof recent tropical Asia and an anatomically different prehistoric peo-ple which lived in boreal climates 100 000 years ago58 Another argu-ment of John Campbellrsquos is founded on archaeological facts The stoneblades of the Mousterian (the material culture of Neanderthal man ismainly Mousterian) are still very similar a wider range of differenttools was unknown at that time This means for Campbell that thecustom of tool-making was carefully handed down from one genera-tion to another comparably to customs of recent bushman culture Thisextraordinary attention is due to a certain feeling of the holy whichwas connected with the manufacturing and use of the tool59 The pass-ing on of Palaeolithic religion to religions of recent hunter-gatherercommunities serves as a proof that the myths of recent peoples origi-nated in the Palaeolithic and have been handed down till today withoutany changes This means that Joseph Campbell constructed a typicalcircular argument Todayrsquos behaviours and myths are taken as proofin order to postulate the existence of the same behaviours and mythsas practised by Palaeolithic man Then the postulate itself is taken as

56 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2757 Campbell 1987 v58 Ibid 365ff59 Ibid 364f

Beginning of Religion 433

a voucher to prove the unchanged existence of those myths from thePalaeolithic up to now

The opinion that Palaeolithic man already had a complicated reli-gion with certain notions of the holy and various rituals can be foundin nearly every religious reference work Fritz Hartmann writes forexample ldquoThe magic of the hunt belongs to this typically human con-ception of the worldrdquo60

Even if the consequences drawn from the archaeologically securedfacts in the past seem frequently exaggerated several sentences in thevolume of Johannes Maringer explain the intention of the authors Itwas the common statement that prehistoric man was a mere beast with-out a developed mind that made the opponents of this point of viewlook for counter-arguments which are no longer defendable in the lightof modern research results61 The use of ethnographic analogies to re-construct prehistoric religion is based on a speci c understanding ofthe evolution of religion In the nineteenth century Charles Darwinrsquostheory of biological evolution in uenced nearly all branches of sci-ence In the elds of the study of religion and anthropology scholarslike Edward Burnett Tylor or James George Frazer developed concep-tions of religious evolution which have strongly determined researchuntil today Tylor as well as Frazer were convinced that they couldprove an ascending development of religion from primitive origins tothe modern religions of the industrial age According to this theory thereligions of recent hunter-gatherer communities can be classi ed asrelics from ancient times62 This means on the contrary that it is pos-sible to reconstruct the consciousness of ancient people with the helpof knowledge about the religion of todayrsquos hunter-gatherer communi-ties However only a brief insight into the multiplicity of so-calledprimitive religions reveals that their contents and symbols are not sim-ilar by any means According to Max Raphael the faith-conceptions of

60 Hartmann 1957 403 Among the latest literature see for example Grim 19981107-1108 and Hultkrantz 1998 746-752

61 Maringer 1956 59ff62 Michaels (ed) 1997 41-60 and 77-89

434 Ina Wunn

recent hunter-gatherer communities cannot be consulted in order to de-rive from them a certain belief of prehistoric man Even people livingon a relatively primitive economical level up to the present day havebeen affected by their past which has in uenced their state of mindAs a result their ideas and religious conceptions changed in the samemanner as the belief system of modern communities did63 The an-thropologist Wilhelm Emil Muumlhlmann acknowledges the arguments ofMax Raphael when he emphasises that all known primitive religionsare younger than theological religions64 Even if ecological and eco-nomical prerequisites of different societies are the same they do notnecessarily have the same or a similar belief system identical ritualssymbols and practices Hermann Schulz emphasises ldquoKulturell aufdas engste verwandte Gruppen koumlnnen einen religioumls-symbolisch undartefaktreichen Ritualismus entwickeln (Sepik-Gebiet) oder innerhalbder elaborierten ritualsymbolische n Medien tendentiell nichtreligioumlseartefakt-arme Programme elaborieren (Kapauku)rdquo65

The arguments show that it is by no means suf cient to nd prooffor the hunting practices of Neanderthal man in order to imply any kindof religion and especially not a de nite and well-known religion

Bear-cult

The existence of the cult of the bear in the middle Palaeolithic pe-riod is taken for granted Aringke Hultkrantz writes ldquoDie Kulturen des ark-

63 Max Raphael writes ldquoMan hat diese Schwierigkeit umgehen wollen durchHeranziehen von Aussagen sogenannter primitiver Kulturvoumllker Diese nur in sehrengen Grenzen moumlgliche Analogie uumlbersieht daszlig auch diese Staumlmme eine Geschichtegehabt haben mdash eine regressive statt der progressiven der Kulturvoumllker Es liegt einunberechtigtes Vorurteil in der Annahme der Einfrierung des Gewesenen denn dielsquoPrimitivenrsquo nden sich selbst wo sie auf dem Stadium der Jagdwirtschaft stehengeblieben sind mit den alten Werkzeugen und Waffen einer anderen Umgebunggegenuumlber die starken den Einzelmenschen an Maumlchtigkeit uumlberragenden Tiere sindersetzt durch wesentlich kleinere und schwaumlchererdquo (Raphael 1978 78)

64 Muumlhlmann 1957 119865 Schulz 1993 189

Beginning of Religion 435

tischen Raumes sind Bruchstuumlcke einer palaumlolithischen Jagdkulturrdquo66

Friedrich Heiler67 refers to similar ideas as those expressed by JosephCampbell who describes the cult of the bear in an interesting buthardly well-grounded manner First Campbell refers to a bear-festivalamong the Ainu After the killing of the captured bear and during theceremonies the skull of the animal is put at the top of a long stick68

In a second step Campbell portrays Neanderthal man in impressiveterms ldquo when the remains of a strangely brutish yet manlike skele-ton were found in a limestone quarry not far from Duumlsseldorf in theValley of Neanderrdquo69 The following descriptions shortly mention thecaves of the Alps where the remains of the bears were detected Theexcavators had the impression that the arrangement of the fossil bonescould hardly be due to nature so they attributed this to the activitiesof H neanderthalensi s who were assumed to have killed the animalsand arranged their bones during certain ceremonies70 It is true thatnearly everywhere in the Arctic primitive peoples know certain ritu-als connected with the hunting of the bear71 The excavators of thecaves Emil Baumlchler and Karl Houmlrmann took these ceremonies of cir-cumpolar peoples to prove their hypothesis of an ancient bear-cult inprehistoric times72 In the following years several discoveries of simi-lar bear-caves seemed to support the hypothesis of cave bear worshipEmil Baumlchler himself discovered bear bone deposits at the Wilden-mannlisloch in Switzerland and in Sloveniarsquos Mornova Cave In 1946Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan excavated seven cave bear skulls arranged in acircle in Furtins Cave Saocircne-et-Loire In 1950 Kurt Ehrenberg secured

66 Hultkrantz 1998 75167 See Heiler 1979 7868 Campbell 1987 334ff69 Ibid 33970 Ibid 341f71 Edsman 1957 84172 Maringer 1956 95ff

436 Ina Wunn

a deposit of long bones arranged together with cave bear skulls in theSalzhofen Cave in the Austrian Alps73

The latest nd of supposed traces of prehistoric cave bear worshipwas published in 1996 In the Rumanian Bihor-Mountains ChristianLascu et al discovered a cave rich in palaeontologica l cave beardeposits74 Scholars such as Johannes Maringer or Aringke Hultkrantzrefer to the reports of the excavators when they interpret the depositsas the remainder of cult practice The historian Karl Narr also gives anaccount of the deposits of cave bear skulls and long bones but remainssceptical75

A detailed discussion of the nds of cave bear bones from a palaeon-tological and ethnographic point of view led to completely differentresults76 The careful and critical use of ethnographic analogues onwhich the theories of a cave bear cult is founded in the end leads toeven contrary results If H neanderthalensi s had known cave bear wor-ship its traces would have been found inside the settlements The re-mains of such a cult would have been the bone deposits of Neanderthalmanrsquos favourite and most dangerous game among which howeverthe bear did not rank Recent peoples who know the bear cult catchor kill a bear in his winter accommodation and bring it to their settle-ment There it is killed and eaten by the villagers under different ritualregulations The bones of the dead game are put into a holy place orare carefully buried near the village but never brought back again tothe dwelling of the bear

The most impressive arguments against cave bear worship comenevertheless from the bone deposits itself Crucial palaeontologica lobjections are to be stated rst of all Both the cave bear (Ursusspelaeus) which was extinct at the end of the last ice age and thebrown bear (Ursus arctos) which spread all over Eurasia since theEem period show a strong preference for cave accommodation There

73 See Lascu et al 1996 19-20 and Maringer 1956 91-9674 See Lascu et al 199675 Narr 1957 1076 Wunn 1999a 3-23

Beginning of Religion 437

they hide during wintertime and give birth to their young The caveswhere the relics of alleged bear worship were found are the naturalhabitat of the animals where they spend the long winters and hidetheir young At those places the bears sometimes died for severalreasons for example age illness lack of food Therefore their bonefossils are bound to be found in those places if they were not carriedoff by carrion eaters or removed by sedimentologica l processes Theoccurrence of cave bear bones in the caves of the ice age which servedgenerations of bear families as shelter is just what a palaeontologis twould expect

The proponents of Palaeolithic bear worship did not only think themere occurrence of bear bones in the caves to be remarkable butalso their alleged assortment and arrangement in which they werefound However there rst takes place an amassment of bear bones incertain places by the activities of the bears themselves as Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan correctly noticed The parts of skeletons of the deceasedanimals which originally are in their anatomical order are thrownin disorder or scattered by later generations of bears Sometimes theyare pressed to the walls where they are relatively protected againstfurther decay77 Also the outweighing of skulls and long bones is aresult of a process of natural decay and not due to human activitiesThe mentioned parts of the skeleton are relatively heavy and compactso that they are more able to resist decomposition processes thanthe small vertebrae ribs foot-bones or hand-bones A result of thoseprocesses is the natural selection of the bone material78 But notonly decomposition in uences the state of the bones During theirhistory the caves were ooded several times as the accumulatedsediments prove Such oodings do not remain without in uence onthe fossil material With high water level and stronger current all loosematerial is either rinsed away or carried for a certain distance andthen dropped at a place where there is a weaker current During theseprocesses the anatomical bone order is radically altered Therefore

77 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 3978 Ziegler 1975 44-45

438 Ina Wunn

the accumulation of several skulls in one place and the absenceof other bones is due to geological and sedimentologica l processesand not to human intervention The oating ability of sediments canbe reduced by prominent parts of the walls or unevenness of the oor resulting in some bone parts being deposited in the proximityof obstacles A concrete example of this effect is the discovery ofseveral skulls deposited in a crosslike pattern in the Cold Cave ofthe Bihor Mountains The obstacle which reduced the transportabilityof the skulls crucially was a stone at which the fossil skulls weredeposited79 Just as little as the assortment of the bone material isproof of human activities so the adjustment of the fossils is anunnatural process The movements of a transport medium be it windsediment or water are transferred to the material to be transportedso that the movement in a special direction leads to its assortmentTherefore the assortment of bear skulls is not due to human activitiesbut to the owing water or other transport mediums in the caves Itcannot be said clearly enough There was no cave bear worship inthe middle Palaeolithic period at all The bear caves show exactlywhat a palaeontologis t would expect Nothing suggests that the naturalprocess of decay and sedimentation was at any time interrupted ordisturbed80

Combined burials of man and cave bear

In connection with assumed bear worship the opinion was heldthat sometimes men and bear were buried together in one grave81 Asevidence served the excavations at Le Reacutegourdou near Lascaux whereunder a hill of debris both the remains of a bear and a Neanderthal manwere preserved The French archaeologist Fabienne May demonstratedthat the remains of the bear bore no connection with the human

79 See Lascu et al 1996 30 plate 380 Wunn 1999a 6ff81 Rust 1986 15

Beginning of Religion 439

skeleton and questioned whether there was a funeral at Le Reacutegourdouat all82

Skull deposits and skull worship

Just as the bear worship was regarded as irrefutable fact there washardly any doubt that Neanderthal man subjected the heads of thedeceased to a special treatment and set them up for ritual purposesOther scholars are convinced that Neanderthal man hunted fellowhumans to kill and eat them83 It is said that the skulls of the killedlater became the focal point of a ritual This hypothesis is suggestedby Ioan Couliano ldquoEinige Schaumldel sind in einer Weise verformtdie den Gedanken an ein Herausloumlsen des Gehirns nahelegenrdquo84

Alfred Rust expresses himself absolutely clearly He is sure that the nds of isolated lower jaws and craniums are closely connected withreligious customs85 Detailed and critically Johannes Maringer arguesthe question of the skull cult He discusses the nds which wereconsidered as proof of the presence of the alleged practices Thereis for example the crushed childlike skull from Gibraltar or the nds of human remains at Weimar-Ehringsdorf and particularly theoutstanding nd of the skull of Monte Circeo which is mentionedby every author as evidence of the described ritual practice Finallyhe comes to the following result ldquoDas Fundbild der Guattari-Grottespricht klar fuumlr einen Kult in dessen Mittelpunkt der Schaumldel standUrspruumlnglich scheint er auf einem Stock aufgesteckt gewesen zusein Einem heiligen Bannkreis gleich umgab ihn der Kranz vonSteinen Der ganze Houmlhlenteil erweckt den Eindruck als habe er den inder vorderen Houmlhle wohnenden Urmenschen als Heiligtum gedientrdquo86

and further ldquoDie Schaumldelsetzungen duumlrften aller Wahrscheinlichkeitnach eine Art Schaumldelkult darstellen in dem das Gedaumlchtnis der

82 Ibid 1583 Ullrich 1978 293ff See also the overview in Henke and Rothe 1999 27784 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2885 Rust 1991 19486 Maringer 1956 80

440 Ina Wunn

Verstorbenen gep egt und ihre Hilfe wie auch ihr Schutz fuumlr die Sippeer eht wurderdquo87 Even Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan agrees that the skull ofMonte Circeo is an intentional deposition of a skull but he refusesto draw any conclusions concerning religious customs88 On the otherhand he can prove that all other nds of isolated heads or jaws arethe result of taphonomic processes89 After a careful re-examinationof the original reports of the excavations Fabienne May states thatnone of the descriptions of the excavations is suf cient to con rm ordisprove the hypothesis of a ritual90 The discovery of a supposed cultsite at Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan where the skull of a child was set upbetween several skulls of ibex does not prove the hypothesis of a cultIn this case the remnants of ibexes and the skull of the child have noconnection at all91 Since it could be shown that even the skull depositof Monte Circeo was not the result of human activities but that thedamages of the skull were due to the work of hungry hyenas the lastargument in favour of a skull cult is disproved92

Cannibalism

Cannibalism has already been mentioned in connection with thedeposition of human skulls Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan expresses him-self as follows ldquoDie Existenz eines religioumlsen Kannibalismus imPalaumlolithikum mag wahrscheinlich sein doch laumlszligt sich dies bei dergegenwaumlrtigen Materiallage absolut nicht beweisen Und dennochspricht kein Autor von der palaumlolithischen Religion ohne fuumlr odergegen die Kannibalismusthese Stellung zu beziehen wobei in groumlszlige-rem Umfang auf ethnographische Beispiele zuruumlckgegriffen wirdrdquo93

But particularly those ethnographic analogies give strong argumentsagainst the hypothesis of prehistoric cannibalism The anthropologis t

87 Ibid 8588 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 5389 Ibid 54-5690 May 1986 1791 Ibid 33-3492 Henke and Rothe 1994 52793 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 56

Beginning of Religion 441

Gabriele Weiss and the archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher discuss thetopic of cannibalism carefully94 They state that the ethnographic ma-terial itself is frequently not convincing because it is based mainly onsensational reports of past adventurers There are no assertions by eye-witnesses but stories of man eaters were always reported by writerswho only stated that they had heard about those customs The cus-tom of cannibalism itself was always stated to have been given upjust several years before the arrival of the traveller95 Frequently theassumption that a certain people was guilty of cannibalism was usedpropagandistically in order to be able to lead a war against this peo-ple or to force them into slavery96 On the other hand it was a wellknown rumour in Africa even up to the beginning of this century thatEuropeans fed on the esh of African children97 It is argued by HeidiPeter-Roumlcher that there is no evidence of cannibalism among recentpeoples at all98 This means that it is nonsense to search for the reasonand the origin of that custom in prehistoric times It cannot be decidedto what extent Sigmund Freud with his hypothesis of the origin of hu-man society must be blamed for evoking the idea of early man-eatersIn his Totem und Tabu he made several statements about the origin ofhuman society claiming that at the beginning of prehistory a group ofhumans was ruled by a despotic patriarch until he was killed and eatenby his sons99 The subtitle of his book ldquoEinige Uumlbereinstimmungen imSeelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotikerrdquo100 re ects however the

94 Weiss 1987 142-159 and Peter-Roumlcher 198995 Volhard 1939 36996 Gabriele Weiss (1987 152) mentions the example of a decree of Queen Isabella

in 1503 who gave permission to enslave the Caribbean Indians because they weresaid to be man-eaters

97 Ibid 15098 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 On the contrary the American anthropologist Christy Turner

is convinced that the Anasazi an Indian people who lived in the southern parts of theUnited States during historical times did human hunting See Turner 1999

99 See Weiss 1987 44-45100 Weiss 1987 44

442 Ina Wunn

opinion of many of his contemporaries and colleagues and contributesto the picture of the mentality of Neanderthal man until today101

The facts on which the theory of prehistoric cannibalism are basedare usually poor Frequently it was suf cient to assume cannibalismexisted if a skeleton was found incomplete or not in anatomical or-der102 It is still considered a strong proof for cannibalism when splithuman bones occur as were excavated at Krapina The defenders ofthe cannibalism thesis argue that the remnants of human bones lookabsolutely similar to the scattered animal bones at the same excava-tion site Therefore they come to the conclusion that Neanderthal mantreated fellow humans in the same way as he treated game This argu-ment is still stressed by the anthropologist s Tim White and Alban De- eur Scattered bones of human beings and deer in the cave of Moula-Guercy show the same scratches103 This argument presupposes how-ever that the humans as well as the animals were killed by Neanderthalman Both the humans and the animals could however have been thevictims of carnivores for example hyena or cave lion or the scratcheson human and animal bones may be due to taphonomic processes104

This thesis would explain the remains of Krapina as well as the ndingsof Moula-Guercy In any case the identical treatment of human andanimal bones and the missing of any traces of a ritual do not promotethe hypothesis of a religious custom In this case Krapina and Moula-Guercy would prove that Neanderthal man hunted other humans formeat This seems however to be unlikely because the hunters of theMousterian lived in a habitat full of game which was for sure easier tokill than humans

101 Campbell 1987 339102 Maringer 1956 81f In the excavation report of the site Weimar-Ehringsdorf

cannibalism is not mentioned at all See Feustel 1989 391-393103 De eur et al 1999 128-131104 It is still more than dif cult to decide whether scratches on bones are due to

human activities to carnivores or to taphonomic processes The topic is still debated

among scientists For an overview see Henke and Rothe 1994 19-25

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

430 Ina Wunn

riod of nearly 100 000 years during which the landscape climate andliving conditions changed dramatically These environmental changesmight have contributed to the special anatomical features of the Nean-derthal man Surely the need to adapt to a frequently changing habitatforced H neanderthalensi s to develop sociocultural abilities that wereclosely related to the progressive evolution of intelligence and psycho-logical abilities52 The frequent environmental changes to which H ne-anderthalensis had to adapt made life immensely challenging In thewarmer and humid periods of the Eem period dense forests coveredthe landscape Population migration was only possible in the valleysThe fauna consisted of elephant deer stag aurochs bear and othersSuf cient food-supply in the direct surroundings allows one to believethat Neanderthal man was relatively stationary during this climatic pe-riod The excavated settlement of Weimar-Ehringsdorf was inhabitedduring this time During the initial phase of cooler climate the orachanged Fir and pine trees were common and formed large and humidforests The winters were cold and snow was plentiful even in sum-mertime the temperature remained low Not only non-migrating ani-mals were hunted by Neanderthal man herds of reindeer wild horsebison and mammoth provided suf cient opportunity for hunting Dur-ing the coldest periods the forests disappeared and made room for

52 Steven Mithen emphasises that natural history intelligence technical intelli-gence social and linguistic intelligence of Neanderthal man were all well developedbut there was still a lack of interaction between the four domains of the mind Cogni-tive uidity took place only between the domains of social and linguistic intelligence(Mithen 1996 143 and 147ff) The author of this article has a different opinion In gen-eral the lithic culture of Neanderthal man is the Mousterian which is still simple com-pared to the technology of the upper Palaeolithic On the other hand the lithic culturesare not strictly related to the one or the other human species Homo neanderthalensistoo was found together with the more advanced tools of the upper Palaeolithic whileHomo sapiens was found with the simple tools of the Mousterian culture Thereforedirect connections between a certain human species and its lithic culture cannot beproved The technical skills of the younger H neanderthalensis and early H sapiensobviously did not differ That means that there is no palaeanthropological evidence forthe assumption of fundamental difference between the minds of H neanderthalensisand H sapiens (Henke and Rothe 1999 275 Reynolds 1990 263ff)

Beginning of Religion 431

prairies and tundra The climate became dry with extremely cold win-ters and relatively mild but short summers The prairies were full ofgame which migrated with the seasons53

The Magic of Hunting in the Middle Palaeolithic

The hunting activities of the Palaeolithic man which Mircea Eliadeand other scholars take for granted are only able to be proved with ref-erence to later periods of ice-age At the town of Lehringen near Ver-den an der Aller the skeleton of an elephant had been preserved thathad been killed with the aid of a wooden spear found between the ribsof the animal This is impressive evidence of the fact that Homo nean-derthalensis was able to successfully hunt big game Therefore it canbe assumed that Mircea Eliadersquos precise conceptions of religion duringprehistoric times may at least be correct with regard to the people of theMousterian He describes this religion as ldquomagic-religious conceptionsof Palaeolithic manrdquo as follows54 The documents regarding the reli-gion of the Palaeolithic man are obscure he says but available Theirmeaning can be deciphered if the scholar succeeds in inserting thesedocuments into a semantic system55 This semantic system is alreadygiven by the results of investigations of recent hunter-gatherer commu-nities Their similar lifestyle offers suf cient certainty for identical orvery similar religions of recent hunter-gatherers and Palaeolithic manTherefore Homo neanderthalensi s believed that the animal is a beingquite similar to man but talented with supernatural forces He wasconvinced that gods such as the ldquoMaster of the Animalsrdquo or ldquoSupremeBeingrdquo existed The kill of the animal took place after a complicatedritual On the other hand rites must have existed which were linkedwith a skull-cult and deposits of long bones Similarly Ioan Coulianoargues that ldquoeither similar models of well-known primitive peoplesare referred to or one dispenses with any model The History of Reli-gion can only use the rst option as imperfect as it may be Scholars

53 See Henke and Rothe 1994 52554 Eliade 1978 15ff55 Ibid 18

432 Ina Wunn

have to endeavour to decipher the mental horizon of the people of pre-historic times by using the results of ethnographic and archaeologicalstudiesrdquo56 John Campbell concludes from the myths of known peoplesthat there must be close connections between the religions of Palae-olithic man and recent hunter-gatherers The following conviction isboth precondition and result of his investigations ldquoI nd that its mainresult has been its con rmation of a thought I have long and faithfullyentertained of the unity of the race of man not only in its biology butalso in its spiritual historyrdquo57 He proves his assumption with the helpof a comparison Under the title ldquoThe Stage of Neanderthal Manrdquo thereader nds the detailed description of the life habits of the small anddelicate Negritos of the Andaman Islands in the Gulf of Bengal butCampbell fails to prove the connections between the habits of a peopleof recent tropical Asia and an anatomically different prehistoric peo-ple which lived in boreal climates 100 000 years ago58 Another argu-ment of John Campbellrsquos is founded on archaeological facts The stoneblades of the Mousterian (the material culture of Neanderthal man ismainly Mousterian) are still very similar a wider range of differenttools was unknown at that time This means for Campbell that thecustom of tool-making was carefully handed down from one genera-tion to another comparably to customs of recent bushman culture Thisextraordinary attention is due to a certain feeling of the holy whichwas connected with the manufacturing and use of the tool59 The pass-ing on of Palaeolithic religion to religions of recent hunter-gatherercommunities serves as a proof that the myths of recent peoples origi-nated in the Palaeolithic and have been handed down till today withoutany changes This means that Joseph Campbell constructed a typicalcircular argument Todayrsquos behaviours and myths are taken as proofin order to postulate the existence of the same behaviours and mythsas practised by Palaeolithic man Then the postulate itself is taken as

56 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2757 Campbell 1987 v58 Ibid 365ff59 Ibid 364f

Beginning of Religion 433

a voucher to prove the unchanged existence of those myths from thePalaeolithic up to now

The opinion that Palaeolithic man already had a complicated reli-gion with certain notions of the holy and various rituals can be foundin nearly every religious reference work Fritz Hartmann writes forexample ldquoThe magic of the hunt belongs to this typically human con-ception of the worldrdquo60

Even if the consequences drawn from the archaeologically securedfacts in the past seem frequently exaggerated several sentences in thevolume of Johannes Maringer explain the intention of the authors Itwas the common statement that prehistoric man was a mere beast with-out a developed mind that made the opponents of this point of viewlook for counter-arguments which are no longer defendable in the lightof modern research results61 The use of ethnographic analogies to re-construct prehistoric religion is based on a speci c understanding ofthe evolution of religion In the nineteenth century Charles Darwinrsquostheory of biological evolution in uenced nearly all branches of sci-ence In the elds of the study of religion and anthropology scholarslike Edward Burnett Tylor or James George Frazer developed concep-tions of religious evolution which have strongly determined researchuntil today Tylor as well as Frazer were convinced that they couldprove an ascending development of religion from primitive origins tothe modern religions of the industrial age According to this theory thereligions of recent hunter-gatherer communities can be classi ed asrelics from ancient times62 This means on the contrary that it is pos-sible to reconstruct the consciousness of ancient people with the helpof knowledge about the religion of todayrsquos hunter-gatherer communi-ties However only a brief insight into the multiplicity of so-calledprimitive religions reveals that their contents and symbols are not sim-ilar by any means According to Max Raphael the faith-conceptions of

60 Hartmann 1957 403 Among the latest literature see for example Grim 19981107-1108 and Hultkrantz 1998 746-752

61 Maringer 1956 59ff62 Michaels (ed) 1997 41-60 and 77-89

434 Ina Wunn

recent hunter-gatherer communities cannot be consulted in order to de-rive from them a certain belief of prehistoric man Even people livingon a relatively primitive economical level up to the present day havebeen affected by their past which has in uenced their state of mindAs a result their ideas and religious conceptions changed in the samemanner as the belief system of modern communities did63 The an-thropologist Wilhelm Emil Muumlhlmann acknowledges the arguments ofMax Raphael when he emphasises that all known primitive religionsare younger than theological religions64 Even if ecological and eco-nomical prerequisites of different societies are the same they do notnecessarily have the same or a similar belief system identical ritualssymbols and practices Hermann Schulz emphasises ldquoKulturell aufdas engste verwandte Gruppen koumlnnen einen religioumls-symbolisch undartefaktreichen Ritualismus entwickeln (Sepik-Gebiet) oder innerhalbder elaborierten ritualsymbolische n Medien tendentiell nichtreligioumlseartefakt-arme Programme elaborieren (Kapauku)rdquo65

The arguments show that it is by no means suf cient to nd prooffor the hunting practices of Neanderthal man in order to imply any kindof religion and especially not a de nite and well-known religion

Bear-cult

The existence of the cult of the bear in the middle Palaeolithic pe-riod is taken for granted Aringke Hultkrantz writes ldquoDie Kulturen des ark-

63 Max Raphael writes ldquoMan hat diese Schwierigkeit umgehen wollen durchHeranziehen von Aussagen sogenannter primitiver Kulturvoumllker Diese nur in sehrengen Grenzen moumlgliche Analogie uumlbersieht daszlig auch diese Staumlmme eine Geschichtegehabt haben mdash eine regressive statt der progressiven der Kulturvoumllker Es liegt einunberechtigtes Vorurteil in der Annahme der Einfrierung des Gewesenen denn dielsquoPrimitivenrsquo nden sich selbst wo sie auf dem Stadium der Jagdwirtschaft stehengeblieben sind mit den alten Werkzeugen und Waffen einer anderen Umgebunggegenuumlber die starken den Einzelmenschen an Maumlchtigkeit uumlberragenden Tiere sindersetzt durch wesentlich kleinere und schwaumlchererdquo (Raphael 1978 78)

64 Muumlhlmann 1957 119865 Schulz 1993 189

Beginning of Religion 435

tischen Raumes sind Bruchstuumlcke einer palaumlolithischen Jagdkulturrdquo66

Friedrich Heiler67 refers to similar ideas as those expressed by JosephCampbell who describes the cult of the bear in an interesting buthardly well-grounded manner First Campbell refers to a bear-festivalamong the Ainu After the killing of the captured bear and during theceremonies the skull of the animal is put at the top of a long stick68

In a second step Campbell portrays Neanderthal man in impressiveterms ldquo when the remains of a strangely brutish yet manlike skele-ton were found in a limestone quarry not far from Duumlsseldorf in theValley of Neanderrdquo69 The following descriptions shortly mention thecaves of the Alps where the remains of the bears were detected Theexcavators had the impression that the arrangement of the fossil bonescould hardly be due to nature so they attributed this to the activitiesof H neanderthalensi s who were assumed to have killed the animalsand arranged their bones during certain ceremonies70 It is true thatnearly everywhere in the Arctic primitive peoples know certain ritu-als connected with the hunting of the bear71 The excavators of thecaves Emil Baumlchler and Karl Houmlrmann took these ceremonies of cir-cumpolar peoples to prove their hypothesis of an ancient bear-cult inprehistoric times72 In the following years several discoveries of simi-lar bear-caves seemed to support the hypothesis of cave bear worshipEmil Baumlchler himself discovered bear bone deposits at the Wilden-mannlisloch in Switzerland and in Sloveniarsquos Mornova Cave In 1946Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan excavated seven cave bear skulls arranged in acircle in Furtins Cave Saocircne-et-Loire In 1950 Kurt Ehrenberg secured

66 Hultkrantz 1998 75167 See Heiler 1979 7868 Campbell 1987 334ff69 Ibid 33970 Ibid 341f71 Edsman 1957 84172 Maringer 1956 95ff

436 Ina Wunn

a deposit of long bones arranged together with cave bear skulls in theSalzhofen Cave in the Austrian Alps73

The latest nd of supposed traces of prehistoric cave bear worshipwas published in 1996 In the Rumanian Bihor-Mountains ChristianLascu et al discovered a cave rich in palaeontologica l cave beardeposits74 Scholars such as Johannes Maringer or Aringke Hultkrantzrefer to the reports of the excavators when they interpret the depositsas the remainder of cult practice The historian Karl Narr also gives anaccount of the deposits of cave bear skulls and long bones but remainssceptical75

A detailed discussion of the nds of cave bear bones from a palaeon-tological and ethnographic point of view led to completely differentresults76 The careful and critical use of ethnographic analogues onwhich the theories of a cave bear cult is founded in the end leads toeven contrary results If H neanderthalensi s had known cave bear wor-ship its traces would have been found inside the settlements The re-mains of such a cult would have been the bone deposits of Neanderthalmanrsquos favourite and most dangerous game among which howeverthe bear did not rank Recent peoples who know the bear cult catchor kill a bear in his winter accommodation and bring it to their settle-ment There it is killed and eaten by the villagers under different ritualregulations The bones of the dead game are put into a holy place orare carefully buried near the village but never brought back again tothe dwelling of the bear

The most impressive arguments against cave bear worship comenevertheless from the bone deposits itself Crucial palaeontologica lobjections are to be stated rst of all Both the cave bear (Ursusspelaeus) which was extinct at the end of the last ice age and thebrown bear (Ursus arctos) which spread all over Eurasia since theEem period show a strong preference for cave accommodation There

73 See Lascu et al 1996 19-20 and Maringer 1956 91-9674 See Lascu et al 199675 Narr 1957 1076 Wunn 1999a 3-23

Beginning of Religion 437

they hide during wintertime and give birth to their young The caveswhere the relics of alleged bear worship were found are the naturalhabitat of the animals where they spend the long winters and hidetheir young At those places the bears sometimes died for severalreasons for example age illness lack of food Therefore their bonefossils are bound to be found in those places if they were not carriedoff by carrion eaters or removed by sedimentologica l processes Theoccurrence of cave bear bones in the caves of the ice age which servedgenerations of bear families as shelter is just what a palaeontologis twould expect

The proponents of Palaeolithic bear worship did not only think themere occurrence of bear bones in the caves to be remarkable butalso their alleged assortment and arrangement in which they werefound However there rst takes place an amassment of bear bones incertain places by the activities of the bears themselves as Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan correctly noticed The parts of skeletons of the deceasedanimals which originally are in their anatomical order are thrownin disorder or scattered by later generations of bears Sometimes theyare pressed to the walls where they are relatively protected againstfurther decay77 Also the outweighing of skulls and long bones is aresult of a process of natural decay and not due to human activitiesThe mentioned parts of the skeleton are relatively heavy and compactso that they are more able to resist decomposition processes thanthe small vertebrae ribs foot-bones or hand-bones A result of thoseprocesses is the natural selection of the bone material78 But notonly decomposition in uences the state of the bones During theirhistory the caves were ooded several times as the accumulatedsediments prove Such oodings do not remain without in uence onthe fossil material With high water level and stronger current all loosematerial is either rinsed away or carried for a certain distance andthen dropped at a place where there is a weaker current During theseprocesses the anatomical bone order is radically altered Therefore

77 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 3978 Ziegler 1975 44-45

438 Ina Wunn

the accumulation of several skulls in one place and the absenceof other bones is due to geological and sedimentologica l processesand not to human intervention The oating ability of sediments canbe reduced by prominent parts of the walls or unevenness of the oor resulting in some bone parts being deposited in the proximityof obstacles A concrete example of this effect is the discovery ofseveral skulls deposited in a crosslike pattern in the Cold Cave ofthe Bihor Mountains The obstacle which reduced the transportabilityof the skulls crucially was a stone at which the fossil skulls weredeposited79 Just as little as the assortment of the bone material isproof of human activities so the adjustment of the fossils is anunnatural process The movements of a transport medium be it windsediment or water are transferred to the material to be transportedso that the movement in a special direction leads to its assortmentTherefore the assortment of bear skulls is not due to human activitiesbut to the owing water or other transport mediums in the caves Itcannot be said clearly enough There was no cave bear worship inthe middle Palaeolithic period at all The bear caves show exactlywhat a palaeontologis t would expect Nothing suggests that the naturalprocess of decay and sedimentation was at any time interrupted ordisturbed80

Combined burials of man and cave bear

In connection with assumed bear worship the opinion was heldthat sometimes men and bear were buried together in one grave81 Asevidence served the excavations at Le Reacutegourdou near Lascaux whereunder a hill of debris both the remains of a bear and a Neanderthal manwere preserved The French archaeologist Fabienne May demonstratedthat the remains of the bear bore no connection with the human

79 See Lascu et al 1996 30 plate 380 Wunn 1999a 6ff81 Rust 1986 15

Beginning of Religion 439

skeleton and questioned whether there was a funeral at Le Reacutegourdouat all82

Skull deposits and skull worship

Just as the bear worship was regarded as irrefutable fact there washardly any doubt that Neanderthal man subjected the heads of thedeceased to a special treatment and set them up for ritual purposesOther scholars are convinced that Neanderthal man hunted fellowhumans to kill and eat them83 It is said that the skulls of the killedlater became the focal point of a ritual This hypothesis is suggestedby Ioan Couliano ldquoEinige Schaumldel sind in einer Weise verformtdie den Gedanken an ein Herausloumlsen des Gehirns nahelegenrdquo84

Alfred Rust expresses himself absolutely clearly He is sure that the nds of isolated lower jaws and craniums are closely connected withreligious customs85 Detailed and critically Johannes Maringer arguesthe question of the skull cult He discusses the nds which wereconsidered as proof of the presence of the alleged practices Thereis for example the crushed childlike skull from Gibraltar or the nds of human remains at Weimar-Ehringsdorf and particularly theoutstanding nd of the skull of Monte Circeo which is mentionedby every author as evidence of the described ritual practice Finallyhe comes to the following result ldquoDas Fundbild der Guattari-Grottespricht klar fuumlr einen Kult in dessen Mittelpunkt der Schaumldel standUrspruumlnglich scheint er auf einem Stock aufgesteckt gewesen zusein Einem heiligen Bannkreis gleich umgab ihn der Kranz vonSteinen Der ganze Houmlhlenteil erweckt den Eindruck als habe er den inder vorderen Houmlhle wohnenden Urmenschen als Heiligtum gedientrdquo86

and further ldquoDie Schaumldelsetzungen duumlrften aller Wahrscheinlichkeitnach eine Art Schaumldelkult darstellen in dem das Gedaumlchtnis der

82 Ibid 1583 Ullrich 1978 293ff See also the overview in Henke and Rothe 1999 27784 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2885 Rust 1991 19486 Maringer 1956 80

440 Ina Wunn

Verstorbenen gep egt und ihre Hilfe wie auch ihr Schutz fuumlr die Sippeer eht wurderdquo87 Even Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan agrees that the skull ofMonte Circeo is an intentional deposition of a skull but he refusesto draw any conclusions concerning religious customs88 On the otherhand he can prove that all other nds of isolated heads or jaws arethe result of taphonomic processes89 After a careful re-examinationof the original reports of the excavations Fabienne May states thatnone of the descriptions of the excavations is suf cient to con rm ordisprove the hypothesis of a ritual90 The discovery of a supposed cultsite at Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan where the skull of a child was set upbetween several skulls of ibex does not prove the hypothesis of a cultIn this case the remnants of ibexes and the skull of the child have noconnection at all91 Since it could be shown that even the skull depositof Monte Circeo was not the result of human activities but that thedamages of the skull were due to the work of hungry hyenas the lastargument in favour of a skull cult is disproved92

Cannibalism

Cannibalism has already been mentioned in connection with thedeposition of human skulls Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan expresses him-self as follows ldquoDie Existenz eines religioumlsen Kannibalismus imPalaumlolithikum mag wahrscheinlich sein doch laumlszligt sich dies bei dergegenwaumlrtigen Materiallage absolut nicht beweisen Und dennochspricht kein Autor von der palaumlolithischen Religion ohne fuumlr odergegen die Kannibalismusthese Stellung zu beziehen wobei in groumlszlige-rem Umfang auf ethnographische Beispiele zuruumlckgegriffen wirdrdquo93

But particularly those ethnographic analogies give strong argumentsagainst the hypothesis of prehistoric cannibalism The anthropologis t

87 Ibid 8588 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 5389 Ibid 54-5690 May 1986 1791 Ibid 33-3492 Henke and Rothe 1994 52793 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 56

Beginning of Religion 441

Gabriele Weiss and the archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher discuss thetopic of cannibalism carefully94 They state that the ethnographic ma-terial itself is frequently not convincing because it is based mainly onsensational reports of past adventurers There are no assertions by eye-witnesses but stories of man eaters were always reported by writerswho only stated that they had heard about those customs The cus-tom of cannibalism itself was always stated to have been given upjust several years before the arrival of the traveller95 Frequently theassumption that a certain people was guilty of cannibalism was usedpropagandistically in order to be able to lead a war against this peo-ple or to force them into slavery96 On the other hand it was a wellknown rumour in Africa even up to the beginning of this century thatEuropeans fed on the esh of African children97 It is argued by HeidiPeter-Roumlcher that there is no evidence of cannibalism among recentpeoples at all98 This means that it is nonsense to search for the reasonand the origin of that custom in prehistoric times It cannot be decidedto what extent Sigmund Freud with his hypothesis of the origin of hu-man society must be blamed for evoking the idea of early man-eatersIn his Totem und Tabu he made several statements about the origin ofhuman society claiming that at the beginning of prehistory a group ofhumans was ruled by a despotic patriarch until he was killed and eatenby his sons99 The subtitle of his book ldquoEinige Uumlbereinstimmungen imSeelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotikerrdquo100 re ects however the

94 Weiss 1987 142-159 and Peter-Roumlcher 198995 Volhard 1939 36996 Gabriele Weiss (1987 152) mentions the example of a decree of Queen Isabella

in 1503 who gave permission to enslave the Caribbean Indians because they weresaid to be man-eaters

97 Ibid 15098 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 On the contrary the American anthropologist Christy Turner

is convinced that the Anasazi an Indian people who lived in the southern parts of theUnited States during historical times did human hunting See Turner 1999

99 See Weiss 1987 44-45100 Weiss 1987 44

442 Ina Wunn

opinion of many of his contemporaries and colleagues and contributesto the picture of the mentality of Neanderthal man until today101

The facts on which the theory of prehistoric cannibalism are basedare usually poor Frequently it was suf cient to assume cannibalismexisted if a skeleton was found incomplete or not in anatomical or-der102 It is still considered a strong proof for cannibalism when splithuman bones occur as were excavated at Krapina The defenders ofthe cannibalism thesis argue that the remnants of human bones lookabsolutely similar to the scattered animal bones at the same excava-tion site Therefore they come to the conclusion that Neanderthal mantreated fellow humans in the same way as he treated game This argu-ment is still stressed by the anthropologist s Tim White and Alban De- eur Scattered bones of human beings and deer in the cave of Moula-Guercy show the same scratches103 This argument presupposes how-ever that the humans as well as the animals were killed by Neanderthalman Both the humans and the animals could however have been thevictims of carnivores for example hyena or cave lion or the scratcheson human and animal bones may be due to taphonomic processes104

This thesis would explain the remains of Krapina as well as the ndingsof Moula-Guercy In any case the identical treatment of human andanimal bones and the missing of any traces of a ritual do not promotethe hypothesis of a religious custom In this case Krapina and Moula-Guercy would prove that Neanderthal man hunted other humans formeat This seems however to be unlikely because the hunters of theMousterian lived in a habitat full of game which was for sure easier tokill than humans

101 Campbell 1987 339102 Maringer 1956 81f In the excavation report of the site Weimar-Ehringsdorf

cannibalism is not mentioned at all See Feustel 1989 391-393103 De eur et al 1999 128-131104 It is still more than dif cult to decide whether scratches on bones are due to

human activities to carnivores or to taphonomic processes The topic is still debated

among scientists For an overview see Henke and Rothe 1994 19-25

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

Beginning of Religion 431

prairies and tundra The climate became dry with extremely cold win-ters and relatively mild but short summers The prairies were full ofgame which migrated with the seasons53

The Magic of Hunting in the Middle Palaeolithic

The hunting activities of the Palaeolithic man which Mircea Eliadeand other scholars take for granted are only able to be proved with ref-erence to later periods of ice-age At the town of Lehringen near Ver-den an der Aller the skeleton of an elephant had been preserved thathad been killed with the aid of a wooden spear found between the ribsof the animal This is impressive evidence of the fact that Homo nean-derthalensis was able to successfully hunt big game Therefore it canbe assumed that Mircea Eliadersquos precise conceptions of religion duringprehistoric times may at least be correct with regard to the people of theMousterian He describes this religion as ldquomagic-religious conceptionsof Palaeolithic manrdquo as follows54 The documents regarding the reli-gion of the Palaeolithic man are obscure he says but available Theirmeaning can be deciphered if the scholar succeeds in inserting thesedocuments into a semantic system55 This semantic system is alreadygiven by the results of investigations of recent hunter-gatherer commu-nities Their similar lifestyle offers suf cient certainty for identical orvery similar religions of recent hunter-gatherers and Palaeolithic manTherefore Homo neanderthalensi s believed that the animal is a beingquite similar to man but talented with supernatural forces He wasconvinced that gods such as the ldquoMaster of the Animalsrdquo or ldquoSupremeBeingrdquo existed The kill of the animal took place after a complicatedritual On the other hand rites must have existed which were linkedwith a skull-cult and deposits of long bones Similarly Ioan Coulianoargues that ldquoeither similar models of well-known primitive peoplesare referred to or one dispenses with any model The History of Reli-gion can only use the rst option as imperfect as it may be Scholars

53 See Henke and Rothe 1994 52554 Eliade 1978 15ff55 Ibid 18

432 Ina Wunn

have to endeavour to decipher the mental horizon of the people of pre-historic times by using the results of ethnographic and archaeologicalstudiesrdquo56 John Campbell concludes from the myths of known peoplesthat there must be close connections between the religions of Palae-olithic man and recent hunter-gatherers The following conviction isboth precondition and result of his investigations ldquoI nd that its mainresult has been its con rmation of a thought I have long and faithfullyentertained of the unity of the race of man not only in its biology butalso in its spiritual historyrdquo57 He proves his assumption with the helpof a comparison Under the title ldquoThe Stage of Neanderthal Manrdquo thereader nds the detailed description of the life habits of the small anddelicate Negritos of the Andaman Islands in the Gulf of Bengal butCampbell fails to prove the connections between the habits of a peopleof recent tropical Asia and an anatomically different prehistoric peo-ple which lived in boreal climates 100 000 years ago58 Another argu-ment of John Campbellrsquos is founded on archaeological facts The stoneblades of the Mousterian (the material culture of Neanderthal man ismainly Mousterian) are still very similar a wider range of differenttools was unknown at that time This means for Campbell that thecustom of tool-making was carefully handed down from one genera-tion to another comparably to customs of recent bushman culture Thisextraordinary attention is due to a certain feeling of the holy whichwas connected with the manufacturing and use of the tool59 The pass-ing on of Palaeolithic religion to religions of recent hunter-gatherercommunities serves as a proof that the myths of recent peoples origi-nated in the Palaeolithic and have been handed down till today withoutany changes This means that Joseph Campbell constructed a typicalcircular argument Todayrsquos behaviours and myths are taken as proofin order to postulate the existence of the same behaviours and mythsas practised by Palaeolithic man Then the postulate itself is taken as

56 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2757 Campbell 1987 v58 Ibid 365ff59 Ibid 364f

Beginning of Religion 433

a voucher to prove the unchanged existence of those myths from thePalaeolithic up to now

The opinion that Palaeolithic man already had a complicated reli-gion with certain notions of the holy and various rituals can be foundin nearly every religious reference work Fritz Hartmann writes forexample ldquoThe magic of the hunt belongs to this typically human con-ception of the worldrdquo60

Even if the consequences drawn from the archaeologically securedfacts in the past seem frequently exaggerated several sentences in thevolume of Johannes Maringer explain the intention of the authors Itwas the common statement that prehistoric man was a mere beast with-out a developed mind that made the opponents of this point of viewlook for counter-arguments which are no longer defendable in the lightof modern research results61 The use of ethnographic analogies to re-construct prehistoric religion is based on a speci c understanding ofthe evolution of religion In the nineteenth century Charles Darwinrsquostheory of biological evolution in uenced nearly all branches of sci-ence In the elds of the study of religion and anthropology scholarslike Edward Burnett Tylor or James George Frazer developed concep-tions of religious evolution which have strongly determined researchuntil today Tylor as well as Frazer were convinced that they couldprove an ascending development of religion from primitive origins tothe modern religions of the industrial age According to this theory thereligions of recent hunter-gatherer communities can be classi ed asrelics from ancient times62 This means on the contrary that it is pos-sible to reconstruct the consciousness of ancient people with the helpof knowledge about the religion of todayrsquos hunter-gatherer communi-ties However only a brief insight into the multiplicity of so-calledprimitive religions reveals that their contents and symbols are not sim-ilar by any means According to Max Raphael the faith-conceptions of

60 Hartmann 1957 403 Among the latest literature see for example Grim 19981107-1108 and Hultkrantz 1998 746-752

61 Maringer 1956 59ff62 Michaels (ed) 1997 41-60 and 77-89

434 Ina Wunn

recent hunter-gatherer communities cannot be consulted in order to de-rive from them a certain belief of prehistoric man Even people livingon a relatively primitive economical level up to the present day havebeen affected by their past which has in uenced their state of mindAs a result their ideas and religious conceptions changed in the samemanner as the belief system of modern communities did63 The an-thropologist Wilhelm Emil Muumlhlmann acknowledges the arguments ofMax Raphael when he emphasises that all known primitive religionsare younger than theological religions64 Even if ecological and eco-nomical prerequisites of different societies are the same they do notnecessarily have the same or a similar belief system identical ritualssymbols and practices Hermann Schulz emphasises ldquoKulturell aufdas engste verwandte Gruppen koumlnnen einen religioumls-symbolisch undartefaktreichen Ritualismus entwickeln (Sepik-Gebiet) oder innerhalbder elaborierten ritualsymbolische n Medien tendentiell nichtreligioumlseartefakt-arme Programme elaborieren (Kapauku)rdquo65

The arguments show that it is by no means suf cient to nd prooffor the hunting practices of Neanderthal man in order to imply any kindof religion and especially not a de nite and well-known religion

Bear-cult

The existence of the cult of the bear in the middle Palaeolithic pe-riod is taken for granted Aringke Hultkrantz writes ldquoDie Kulturen des ark-

63 Max Raphael writes ldquoMan hat diese Schwierigkeit umgehen wollen durchHeranziehen von Aussagen sogenannter primitiver Kulturvoumllker Diese nur in sehrengen Grenzen moumlgliche Analogie uumlbersieht daszlig auch diese Staumlmme eine Geschichtegehabt haben mdash eine regressive statt der progressiven der Kulturvoumllker Es liegt einunberechtigtes Vorurteil in der Annahme der Einfrierung des Gewesenen denn dielsquoPrimitivenrsquo nden sich selbst wo sie auf dem Stadium der Jagdwirtschaft stehengeblieben sind mit den alten Werkzeugen und Waffen einer anderen Umgebunggegenuumlber die starken den Einzelmenschen an Maumlchtigkeit uumlberragenden Tiere sindersetzt durch wesentlich kleinere und schwaumlchererdquo (Raphael 1978 78)

64 Muumlhlmann 1957 119865 Schulz 1993 189

Beginning of Religion 435

tischen Raumes sind Bruchstuumlcke einer palaumlolithischen Jagdkulturrdquo66

Friedrich Heiler67 refers to similar ideas as those expressed by JosephCampbell who describes the cult of the bear in an interesting buthardly well-grounded manner First Campbell refers to a bear-festivalamong the Ainu After the killing of the captured bear and during theceremonies the skull of the animal is put at the top of a long stick68

In a second step Campbell portrays Neanderthal man in impressiveterms ldquo when the remains of a strangely brutish yet manlike skele-ton were found in a limestone quarry not far from Duumlsseldorf in theValley of Neanderrdquo69 The following descriptions shortly mention thecaves of the Alps where the remains of the bears were detected Theexcavators had the impression that the arrangement of the fossil bonescould hardly be due to nature so they attributed this to the activitiesof H neanderthalensi s who were assumed to have killed the animalsand arranged their bones during certain ceremonies70 It is true thatnearly everywhere in the Arctic primitive peoples know certain ritu-als connected with the hunting of the bear71 The excavators of thecaves Emil Baumlchler and Karl Houmlrmann took these ceremonies of cir-cumpolar peoples to prove their hypothesis of an ancient bear-cult inprehistoric times72 In the following years several discoveries of simi-lar bear-caves seemed to support the hypothesis of cave bear worshipEmil Baumlchler himself discovered bear bone deposits at the Wilden-mannlisloch in Switzerland and in Sloveniarsquos Mornova Cave In 1946Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan excavated seven cave bear skulls arranged in acircle in Furtins Cave Saocircne-et-Loire In 1950 Kurt Ehrenberg secured

66 Hultkrantz 1998 75167 See Heiler 1979 7868 Campbell 1987 334ff69 Ibid 33970 Ibid 341f71 Edsman 1957 84172 Maringer 1956 95ff

436 Ina Wunn

a deposit of long bones arranged together with cave bear skulls in theSalzhofen Cave in the Austrian Alps73

The latest nd of supposed traces of prehistoric cave bear worshipwas published in 1996 In the Rumanian Bihor-Mountains ChristianLascu et al discovered a cave rich in palaeontologica l cave beardeposits74 Scholars such as Johannes Maringer or Aringke Hultkrantzrefer to the reports of the excavators when they interpret the depositsas the remainder of cult practice The historian Karl Narr also gives anaccount of the deposits of cave bear skulls and long bones but remainssceptical75

A detailed discussion of the nds of cave bear bones from a palaeon-tological and ethnographic point of view led to completely differentresults76 The careful and critical use of ethnographic analogues onwhich the theories of a cave bear cult is founded in the end leads toeven contrary results If H neanderthalensi s had known cave bear wor-ship its traces would have been found inside the settlements The re-mains of such a cult would have been the bone deposits of Neanderthalmanrsquos favourite and most dangerous game among which howeverthe bear did not rank Recent peoples who know the bear cult catchor kill a bear in his winter accommodation and bring it to their settle-ment There it is killed and eaten by the villagers under different ritualregulations The bones of the dead game are put into a holy place orare carefully buried near the village but never brought back again tothe dwelling of the bear

The most impressive arguments against cave bear worship comenevertheless from the bone deposits itself Crucial palaeontologica lobjections are to be stated rst of all Both the cave bear (Ursusspelaeus) which was extinct at the end of the last ice age and thebrown bear (Ursus arctos) which spread all over Eurasia since theEem period show a strong preference for cave accommodation There

73 See Lascu et al 1996 19-20 and Maringer 1956 91-9674 See Lascu et al 199675 Narr 1957 1076 Wunn 1999a 3-23

Beginning of Religion 437

they hide during wintertime and give birth to their young The caveswhere the relics of alleged bear worship were found are the naturalhabitat of the animals where they spend the long winters and hidetheir young At those places the bears sometimes died for severalreasons for example age illness lack of food Therefore their bonefossils are bound to be found in those places if they were not carriedoff by carrion eaters or removed by sedimentologica l processes Theoccurrence of cave bear bones in the caves of the ice age which servedgenerations of bear families as shelter is just what a palaeontologis twould expect

The proponents of Palaeolithic bear worship did not only think themere occurrence of bear bones in the caves to be remarkable butalso their alleged assortment and arrangement in which they werefound However there rst takes place an amassment of bear bones incertain places by the activities of the bears themselves as Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan correctly noticed The parts of skeletons of the deceasedanimals which originally are in their anatomical order are thrownin disorder or scattered by later generations of bears Sometimes theyare pressed to the walls where they are relatively protected againstfurther decay77 Also the outweighing of skulls and long bones is aresult of a process of natural decay and not due to human activitiesThe mentioned parts of the skeleton are relatively heavy and compactso that they are more able to resist decomposition processes thanthe small vertebrae ribs foot-bones or hand-bones A result of thoseprocesses is the natural selection of the bone material78 But notonly decomposition in uences the state of the bones During theirhistory the caves were ooded several times as the accumulatedsediments prove Such oodings do not remain without in uence onthe fossil material With high water level and stronger current all loosematerial is either rinsed away or carried for a certain distance andthen dropped at a place where there is a weaker current During theseprocesses the anatomical bone order is radically altered Therefore

77 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 3978 Ziegler 1975 44-45

438 Ina Wunn

the accumulation of several skulls in one place and the absenceof other bones is due to geological and sedimentologica l processesand not to human intervention The oating ability of sediments canbe reduced by prominent parts of the walls or unevenness of the oor resulting in some bone parts being deposited in the proximityof obstacles A concrete example of this effect is the discovery ofseveral skulls deposited in a crosslike pattern in the Cold Cave ofthe Bihor Mountains The obstacle which reduced the transportabilityof the skulls crucially was a stone at which the fossil skulls weredeposited79 Just as little as the assortment of the bone material isproof of human activities so the adjustment of the fossils is anunnatural process The movements of a transport medium be it windsediment or water are transferred to the material to be transportedso that the movement in a special direction leads to its assortmentTherefore the assortment of bear skulls is not due to human activitiesbut to the owing water or other transport mediums in the caves Itcannot be said clearly enough There was no cave bear worship inthe middle Palaeolithic period at all The bear caves show exactlywhat a palaeontologis t would expect Nothing suggests that the naturalprocess of decay and sedimentation was at any time interrupted ordisturbed80

Combined burials of man and cave bear

In connection with assumed bear worship the opinion was heldthat sometimes men and bear were buried together in one grave81 Asevidence served the excavations at Le Reacutegourdou near Lascaux whereunder a hill of debris both the remains of a bear and a Neanderthal manwere preserved The French archaeologist Fabienne May demonstratedthat the remains of the bear bore no connection with the human

79 See Lascu et al 1996 30 plate 380 Wunn 1999a 6ff81 Rust 1986 15

Beginning of Religion 439

skeleton and questioned whether there was a funeral at Le Reacutegourdouat all82

Skull deposits and skull worship

Just as the bear worship was regarded as irrefutable fact there washardly any doubt that Neanderthal man subjected the heads of thedeceased to a special treatment and set them up for ritual purposesOther scholars are convinced that Neanderthal man hunted fellowhumans to kill and eat them83 It is said that the skulls of the killedlater became the focal point of a ritual This hypothesis is suggestedby Ioan Couliano ldquoEinige Schaumldel sind in einer Weise verformtdie den Gedanken an ein Herausloumlsen des Gehirns nahelegenrdquo84

Alfred Rust expresses himself absolutely clearly He is sure that the nds of isolated lower jaws and craniums are closely connected withreligious customs85 Detailed and critically Johannes Maringer arguesthe question of the skull cult He discusses the nds which wereconsidered as proof of the presence of the alleged practices Thereis for example the crushed childlike skull from Gibraltar or the nds of human remains at Weimar-Ehringsdorf and particularly theoutstanding nd of the skull of Monte Circeo which is mentionedby every author as evidence of the described ritual practice Finallyhe comes to the following result ldquoDas Fundbild der Guattari-Grottespricht klar fuumlr einen Kult in dessen Mittelpunkt der Schaumldel standUrspruumlnglich scheint er auf einem Stock aufgesteckt gewesen zusein Einem heiligen Bannkreis gleich umgab ihn der Kranz vonSteinen Der ganze Houmlhlenteil erweckt den Eindruck als habe er den inder vorderen Houmlhle wohnenden Urmenschen als Heiligtum gedientrdquo86

and further ldquoDie Schaumldelsetzungen duumlrften aller Wahrscheinlichkeitnach eine Art Schaumldelkult darstellen in dem das Gedaumlchtnis der

82 Ibid 1583 Ullrich 1978 293ff See also the overview in Henke and Rothe 1999 27784 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2885 Rust 1991 19486 Maringer 1956 80

440 Ina Wunn

Verstorbenen gep egt und ihre Hilfe wie auch ihr Schutz fuumlr die Sippeer eht wurderdquo87 Even Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan agrees that the skull ofMonte Circeo is an intentional deposition of a skull but he refusesto draw any conclusions concerning religious customs88 On the otherhand he can prove that all other nds of isolated heads or jaws arethe result of taphonomic processes89 After a careful re-examinationof the original reports of the excavations Fabienne May states thatnone of the descriptions of the excavations is suf cient to con rm ordisprove the hypothesis of a ritual90 The discovery of a supposed cultsite at Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan where the skull of a child was set upbetween several skulls of ibex does not prove the hypothesis of a cultIn this case the remnants of ibexes and the skull of the child have noconnection at all91 Since it could be shown that even the skull depositof Monte Circeo was not the result of human activities but that thedamages of the skull were due to the work of hungry hyenas the lastargument in favour of a skull cult is disproved92

Cannibalism

Cannibalism has already been mentioned in connection with thedeposition of human skulls Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan expresses him-self as follows ldquoDie Existenz eines religioumlsen Kannibalismus imPalaumlolithikum mag wahrscheinlich sein doch laumlszligt sich dies bei dergegenwaumlrtigen Materiallage absolut nicht beweisen Und dennochspricht kein Autor von der palaumlolithischen Religion ohne fuumlr odergegen die Kannibalismusthese Stellung zu beziehen wobei in groumlszlige-rem Umfang auf ethnographische Beispiele zuruumlckgegriffen wirdrdquo93

But particularly those ethnographic analogies give strong argumentsagainst the hypothesis of prehistoric cannibalism The anthropologis t

87 Ibid 8588 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 5389 Ibid 54-5690 May 1986 1791 Ibid 33-3492 Henke and Rothe 1994 52793 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 56

Beginning of Religion 441

Gabriele Weiss and the archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher discuss thetopic of cannibalism carefully94 They state that the ethnographic ma-terial itself is frequently not convincing because it is based mainly onsensational reports of past adventurers There are no assertions by eye-witnesses but stories of man eaters were always reported by writerswho only stated that they had heard about those customs The cus-tom of cannibalism itself was always stated to have been given upjust several years before the arrival of the traveller95 Frequently theassumption that a certain people was guilty of cannibalism was usedpropagandistically in order to be able to lead a war against this peo-ple or to force them into slavery96 On the other hand it was a wellknown rumour in Africa even up to the beginning of this century thatEuropeans fed on the esh of African children97 It is argued by HeidiPeter-Roumlcher that there is no evidence of cannibalism among recentpeoples at all98 This means that it is nonsense to search for the reasonand the origin of that custom in prehistoric times It cannot be decidedto what extent Sigmund Freud with his hypothesis of the origin of hu-man society must be blamed for evoking the idea of early man-eatersIn his Totem und Tabu he made several statements about the origin ofhuman society claiming that at the beginning of prehistory a group ofhumans was ruled by a despotic patriarch until he was killed and eatenby his sons99 The subtitle of his book ldquoEinige Uumlbereinstimmungen imSeelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotikerrdquo100 re ects however the

94 Weiss 1987 142-159 and Peter-Roumlcher 198995 Volhard 1939 36996 Gabriele Weiss (1987 152) mentions the example of a decree of Queen Isabella

in 1503 who gave permission to enslave the Caribbean Indians because they weresaid to be man-eaters

97 Ibid 15098 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 On the contrary the American anthropologist Christy Turner

is convinced that the Anasazi an Indian people who lived in the southern parts of theUnited States during historical times did human hunting See Turner 1999

99 See Weiss 1987 44-45100 Weiss 1987 44

442 Ina Wunn

opinion of many of his contemporaries and colleagues and contributesto the picture of the mentality of Neanderthal man until today101

The facts on which the theory of prehistoric cannibalism are basedare usually poor Frequently it was suf cient to assume cannibalismexisted if a skeleton was found incomplete or not in anatomical or-der102 It is still considered a strong proof for cannibalism when splithuman bones occur as were excavated at Krapina The defenders ofthe cannibalism thesis argue that the remnants of human bones lookabsolutely similar to the scattered animal bones at the same excava-tion site Therefore they come to the conclusion that Neanderthal mantreated fellow humans in the same way as he treated game This argu-ment is still stressed by the anthropologist s Tim White and Alban De- eur Scattered bones of human beings and deer in the cave of Moula-Guercy show the same scratches103 This argument presupposes how-ever that the humans as well as the animals were killed by Neanderthalman Both the humans and the animals could however have been thevictims of carnivores for example hyena or cave lion or the scratcheson human and animal bones may be due to taphonomic processes104

This thesis would explain the remains of Krapina as well as the ndingsof Moula-Guercy In any case the identical treatment of human andanimal bones and the missing of any traces of a ritual do not promotethe hypothesis of a religious custom In this case Krapina and Moula-Guercy would prove that Neanderthal man hunted other humans formeat This seems however to be unlikely because the hunters of theMousterian lived in a habitat full of game which was for sure easier tokill than humans

101 Campbell 1987 339102 Maringer 1956 81f In the excavation report of the site Weimar-Ehringsdorf

cannibalism is not mentioned at all See Feustel 1989 391-393103 De eur et al 1999 128-131104 It is still more than dif cult to decide whether scratches on bones are due to

human activities to carnivores or to taphonomic processes The topic is still debated

among scientists For an overview see Henke and Rothe 1994 19-25

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

432 Ina Wunn

have to endeavour to decipher the mental horizon of the people of pre-historic times by using the results of ethnographic and archaeologicalstudiesrdquo56 John Campbell concludes from the myths of known peoplesthat there must be close connections between the religions of Palae-olithic man and recent hunter-gatherers The following conviction isboth precondition and result of his investigations ldquoI nd that its mainresult has been its con rmation of a thought I have long and faithfullyentertained of the unity of the race of man not only in its biology butalso in its spiritual historyrdquo57 He proves his assumption with the helpof a comparison Under the title ldquoThe Stage of Neanderthal Manrdquo thereader nds the detailed description of the life habits of the small anddelicate Negritos of the Andaman Islands in the Gulf of Bengal butCampbell fails to prove the connections between the habits of a peopleof recent tropical Asia and an anatomically different prehistoric peo-ple which lived in boreal climates 100 000 years ago58 Another argu-ment of John Campbellrsquos is founded on archaeological facts The stoneblades of the Mousterian (the material culture of Neanderthal man ismainly Mousterian) are still very similar a wider range of differenttools was unknown at that time This means for Campbell that thecustom of tool-making was carefully handed down from one genera-tion to another comparably to customs of recent bushman culture Thisextraordinary attention is due to a certain feeling of the holy whichwas connected with the manufacturing and use of the tool59 The pass-ing on of Palaeolithic religion to religions of recent hunter-gatherercommunities serves as a proof that the myths of recent peoples origi-nated in the Palaeolithic and have been handed down till today withoutany changes This means that Joseph Campbell constructed a typicalcircular argument Todayrsquos behaviours and myths are taken as proofin order to postulate the existence of the same behaviours and mythsas practised by Palaeolithic man Then the postulate itself is taken as

56 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2757 Campbell 1987 v58 Ibid 365ff59 Ibid 364f

Beginning of Religion 433

a voucher to prove the unchanged existence of those myths from thePalaeolithic up to now

The opinion that Palaeolithic man already had a complicated reli-gion with certain notions of the holy and various rituals can be foundin nearly every religious reference work Fritz Hartmann writes forexample ldquoThe magic of the hunt belongs to this typically human con-ception of the worldrdquo60

Even if the consequences drawn from the archaeologically securedfacts in the past seem frequently exaggerated several sentences in thevolume of Johannes Maringer explain the intention of the authors Itwas the common statement that prehistoric man was a mere beast with-out a developed mind that made the opponents of this point of viewlook for counter-arguments which are no longer defendable in the lightof modern research results61 The use of ethnographic analogies to re-construct prehistoric religion is based on a speci c understanding ofthe evolution of religion In the nineteenth century Charles Darwinrsquostheory of biological evolution in uenced nearly all branches of sci-ence In the elds of the study of religion and anthropology scholarslike Edward Burnett Tylor or James George Frazer developed concep-tions of religious evolution which have strongly determined researchuntil today Tylor as well as Frazer were convinced that they couldprove an ascending development of religion from primitive origins tothe modern religions of the industrial age According to this theory thereligions of recent hunter-gatherer communities can be classi ed asrelics from ancient times62 This means on the contrary that it is pos-sible to reconstruct the consciousness of ancient people with the helpof knowledge about the religion of todayrsquos hunter-gatherer communi-ties However only a brief insight into the multiplicity of so-calledprimitive religions reveals that their contents and symbols are not sim-ilar by any means According to Max Raphael the faith-conceptions of

60 Hartmann 1957 403 Among the latest literature see for example Grim 19981107-1108 and Hultkrantz 1998 746-752

61 Maringer 1956 59ff62 Michaels (ed) 1997 41-60 and 77-89

434 Ina Wunn

recent hunter-gatherer communities cannot be consulted in order to de-rive from them a certain belief of prehistoric man Even people livingon a relatively primitive economical level up to the present day havebeen affected by their past which has in uenced their state of mindAs a result their ideas and religious conceptions changed in the samemanner as the belief system of modern communities did63 The an-thropologist Wilhelm Emil Muumlhlmann acknowledges the arguments ofMax Raphael when he emphasises that all known primitive religionsare younger than theological religions64 Even if ecological and eco-nomical prerequisites of different societies are the same they do notnecessarily have the same or a similar belief system identical ritualssymbols and practices Hermann Schulz emphasises ldquoKulturell aufdas engste verwandte Gruppen koumlnnen einen religioumls-symbolisch undartefaktreichen Ritualismus entwickeln (Sepik-Gebiet) oder innerhalbder elaborierten ritualsymbolische n Medien tendentiell nichtreligioumlseartefakt-arme Programme elaborieren (Kapauku)rdquo65

The arguments show that it is by no means suf cient to nd prooffor the hunting practices of Neanderthal man in order to imply any kindof religion and especially not a de nite and well-known religion

Bear-cult

The existence of the cult of the bear in the middle Palaeolithic pe-riod is taken for granted Aringke Hultkrantz writes ldquoDie Kulturen des ark-

63 Max Raphael writes ldquoMan hat diese Schwierigkeit umgehen wollen durchHeranziehen von Aussagen sogenannter primitiver Kulturvoumllker Diese nur in sehrengen Grenzen moumlgliche Analogie uumlbersieht daszlig auch diese Staumlmme eine Geschichtegehabt haben mdash eine regressive statt der progressiven der Kulturvoumllker Es liegt einunberechtigtes Vorurteil in der Annahme der Einfrierung des Gewesenen denn dielsquoPrimitivenrsquo nden sich selbst wo sie auf dem Stadium der Jagdwirtschaft stehengeblieben sind mit den alten Werkzeugen und Waffen einer anderen Umgebunggegenuumlber die starken den Einzelmenschen an Maumlchtigkeit uumlberragenden Tiere sindersetzt durch wesentlich kleinere und schwaumlchererdquo (Raphael 1978 78)

64 Muumlhlmann 1957 119865 Schulz 1993 189

Beginning of Religion 435

tischen Raumes sind Bruchstuumlcke einer palaumlolithischen Jagdkulturrdquo66

Friedrich Heiler67 refers to similar ideas as those expressed by JosephCampbell who describes the cult of the bear in an interesting buthardly well-grounded manner First Campbell refers to a bear-festivalamong the Ainu After the killing of the captured bear and during theceremonies the skull of the animal is put at the top of a long stick68

In a second step Campbell portrays Neanderthal man in impressiveterms ldquo when the remains of a strangely brutish yet manlike skele-ton were found in a limestone quarry not far from Duumlsseldorf in theValley of Neanderrdquo69 The following descriptions shortly mention thecaves of the Alps where the remains of the bears were detected Theexcavators had the impression that the arrangement of the fossil bonescould hardly be due to nature so they attributed this to the activitiesof H neanderthalensi s who were assumed to have killed the animalsand arranged their bones during certain ceremonies70 It is true thatnearly everywhere in the Arctic primitive peoples know certain ritu-als connected with the hunting of the bear71 The excavators of thecaves Emil Baumlchler and Karl Houmlrmann took these ceremonies of cir-cumpolar peoples to prove their hypothesis of an ancient bear-cult inprehistoric times72 In the following years several discoveries of simi-lar bear-caves seemed to support the hypothesis of cave bear worshipEmil Baumlchler himself discovered bear bone deposits at the Wilden-mannlisloch in Switzerland and in Sloveniarsquos Mornova Cave In 1946Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan excavated seven cave bear skulls arranged in acircle in Furtins Cave Saocircne-et-Loire In 1950 Kurt Ehrenberg secured

66 Hultkrantz 1998 75167 See Heiler 1979 7868 Campbell 1987 334ff69 Ibid 33970 Ibid 341f71 Edsman 1957 84172 Maringer 1956 95ff

436 Ina Wunn

a deposit of long bones arranged together with cave bear skulls in theSalzhofen Cave in the Austrian Alps73

The latest nd of supposed traces of prehistoric cave bear worshipwas published in 1996 In the Rumanian Bihor-Mountains ChristianLascu et al discovered a cave rich in palaeontologica l cave beardeposits74 Scholars such as Johannes Maringer or Aringke Hultkrantzrefer to the reports of the excavators when they interpret the depositsas the remainder of cult practice The historian Karl Narr also gives anaccount of the deposits of cave bear skulls and long bones but remainssceptical75

A detailed discussion of the nds of cave bear bones from a palaeon-tological and ethnographic point of view led to completely differentresults76 The careful and critical use of ethnographic analogues onwhich the theories of a cave bear cult is founded in the end leads toeven contrary results If H neanderthalensi s had known cave bear wor-ship its traces would have been found inside the settlements The re-mains of such a cult would have been the bone deposits of Neanderthalmanrsquos favourite and most dangerous game among which howeverthe bear did not rank Recent peoples who know the bear cult catchor kill a bear in his winter accommodation and bring it to their settle-ment There it is killed and eaten by the villagers under different ritualregulations The bones of the dead game are put into a holy place orare carefully buried near the village but never brought back again tothe dwelling of the bear

The most impressive arguments against cave bear worship comenevertheless from the bone deposits itself Crucial palaeontologica lobjections are to be stated rst of all Both the cave bear (Ursusspelaeus) which was extinct at the end of the last ice age and thebrown bear (Ursus arctos) which spread all over Eurasia since theEem period show a strong preference for cave accommodation There

73 See Lascu et al 1996 19-20 and Maringer 1956 91-9674 See Lascu et al 199675 Narr 1957 1076 Wunn 1999a 3-23

Beginning of Religion 437

they hide during wintertime and give birth to their young The caveswhere the relics of alleged bear worship were found are the naturalhabitat of the animals where they spend the long winters and hidetheir young At those places the bears sometimes died for severalreasons for example age illness lack of food Therefore their bonefossils are bound to be found in those places if they were not carriedoff by carrion eaters or removed by sedimentologica l processes Theoccurrence of cave bear bones in the caves of the ice age which servedgenerations of bear families as shelter is just what a palaeontologis twould expect

The proponents of Palaeolithic bear worship did not only think themere occurrence of bear bones in the caves to be remarkable butalso their alleged assortment and arrangement in which they werefound However there rst takes place an amassment of bear bones incertain places by the activities of the bears themselves as Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan correctly noticed The parts of skeletons of the deceasedanimals which originally are in their anatomical order are thrownin disorder or scattered by later generations of bears Sometimes theyare pressed to the walls where they are relatively protected againstfurther decay77 Also the outweighing of skulls and long bones is aresult of a process of natural decay and not due to human activitiesThe mentioned parts of the skeleton are relatively heavy and compactso that they are more able to resist decomposition processes thanthe small vertebrae ribs foot-bones or hand-bones A result of thoseprocesses is the natural selection of the bone material78 But notonly decomposition in uences the state of the bones During theirhistory the caves were ooded several times as the accumulatedsediments prove Such oodings do not remain without in uence onthe fossil material With high water level and stronger current all loosematerial is either rinsed away or carried for a certain distance andthen dropped at a place where there is a weaker current During theseprocesses the anatomical bone order is radically altered Therefore

77 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 3978 Ziegler 1975 44-45

438 Ina Wunn

the accumulation of several skulls in one place and the absenceof other bones is due to geological and sedimentologica l processesand not to human intervention The oating ability of sediments canbe reduced by prominent parts of the walls or unevenness of the oor resulting in some bone parts being deposited in the proximityof obstacles A concrete example of this effect is the discovery ofseveral skulls deposited in a crosslike pattern in the Cold Cave ofthe Bihor Mountains The obstacle which reduced the transportabilityof the skulls crucially was a stone at which the fossil skulls weredeposited79 Just as little as the assortment of the bone material isproof of human activities so the adjustment of the fossils is anunnatural process The movements of a transport medium be it windsediment or water are transferred to the material to be transportedso that the movement in a special direction leads to its assortmentTherefore the assortment of bear skulls is not due to human activitiesbut to the owing water or other transport mediums in the caves Itcannot be said clearly enough There was no cave bear worship inthe middle Palaeolithic period at all The bear caves show exactlywhat a palaeontologis t would expect Nothing suggests that the naturalprocess of decay and sedimentation was at any time interrupted ordisturbed80

Combined burials of man and cave bear

In connection with assumed bear worship the opinion was heldthat sometimes men and bear were buried together in one grave81 Asevidence served the excavations at Le Reacutegourdou near Lascaux whereunder a hill of debris both the remains of a bear and a Neanderthal manwere preserved The French archaeologist Fabienne May demonstratedthat the remains of the bear bore no connection with the human

79 See Lascu et al 1996 30 plate 380 Wunn 1999a 6ff81 Rust 1986 15

Beginning of Religion 439

skeleton and questioned whether there was a funeral at Le Reacutegourdouat all82

Skull deposits and skull worship

Just as the bear worship was regarded as irrefutable fact there washardly any doubt that Neanderthal man subjected the heads of thedeceased to a special treatment and set them up for ritual purposesOther scholars are convinced that Neanderthal man hunted fellowhumans to kill and eat them83 It is said that the skulls of the killedlater became the focal point of a ritual This hypothesis is suggestedby Ioan Couliano ldquoEinige Schaumldel sind in einer Weise verformtdie den Gedanken an ein Herausloumlsen des Gehirns nahelegenrdquo84

Alfred Rust expresses himself absolutely clearly He is sure that the nds of isolated lower jaws and craniums are closely connected withreligious customs85 Detailed and critically Johannes Maringer arguesthe question of the skull cult He discusses the nds which wereconsidered as proof of the presence of the alleged practices Thereis for example the crushed childlike skull from Gibraltar or the nds of human remains at Weimar-Ehringsdorf and particularly theoutstanding nd of the skull of Monte Circeo which is mentionedby every author as evidence of the described ritual practice Finallyhe comes to the following result ldquoDas Fundbild der Guattari-Grottespricht klar fuumlr einen Kult in dessen Mittelpunkt der Schaumldel standUrspruumlnglich scheint er auf einem Stock aufgesteckt gewesen zusein Einem heiligen Bannkreis gleich umgab ihn der Kranz vonSteinen Der ganze Houmlhlenteil erweckt den Eindruck als habe er den inder vorderen Houmlhle wohnenden Urmenschen als Heiligtum gedientrdquo86

and further ldquoDie Schaumldelsetzungen duumlrften aller Wahrscheinlichkeitnach eine Art Schaumldelkult darstellen in dem das Gedaumlchtnis der

82 Ibid 1583 Ullrich 1978 293ff See also the overview in Henke and Rothe 1999 27784 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2885 Rust 1991 19486 Maringer 1956 80

440 Ina Wunn

Verstorbenen gep egt und ihre Hilfe wie auch ihr Schutz fuumlr die Sippeer eht wurderdquo87 Even Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan agrees that the skull ofMonte Circeo is an intentional deposition of a skull but he refusesto draw any conclusions concerning religious customs88 On the otherhand he can prove that all other nds of isolated heads or jaws arethe result of taphonomic processes89 After a careful re-examinationof the original reports of the excavations Fabienne May states thatnone of the descriptions of the excavations is suf cient to con rm ordisprove the hypothesis of a ritual90 The discovery of a supposed cultsite at Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan where the skull of a child was set upbetween several skulls of ibex does not prove the hypothesis of a cultIn this case the remnants of ibexes and the skull of the child have noconnection at all91 Since it could be shown that even the skull depositof Monte Circeo was not the result of human activities but that thedamages of the skull were due to the work of hungry hyenas the lastargument in favour of a skull cult is disproved92

Cannibalism

Cannibalism has already been mentioned in connection with thedeposition of human skulls Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan expresses him-self as follows ldquoDie Existenz eines religioumlsen Kannibalismus imPalaumlolithikum mag wahrscheinlich sein doch laumlszligt sich dies bei dergegenwaumlrtigen Materiallage absolut nicht beweisen Und dennochspricht kein Autor von der palaumlolithischen Religion ohne fuumlr odergegen die Kannibalismusthese Stellung zu beziehen wobei in groumlszlige-rem Umfang auf ethnographische Beispiele zuruumlckgegriffen wirdrdquo93

But particularly those ethnographic analogies give strong argumentsagainst the hypothesis of prehistoric cannibalism The anthropologis t

87 Ibid 8588 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 5389 Ibid 54-5690 May 1986 1791 Ibid 33-3492 Henke and Rothe 1994 52793 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 56

Beginning of Religion 441

Gabriele Weiss and the archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher discuss thetopic of cannibalism carefully94 They state that the ethnographic ma-terial itself is frequently not convincing because it is based mainly onsensational reports of past adventurers There are no assertions by eye-witnesses but stories of man eaters were always reported by writerswho only stated that they had heard about those customs The cus-tom of cannibalism itself was always stated to have been given upjust several years before the arrival of the traveller95 Frequently theassumption that a certain people was guilty of cannibalism was usedpropagandistically in order to be able to lead a war against this peo-ple or to force them into slavery96 On the other hand it was a wellknown rumour in Africa even up to the beginning of this century thatEuropeans fed on the esh of African children97 It is argued by HeidiPeter-Roumlcher that there is no evidence of cannibalism among recentpeoples at all98 This means that it is nonsense to search for the reasonand the origin of that custom in prehistoric times It cannot be decidedto what extent Sigmund Freud with his hypothesis of the origin of hu-man society must be blamed for evoking the idea of early man-eatersIn his Totem und Tabu he made several statements about the origin ofhuman society claiming that at the beginning of prehistory a group ofhumans was ruled by a despotic patriarch until he was killed and eatenby his sons99 The subtitle of his book ldquoEinige Uumlbereinstimmungen imSeelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotikerrdquo100 re ects however the

94 Weiss 1987 142-159 and Peter-Roumlcher 198995 Volhard 1939 36996 Gabriele Weiss (1987 152) mentions the example of a decree of Queen Isabella

in 1503 who gave permission to enslave the Caribbean Indians because they weresaid to be man-eaters

97 Ibid 15098 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 On the contrary the American anthropologist Christy Turner

is convinced that the Anasazi an Indian people who lived in the southern parts of theUnited States during historical times did human hunting See Turner 1999

99 See Weiss 1987 44-45100 Weiss 1987 44

442 Ina Wunn

opinion of many of his contemporaries and colleagues and contributesto the picture of the mentality of Neanderthal man until today101

The facts on which the theory of prehistoric cannibalism are basedare usually poor Frequently it was suf cient to assume cannibalismexisted if a skeleton was found incomplete or not in anatomical or-der102 It is still considered a strong proof for cannibalism when splithuman bones occur as were excavated at Krapina The defenders ofthe cannibalism thesis argue that the remnants of human bones lookabsolutely similar to the scattered animal bones at the same excava-tion site Therefore they come to the conclusion that Neanderthal mantreated fellow humans in the same way as he treated game This argu-ment is still stressed by the anthropologist s Tim White and Alban De- eur Scattered bones of human beings and deer in the cave of Moula-Guercy show the same scratches103 This argument presupposes how-ever that the humans as well as the animals were killed by Neanderthalman Both the humans and the animals could however have been thevictims of carnivores for example hyena or cave lion or the scratcheson human and animal bones may be due to taphonomic processes104

This thesis would explain the remains of Krapina as well as the ndingsof Moula-Guercy In any case the identical treatment of human andanimal bones and the missing of any traces of a ritual do not promotethe hypothesis of a religious custom In this case Krapina and Moula-Guercy would prove that Neanderthal man hunted other humans formeat This seems however to be unlikely because the hunters of theMousterian lived in a habitat full of game which was for sure easier tokill than humans

101 Campbell 1987 339102 Maringer 1956 81f In the excavation report of the site Weimar-Ehringsdorf

cannibalism is not mentioned at all See Feustel 1989 391-393103 De eur et al 1999 128-131104 It is still more than dif cult to decide whether scratches on bones are due to

human activities to carnivores or to taphonomic processes The topic is still debated

among scientists For an overview see Henke and Rothe 1994 19-25

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

Beginning of Religion 433

a voucher to prove the unchanged existence of those myths from thePalaeolithic up to now

The opinion that Palaeolithic man already had a complicated reli-gion with certain notions of the holy and various rituals can be foundin nearly every religious reference work Fritz Hartmann writes forexample ldquoThe magic of the hunt belongs to this typically human con-ception of the worldrdquo60

Even if the consequences drawn from the archaeologically securedfacts in the past seem frequently exaggerated several sentences in thevolume of Johannes Maringer explain the intention of the authors Itwas the common statement that prehistoric man was a mere beast with-out a developed mind that made the opponents of this point of viewlook for counter-arguments which are no longer defendable in the lightof modern research results61 The use of ethnographic analogies to re-construct prehistoric religion is based on a speci c understanding ofthe evolution of religion In the nineteenth century Charles Darwinrsquostheory of biological evolution in uenced nearly all branches of sci-ence In the elds of the study of religion and anthropology scholarslike Edward Burnett Tylor or James George Frazer developed concep-tions of religious evolution which have strongly determined researchuntil today Tylor as well as Frazer were convinced that they couldprove an ascending development of religion from primitive origins tothe modern religions of the industrial age According to this theory thereligions of recent hunter-gatherer communities can be classi ed asrelics from ancient times62 This means on the contrary that it is pos-sible to reconstruct the consciousness of ancient people with the helpof knowledge about the religion of todayrsquos hunter-gatherer communi-ties However only a brief insight into the multiplicity of so-calledprimitive religions reveals that their contents and symbols are not sim-ilar by any means According to Max Raphael the faith-conceptions of

60 Hartmann 1957 403 Among the latest literature see for example Grim 19981107-1108 and Hultkrantz 1998 746-752

61 Maringer 1956 59ff62 Michaels (ed) 1997 41-60 and 77-89

434 Ina Wunn

recent hunter-gatherer communities cannot be consulted in order to de-rive from them a certain belief of prehistoric man Even people livingon a relatively primitive economical level up to the present day havebeen affected by their past which has in uenced their state of mindAs a result their ideas and religious conceptions changed in the samemanner as the belief system of modern communities did63 The an-thropologist Wilhelm Emil Muumlhlmann acknowledges the arguments ofMax Raphael when he emphasises that all known primitive religionsare younger than theological religions64 Even if ecological and eco-nomical prerequisites of different societies are the same they do notnecessarily have the same or a similar belief system identical ritualssymbols and practices Hermann Schulz emphasises ldquoKulturell aufdas engste verwandte Gruppen koumlnnen einen religioumls-symbolisch undartefaktreichen Ritualismus entwickeln (Sepik-Gebiet) oder innerhalbder elaborierten ritualsymbolische n Medien tendentiell nichtreligioumlseartefakt-arme Programme elaborieren (Kapauku)rdquo65

The arguments show that it is by no means suf cient to nd prooffor the hunting practices of Neanderthal man in order to imply any kindof religion and especially not a de nite and well-known religion

Bear-cult

The existence of the cult of the bear in the middle Palaeolithic pe-riod is taken for granted Aringke Hultkrantz writes ldquoDie Kulturen des ark-

63 Max Raphael writes ldquoMan hat diese Schwierigkeit umgehen wollen durchHeranziehen von Aussagen sogenannter primitiver Kulturvoumllker Diese nur in sehrengen Grenzen moumlgliche Analogie uumlbersieht daszlig auch diese Staumlmme eine Geschichtegehabt haben mdash eine regressive statt der progressiven der Kulturvoumllker Es liegt einunberechtigtes Vorurteil in der Annahme der Einfrierung des Gewesenen denn dielsquoPrimitivenrsquo nden sich selbst wo sie auf dem Stadium der Jagdwirtschaft stehengeblieben sind mit den alten Werkzeugen und Waffen einer anderen Umgebunggegenuumlber die starken den Einzelmenschen an Maumlchtigkeit uumlberragenden Tiere sindersetzt durch wesentlich kleinere und schwaumlchererdquo (Raphael 1978 78)

64 Muumlhlmann 1957 119865 Schulz 1993 189

Beginning of Religion 435

tischen Raumes sind Bruchstuumlcke einer palaumlolithischen Jagdkulturrdquo66

Friedrich Heiler67 refers to similar ideas as those expressed by JosephCampbell who describes the cult of the bear in an interesting buthardly well-grounded manner First Campbell refers to a bear-festivalamong the Ainu After the killing of the captured bear and during theceremonies the skull of the animal is put at the top of a long stick68

In a second step Campbell portrays Neanderthal man in impressiveterms ldquo when the remains of a strangely brutish yet manlike skele-ton were found in a limestone quarry not far from Duumlsseldorf in theValley of Neanderrdquo69 The following descriptions shortly mention thecaves of the Alps where the remains of the bears were detected Theexcavators had the impression that the arrangement of the fossil bonescould hardly be due to nature so they attributed this to the activitiesof H neanderthalensi s who were assumed to have killed the animalsand arranged their bones during certain ceremonies70 It is true thatnearly everywhere in the Arctic primitive peoples know certain ritu-als connected with the hunting of the bear71 The excavators of thecaves Emil Baumlchler and Karl Houmlrmann took these ceremonies of cir-cumpolar peoples to prove their hypothesis of an ancient bear-cult inprehistoric times72 In the following years several discoveries of simi-lar bear-caves seemed to support the hypothesis of cave bear worshipEmil Baumlchler himself discovered bear bone deposits at the Wilden-mannlisloch in Switzerland and in Sloveniarsquos Mornova Cave In 1946Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan excavated seven cave bear skulls arranged in acircle in Furtins Cave Saocircne-et-Loire In 1950 Kurt Ehrenberg secured

66 Hultkrantz 1998 75167 See Heiler 1979 7868 Campbell 1987 334ff69 Ibid 33970 Ibid 341f71 Edsman 1957 84172 Maringer 1956 95ff

436 Ina Wunn

a deposit of long bones arranged together with cave bear skulls in theSalzhofen Cave in the Austrian Alps73

The latest nd of supposed traces of prehistoric cave bear worshipwas published in 1996 In the Rumanian Bihor-Mountains ChristianLascu et al discovered a cave rich in palaeontologica l cave beardeposits74 Scholars such as Johannes Maringer or Aringke Hultkrantzrefer to the reports of the excavators when they interpret the depositsas the remainder of cult practice The historian Karl Narr also gives anaccount of the deposits of cave bear skulls and long bones but remainssceptical75

A detailed discussion of the nds of cave bear bones from a palaeon-tological and ethnographic point of view led to completely differentresults76 The careful and critical use of ethnographic analogues onwhich the theories of a cave bear cult is founded in the end leads toeven contrary results If H neanderthalensi s had known cave bear wor-ship its traces would have been found inside the settlements The re-mains of such a cult would have been the bone deposits of Neanderthalmanrsquos favourite and most dangerous game among which howeverthe bear did not rank Recent peoples who know the bear cult catchor kill a bear in his winter accommodation and bring it to their settle-ment There it is killed and eaten by the villagers under different ritualregulations The bones of the dead game are put into a holy place orare carefully buried near the village but never brought back again tothe dwelling of the bear

The most impressive arguments against cave bear worship comenevertheless from the bone deposits itself Crucial palaeontologica lobjections are to be stated rst of all Both the cave bear (Ursusspelaeus) which was extinct at the end of the last ice age and thebrown bear (Ursus arctos) which spread all over Eurasia since theEem period show a strong preference for cave accommodation There

73 See Lascu et al 1996 19-20 and Maringer 1956 91-9674 See Lascu et al 199675 Narr 1957 1076 Wunn 1999a 3-23

Beginning of Religion 437

they hide during wintertime and give birth to their young The caveswhere the relics of alleged bear worship were found are the naturalhabitat of the animals where they spend the long winters and hidetheir young At those places the bears sometimes died for severalreasons for example age illness lack of food Therefore their bonefossils are bound to be found in those places if they were not carriedoff by carrion eaters or removed by sedimentologica l processes Theoccurrence of cave bear bones in the caves of the ice age which servedgenerations of bear families as shelter is just what a palaeontologis twould expect

The proponents of Palaeolithic bear worship did not only think themere occurrence of bear bones in the caves to be remarkable butalso their alleged assortment and arrangement in which they werefound However there rst takes place an amassment of bear bones incertain places by the activities of the bears themselves as Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan correctly noticed The parts of skeletons of the deceasedanimals which originally are in their anatomical order are thrownin disorder or scattered by later generations of bears Sometimes theyare pressed to the walls where they are relatively protected againstfurther decay77 Also the outweighing of skulls and long bones is aresult of a process of natural decay and not due to human activitiesThe mentioned parts of the skeleton are relatively heavy and compactso that they are more able to resist decomposition processes thanthe small vertebrae ribs foot-bones or hand-bones A result of thoseprocesses is the natural selection of the bone material78 But notonly decomposition in uences the state of the bones During theirhistory the caves were ooded several times as the accumulatedsediments prove Such oodings do not remain without in uence onthe fossil material With high water level and stronger current all loosematerial is either rinsed away or carried for a certain distance andthen dropped at a place where there is a weaker current During theseprocesses the anatomical bone order is radically altered Therefore

77 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 3978 Ziegler 1975 44-45

438 Ina Wunn

the accumulation of several skulls in one place and the absenceof other bones is due to geological and sedimentologica l processesand not to human intervention The oating ability of sediments canbe reduced by prominent parts of the walls or unevenness of the oor resulting in some bone parts being deposited in the proximityof obstacles A concrete example of this effect is the discovery ofseveral skulls deposited in a crosslike pattern in the Cold Cave ofthe Bihor Mountains The obstacle which reduced the transportabilityof the skulls crucially was a stone at which the fossil skulls weredeposited79 Just as little as the assortment of the bone material isproof of human activities so the adjustment of the fossils is anunnatural process The movements of a transport medium be it windsediment or water are transferred to the material to be transportedso that the movement in a special direction leads to its assortmentTherefore the assortment of bear skulls is not due to human activitiesbut to the owing water or other transport mediums in the caves Itcannot be said clearly enough There was no cave bear worship inthe middle Palaeolithic period at all The bear caves show exactlywhat a palaeontologis t would expect Nothing suggests that the naturalprocess of decay and sedimentation was at any time interrupted ordisturbed80

Combined burials of man and cave bear

In connection with assumed bear worship the opinion was heldthat sometimes men and bear were buried together in one grave81 Asevidence served the excavations at Le Reacutegourdou near Lascaux whereunder a hill of debris both the remains of a bear and a Neanderthal manwere preserved The French archaeologist Fabienne May demonstratedthat the remains of the bear bore no connection with the human

79 See Lascu et al 1996 30 plate 380 Wunn 1999a 6ff81 Rust 1986 15

Beginning of Religion 439

skeleton and questioned whether there was a funeral at Le Reacutegourdouat all82

Skull deposits and skull worship

Just as the bear worship was regarded as irrefutable fact there washardly any doubt that Neanderthal man subjected the heads of thedeceased to a special treatment and set them up for ritual purposesOther scholars are convinced that Neanderthal man hunted fellowhumans to kill and eat them83 It is said that the skulls of the killedlater became the focal point of a ritual This hypothesis is suggestedby Ioan Couliano ldquoEinige Schaumldel sind in einer Weise verformtdie den Gedanken an ein Herausloumlsen des Gehirns nahelegenrdquo84

Alfred Rust expresses himself absolutely clearly He is sure that the nds of isolated lower jaws and craniums are closely connected withreligious customs85 Detailed and critically Johannes Maringer arguesthe question of the skull cult He discusses the nds which wereconsidered as proof of the presence of the alleged practices Thereis for example the crushed childlike skull from Gibraltar or the nds of human remains at Weimar-Ehringsdorf and particularly theoutstanding nd of the skull of Monte Circeo which is mentionedby every author as evidence of the described ritual practice Finallyhe comes to the following result ldquoDas Fundbild der Guattari-Grottespricht klar fuumlr einen Kult in dessen Mittelpunkt der Schaumldel standUrspruumlnglich scheint er auf einem Stock aufgesteckt gewesen zusein Einem heiligen Bannkreis gleich umgab ihn der Kranz vonSteinen Der ganze Houmlhlenteil erweckt den Eindruck als habe er den inder vorderen Houmlhle wohnenden Urmenschen als Heiligtum gedientrdquo86

and further ldquoDie Schaumldelsetzungen duumlrften aller Wahrscheinlichkeitnach eine Art Schaumldelkult darstellen in dem das Gedaumlchtnis der

82 Ibid 1583 Ullrich 1978 293ff See also the overview in Henke and Rothe 1999 27784 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2885 Rust 1991 19486 Maringer 1956 80

440 Ina Wunn

Verstorbenen gep egt und ihre Hilfe wie auch ihr Schutz fuumlr die Sippeer eht wurderdquo87 Even Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan agrees that the skull ofMonte Circeo is an intentional deposition of a skull but he refusesto draw any conclusions concerning religious customs88 On the otherhand he can prove that all other nds of isolated heads or jaws arethe result of taphonomic processes89 After a careful re-examinationof the original reports of the excavations Fabienne May states thatnone of the descriptions of the excavations is suf cient to con rm ordisprove the hypothesis of a ritual90 The discovery of a supposed cultsite at Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan where the skull of a child was set upbetween several skulls of ibex does not prove the hypothesis of a cultIn this case the remnants of ibexes and the skull of the child have noconnection at all91 Since it could be shown that even the skull depositof Monte Circeo was not the result of human activities but that thedamages of the skull were due to the work of hungry hyenas the lastargument in favour of a skull cult is disproved92

Cannibalism

Cannibalism has already been mentioned in connection with thedeposition of human skulls Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan expresses him-self as follows ldquoDie Existenz eines religioumlsen Kannibalismus imPalaumlolithikum mag wahrscheinlich sein doch laumlszligt sich dies bei dergegenwaumlrtigen Materiallage absolut nicht beweisen Und dennochspricht kein Autor von der palaumlolithischen Religion ohne fuumlr odergegen die Kannibalismusthese Stellung zu beziehen wobei in groumlszlige-rem Umfang auf ethnographische Beispiele zuruumlckgegriffen wirdrdquo93

But particularly those ethnographic analogies give strong argumentsagainst the hypothesis of prehistoric cannibalism The anthropologis t

87 Ibid 8588 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 5389 Ibid 54-5690 May 1986 1791 Ibid 33-3492 Henke and Rothe 1994 52793 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 56

Beginning of Religion 441

Gabriele Weiss and the archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher discuss thetopic of cannibalism carefully94 They state that the ethnographic ma-terial itself is frequently not convincing because it is based mainly onsensational reports of past adventurers There are no assertions by eye-witnesses but stories of man eaters were always reported by writerswho only stated that they had heard about those customs The cus-tom of cannibalism itself was always stated to have been given upjust several years before the arrival of the traveller95 Frequently theassumption that a certain people was guilty of cannibalism was usedpropagandistically in order to be able to lead a war against this peo-ple or to force them into slavery96 On the other hand it was a wellknown rumour in Africa even up to the beginning of this century thatEuropeans fed on the esh of African children97 It is argued by HeidiPeter-Roumlcher that there is no evidence of cannibalism among recentpeoples at all98 This means that it is nonsense to search for the reasonand the origin of that custom in prehistoric times It cannot be decidedto what extent Sigmund Freud with his hypothesis of the origin of hu-man society must be blamed for evoking the idea of early man-eatersIn his Totem und Tabu he made several statements about the origin ofhuman society claiming that at the beginning of prehistory a group ofhumans was ruled by a despotic patriarch until he was killed and eatenby his sons99 The subtitle of his book ldquoEinige Uumlbereinstimmungen imSeelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotikerrdquo100 re ects however the

94 Weiss 1987 142-159 and Peter-Roumlcher 198995 Volhard 1939 36996 Gabriele Weiss (1987 152) mentions the example of a decree of Queen Isabella

in 1503 who gave permission to enslave the Caribbean Indians because they weresaid to be man-eaters

97 Ibid 15098 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 On the contrary the American anthropologist Christy Turner

is convinced that the Anasazi an Indian people who lived in the southern parts of theUnited States during historical times did human hunting See Turner 1999

99 See Weiss 1987 44-45100 Weiss 1987 44

442 Ina Wunn

opinion of many of his contemporaries and colleagues and contributesto the picture of the mentality of Neanderthal man until today101

The facts on which the theory of prehistoric cannibalism are basedare usually poor Frequently it was suf cient to assume cannibalismexisted if a skeleton was found incomplete or not in anatomical or-der102 It is still considered a strong proof for cannibalism when splithuman bones occur as were excavated at Krapina The defenders ofthe cannibalism thesis argue that the remnants of human bones lookabsolutely similar to the scattered animal bones at the same excava-tion site Therefore they come to the conclusion that Neanderthal mantreated fellow humans in the same way as he treated game This argu-ment is still stressed by the anthropologist s Tim White and Alban De- eur Scattered bones of human beings and deer in the cave of Moula-Guercy show the same scratches103 This argument presupposes how-ever that the humans as well as the animals were killed by Neanderthalman Both the humans and the animals could however have been thevictims of carnivores for example hyena or cave lion or the scratcheson human and animal bones may be due to taphonomic processes104

This thesis would explain the remains of Krapina as well as the ndingsof Moula-Guercy In any case the identical treatment of human andanimal bones and the missing of any traces of a ritual do not promotethe hypothesis of a religious custom In this case Krapina and Moula-Guercy would prove that Neanderthal man hunted other humans formeat This seems however to be unlikely because the hunters of theMousterian lived in a habitat full of game which was for sure easier tokill than humans

101 Campbell 1987 339102 Maringer 1956 81f In the excavation report of the site Weimar-Ehringsdorf

cannibalism is not mentioned at all See Feustel 1989 391-393103 De eur et al 1999 128-131104 It is still more than dif cult to decide whether scratches on bones are due to

human activities to carnivores or to taphonomic processes The topic is still debated

among scientists For an overview see Henke and Rothe 1994 19-25

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

434 Ina Wunn

recent hunter-gatherer communities cannot be consulted in order to de-rive from them a certain belief of prehistoric man Even people livingon a relatively primitive economical level up to the present day havebeen affected by their past which has in uenced their state of mindAs a result their ideas and religious conceptions changed in the samemanner as the belief system of modern communities did63 The an-thropologist Wilhelm Emil Muumlhlmann acknowledges the arguments ofMax Raphael when he emphasises that all known primitive religionsare younger than theological religions64 Even if ecological and eco-nomical prerequisites of different societies are the same they do notnecessarily have the same or a similar belief system identical ritualssymbols and practices Hermann Schulz emphasises ldquoKulturell aufdas engste verwandte Gruppen koumlnnen einen religioumls-symbolisch undartefaktreichen Ritualismus entwickeln (Sepik-Gebiet) oder innerhalbder elaborierten ritualsymbolische n Medien tendentiell nichtreligioumlseartefakt-arme Programme elaborieren (Kapauku)rdquo65

The arguments show that it is by no means suf cient to nd prooffor the hunting practices of Neanderthal man in order to imply any kindof religion and especially not a de nite and well-known religion

Bear-cult

The existence of the cult of the bear in the middle Palaeolithic pe-riod is taken for granted Aringke Hultkrantz writes ldquoDie Kulturen des ark-

63 Max Raphael writes ldquoMan hat diese Schwierigkeit umgehen wollen durchHeranziehen von Aussagen sogenannter primitiver Kulturvoumllker Diese nur in sehrengen Grenzen moumlgliche Analogie uumlbersieht daszlig auch diese Staumlmme eine Geschichtegehabt haben mdash eine regressive statt der progressiven der Kulturvoumllker Es liegt einunberechtigtes Vorurteil in der Annahme der Einfrierung des Gewesenen denn dielsquoPrimitivenrsquo nden sich selbst wo sie auf dem Stadium der Jagdwirtschaft stehengeblieben sind mit den alten Werkzeugen und Waffen einer anderen Umgebunggegenuumlber die starken den Einzelmenschen an Maumlchtigkeit uumlberragenden Tiere sindersetzt durch wesentlich kleinere und schwaumlchererdquo (Raphael 1978 78)

64 Muumlhlmann 1957 119865 Schulz 1993 189

Beginning of Religion 435

tischen Raumes sind Bruchstuumlcke einer palaumlolithischen Jagdkulturrdquo66

Friedrich Heiler67 refers to similar ideas as those expressed by JosephCampbell who describes the cult of the bear in an interesting buthardly well-grounded manner First Campbell refers to a bear-festivalamong the Ainu After the killing of the captured bear and during theceremonies the skull of the animal is put at the top of a long stick68

In a second step Campbell portrays Neanderthal man in impressiveterms ldquo when the remains of a strangely brutish yet manlike skele-ton were found in a limestone quarry not far from Duumlsseldorf in theValley of Neanderrdquo69 The following descriptions shortly mention thecaves of the Alps where the remains of the bears were detected Theexcavators had the impression that the arrangement of the fossil bonescould hardly be due to nature so they attributed this to the activitiesof H neanderthalensi s who were assumed to have killed the animalsand arranged their bones during certain ceremonies70 It is true thatnearly everywhere in the Arctic primitive peoples know certain ritu-als connected with the hunting of the bear71 The excavators of thecaves Emil Baumlchler and Karl Houmlrmann took these ceremonies of cir-cumpolar peoples to prove their hypothesis of an ancient bear-cult inprehistoric times72 In the following years several discoveries of simi-lar bear-caves seemed to support the hypothesis of cave bear worshipEmil Baumlchler himself discovered bear bone deposits at the Wilden-mannlisloch in Switzerland and in Sloveniarsquos Mornova Cave In 1946Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan excavated seven cave bear skulls arranged in acircle in Furtins Cave Saocircne-et-Loire In 1950 Kurt Ehrenberg secured

66 Hultkrantz 1998 75167 See Heiler 1979 7868 Campbell 1987 334ff69 Ibid 33970 Ibid 341f71 Edsman 1957 84172 Maringer 1956 95ff

436 Ina Wunn

a deposit of long bones arranged together with cave bear skulls in theSalzhofen Cave in the Austrian Alps73

The latest nd of supposed traces of prehistoric cave bear worshipwas published in 1996 In the Rumanian Bihor-Mountains ChristianLascu et al discovered a cave rich in palaeontologica l cave beardeposits74 Scholars such as Johannes Maringer or Aringke Hultkrantzrefer to the reports of the excavators when they interpret the depositsas the remainder of cult practice The historian Karl Narr also gives anaccount of the deposits of cave bear skulls and long bones but remainssceptical75

A detailed discussion of the nds of cave bear bones from a palaeon-tological and ethnographic point of view led to completely differentresults76 The careful and critical use of ethnographic analogues onwhich the theories of a cave bear cult is founded in the end leads toeven contrary results If H neanderthalensi s had known cave bear wor-ship its traces would have been found inside the settlements The re-mains of such a cult would have been the bone deposits of Neanderthalmanrsquos favourite and most dangerous game among which howeverthe bear did not rank Recent peoples who know the bear cult catchor kill a bear in his winter accommodation and bring it to their settle-ment There it is killed and eaten by the villagers under different ritualregulations The bones of the dead game are put into a holy place orare carefully buried near the village but never brought back again tothe dwelling of the bear

The most impressive arguments against cave bear worship comenevertheless from the bone deposits itself Crucial palaeontologica lobjections are to be stated rst of all Both the cave bear (Ursusspelaeus) which was extinct at the end of the last ice age and thebrown bear (Ursus arctos) which spread all over Eurasia since theEem period show a strong preference for cave accommodation There

73 See Lascu et al 1996 19-20 and Maringer 1956 91-9674 See Lascu et al 199675 Narr 1957 1076 Wunn 1999a 3-23

Beginning of Religion 437

they hide during wintertime and give birth to their young The caveswhere the relics of alleged bear worship were found are the naturalhabitat of the animals where they spend the long winters and hidetheir young At those places the bears sometimes died for severalreasons for example age illness lack of food Therefore their bonefossils are bound to be found in those places if they were not carriedoff by carrion eaters or removed by sedimentologica l processes Theoccurrence of cave bear bones in the caves of the ice age which servedgenerations of bear families as shelter is just what a palaeontologis twould expect

The proponents of Palaeolithic bear worship did not only think themere occurrence of bear bones in the caves to be remarkable butalso their alleged assortment and arrangement in which they werefound However there rst takes place an amassment of bear bones incertain places by the activities of the bears themselves as Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan correctly noticed The parts of skeletons of the deceasedanimals which originally are in their anatomical order are thrownin disorder or scattered by later generations of bears Sometimes theyare pressed to the walls where they are relatively protected againstfurther decay77 Also the outweighing of skulls and long bones is aresult of a process of natural decay and not due to human activitiesThe mentioned parts of the skeleton are relatively heavy and compactso that they are more able to resist decomposition processes thanthe small vertebrae ribs foot-bones or hand-bones A result of thoseprocesses is the natural selection of the bone material78 But notonly decomposition in uences the state of the bones During theirhistory the caves were ooded several times as the accumulatedsediments prove Such oodings do not remain without in uence onthe fossil material With high water level and stronger current all loosematerial is either rinsed away or carried for a certain distance andthen dropped at a place where there is a weaker current During theseprocesses the anatomical bone order is radically altered Therefore

77 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 3978 Ziegler 1975 44-45

438 Ina Wunn

the accumulation of several skulls in one place and the absenceof other bones is due to geological and sedimentologica l processesand not to human intervention The oating ability of sediments canbe reduced by prominent parts of the walls or unevenness of the oor resulting in some bone parts being deposited in the proximityof obstacles A concrete example of this effect is the discovery ofseveral skulls deposited in a crosslike pattern in the Cold Cave ofthe Bihor Mountains The obstacle which reduced the transportabilityof the skulls crucially was a stone at which the fossil skulls weredeposited79 Just as little as the assortment of the bone material isproof of human activities so the adjustment of the fossils is anunnatural process The movements of a transport medium be it windsediment or water are transferred to the material to be transportedso that the movement in a special direction leads to its assortmentTherefore the assortment of bear skulls is not due to human activitiesbut to the owing water or other transport mediums in the caves Itcannot be said clearly enough There was no cave bear worship inthe middle Palaeolithic period at all The bear caves show exactlywhat a palaeontologis t would expect Nothing suggests that the naturalprocess of decay and sedimentation was at any time interrupted ordisturbed80

Combined burials of man and cave bear

In connection with assumed bear worship the opinion was heldthat sometimes men and bear were buried together in one grave81 Asevidence served the excavations at Le Reacutegourdou near Lascaux whereunder a hill of debris both the remains of a bear and a Neanderthal manwere preserved The French archaeologist Fabienne May demonstratedthat the remains of the bear bore no connection with the human

79 See Lascu et al 1996 30 plate 380 Wunn 1999a 6ff81 Rust 1986 15

Beginning of Religion 439

skeleton and questioned whether there was a funeral at Le Reacutegourdouat all82

Skull deposits and skull worship

Just as the bear worship was regarded as irrefutable fact there washardly any doubt that Neanderthal man subjected the heads of thedeceased to a special treatment and set them up for ritual purposesOther scholars are convinced that Neanderthal man hunted fellowhumans to kill and eat them83 It is said that the skulls of the killedlater became the focal point of a ritual This hypothesis is suggestedby Ioan Couliano ldquoEinige Schaumldel sind in einer Weise verformtdie den Gedanken an ein Herausloumlsen des Gehirns nahelegenrdquo84

Alfred Rust expresses himself absolutely clearly He is sure that the nds of isolated lower jaws and craniums are closely connected withreligious customs85 Detailed and critically Johannes Maringer arguesthe question of the skull cult He discusses the nds which wereconsidered as proof of the presence of the alleged practices Thereis for example the crushed childlike skull from Gibraltar or the nds of human remains at Weimar-Ehringsdorf and particularly theoutstanding nd of the skull of Monte Circeo which is mentionedby every author as evidence of the described ritual practice Finallyhe comes to the following result ldquoDas Fundbild der Guattari-Grottespricht klar fuumlr einen Kult in dessen Mittelpunkt der Schaumldel standUrspruumlnglich scheint er auf einem Stock aufgesteckt gewesen zusein Einem heiligen Bannkreis gleich umgab ihn der Kranz vonSteinen Der ganze Houmlhlenteil erweckt den Eindruck als habe er den inder vorderen Houmlhle wohnenden Urmenschen als Heiligtum gedientrdquo86

and further ldquoDie Schaumldelsetzungen duumlrften aller Wahrscheinlichkeitnach eine Art Schaumldelkult darstellen in dem das Gedaumlchtnis der

82 Ibid 1583 Ullrich 1978 293ff See also the overview in Henke and Rothe 1999 27784 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2885 Rust 1991 19486 Maringer 1956 80

440 Ina Wunn

Verstorbenen gep egt und ihre Hilfe wie auch ihr Schutz fuumlr die Sippeer eht wurderdquo87 Even Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan agrees that the skull ofMonte Circeo is an intentional deposition of a skull but he refusesto draw any conclusions concerning religious customs88 On the otherhand he can prove that all other nds of isolated heads or jaws arethe result of taphonomic processes89 After a careful re-examinationof the original reports of the excavations Fabienne May states thatnone of the descriptions of the excavations is suf cient to con rm ordisprove the hypothesis of a ritual90 The discovery of a supposed cultsite at Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan where the skull of a child was set upbetween several skulls of ibex does not prove the hypothesis of a cultIn this case the remnants of ibexes and the skull of the child have noconnection at all91 Since it could be shown that even the skull depositof Monte Circeo was not the result of human activities but that thedamages of the skull were due to the work of hungry hyenas the lastargument in favour of a skull cult is disproved92

Cannibalism

Cannibalism has already been mentioned in connection with thedeposition of human skulls Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan expresses him-self as follows ldquoDie Existenz eines religioumlsen Kannibalismus imPalaumlolithikum mag wahrscheinlich sein doch laumlszligt sich dies bei dergegenwaumlrtigen Materiallage absolut nicht beweisen Und dennochspricht kein Autor von der palaumlolithischen Religion ohne fuumlr odergegen die Kannibalismusthese Stellung zu beziehen wobei in groumlszlige-rem Umfang auf ethnographische Beispiele zuruumlckgegriffen wirdrdquo93

But particularly those ethnographic analogies give strong argumentsagainst the hypothesis of prehistoric cannibalism The anthropologis t

87 Ibid 8588 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 5389 Ibid 54-5690 May 1986 1791 Ibid 33-3492 Henke and Rothe 1994 52793 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 56

Beginning of Religion 441

Gabriele Weiss and the archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher discuss thetopic of cannibalism carefully94 They state that the ethnographic ma-terial itself is frequently not convincing because it is based mainly onsensational reports of past adventurers There are no assertions by eye-witnesses but stories of man eaters were always reported by writerswho only stated that they had heard about those customs The cus-tom of cannibalism itself was always stated to have been given upjust several years before the arrival of the traveller95 Frequently theassumption that a certain people was guilty of cannibalism was usedpropagandistically in order to be able to lead a war against this peo-ple or to force them into slavery96 On the other hand it was a wellknown rumour in Africa even up to the beginning of this century thatEuropeans fed on the esh of African children97 It is argued by HeidiPeter-Roumlcher that there is no evidence of cannibalism among recentpeoples at all98 This means that it is nonsense to search for the reasonand the origin of that custom in prehistoric times It cannot be decidedto what extent Sigmund Freud with his hypothesis of the origin of hu-man society must be blamed for evoking the idea of early man-eatersIn his Totem und Tabu he made several statements about the origin ofhuman society claiming that at the beginning of prehistory a group ofhumans was ruled by a despotic patriarch until he was killed and eatenby his sons99 The subtitle of his book ldquoEinige Uumlbereinstimmungen imSeelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotikerrdquo100 re ects however the

94 Weiss 1987 142-159 and Peter-Roumlcher 198995 Volhard 1939 36996 Gabriele Weiss (1987 152) mentions the example of a decree of Queen Isabella

in 1503 who gave permission to enslave the Caribbean Indians because they weresaid to be man-eaters

97 Ibid 15098 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 On the contrary the American anthropologist Christy Turner

is convinced that the Anasazi an Indian people who lived in the southern parts of theUnited States during historical times did human hunting See Turner 1999

99 See Weiss 1987 44-45100 Weiss 1987 44

442 Ina Wunn

opinion of many of his contemporaries and colleagues and contributesto the picture of the mentality of Neanderthal man until today101

The facts on which the theory of prehistoric cannibalism are basedare usually poor Frequently it was suf cient to assume cannibalismexisted if a skeleton was found incomplete or not in anatomical or-der102 It is still considered a strong proof for cannibalism when splithuman bones occur as were excavated at Krapina The defenders ofthe cannibalism thesis argue that the remnants of human bones lookabsolutely similar to the scattered animal bones at the same excava-tion site Therefore they come to the conclusion that Neanderthal mantreated fellow humans in the same way as he treated game This argu-ment is still stressed by the anthropologist s Tim White and Alban De- eur Scattered bones of human beings and deer in the cave of Moula-Guercy show the same scratches103 This argument presupposes how-ever that the humans as well as the animals were killed by Neanderthalman Both the humans and the animals could however have been thevictims of carnivores for example hyena or cave lion or the scratcheson human and animal bones may be due to taphonomic processes104

This thesis would explain the remains of Krapina as well as the ndingsof Moula-Guercy In any case the identical treatment of human andanimal bones and the missing of any traces of a ritual do not promotethe hypothesis of a religious custom In this case Krapina and Moula-Guercy would prove that Neanderthal man hunted other humans formeat This seems however to be unlikely because the hunters of theMousterian lived in a habitat full of game which was for sure easier tokill than humans

101 Campbell 1987 339102 Maringer 1956 81f In the excavation report of the site Weimar-Ehringsdorf

cannibalism is not mentioned at all See Feustel 1989 391-393103 De eur et al 1999 128-131104 It is still more than dif cult to decide whether scratches on bones are due to

human activities to carnivores or to taphonomic processes The topic is still debated

among scientists For an overview see Henke and Rothe 1994 19-25

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

Beginning of Religion 435

tischen Raumes sind Bruchstuumlcke einer palaumlolithischen Jagdkulturrdquo66

Friedrich Heiler67 refers to similar ideas as those expressed by JosephCampbell who describes the cult of the bear in an interesting buthardly well-grounded manner First Campbell refers to a bear-festivalamong the Ainu After the killing of the captured bear and during theceremonies the skull of the animal is put at the top of a long stick68

In a second step Campbell portrays Neanderthal man in impressiveterms ldquo when the remains of a strangely brutish yet manlike skele-ton were found in a limestone quarry not far from Duumlsseldorf in theValley of Neanderrdquo69 The following descriptions shortly mention thecaves of the Alps where the remains of the bears were detected Theexcavators had the impression that the arrangement of the fossil bonescould hardly be due to nature so they attributed this to the activitiesof H neanderthalensi s who were assumed to have killed the animalsand arranged their bones during certain ceremonies70 It is true thatnearly everywhere in the Arctic primitive peoples know certain ritu-als connected with the hunting of the bear71 The excavators of thecaves Emil Baumlchler and Karl Houmlrmann took these ceremonies of cir-cumpolar peoples to prove their hypothesis of an ancient bear-cult inprehistoric times72 In the following years several discoveries of simi-lar bear-caves seemed to support the hypothesis of cave bear worshipEmil Baumlchler himself discovered bear bone deposits at the Wilden-mannlisloch in Switzerland and in Sloveniarsquos Mornova Cave In 1946Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan excavated seven cave bear skulls arranged in acircle in Furtins Cave Saocircne-et-Loire In 1950 Kurt Ehrenberg secured

66 Hultkrantz 1998 75167 See Heiler 1979 7868 Campbell 1987 334ff69 Ibid 33970 Ibid 341f71 Edsman 1957 84172 Maringer 1956 95ff

436 Ina Wunn

a deposit of long bones arranged together with cave bear skulls in theSalzhofen Cave in the Austrian Alps73

The latest nd of supposed traces of prehistoric cave bear worshipwas published in 1996 In the Rumanian Bihor-Mountains ChristianLascu et al discovered a cave rich in palaeontologica l cave beardeposits74 Scholars such as Johannes Maringer or Aringke Hultkrantzrefer to the reports of the excavators when they interpret the depositsas the remainder of cult practice The historian Karl Narr also gives anaccount of the deposits of cave bear skulls and long bones but remainssceptical75

A detailed discussion of the nds of cave bear bones from a palaeon-tological and ethnographic point of view led to completely differentresults76 The careful and critical use of ethnographic analogues onwhich the theories of a cave bear cult is founded in the end leads toeven contrary results If H neanderthalensi s had known cave bear wor-ship its traces would have been found inside the settlements The re-mains of such a cult would have been the bone deposits of Neanderthalmanrsquos favourite and most dangerous game among which howeverthe bear did not rank Recent peoples who know the bear cult catchor kill a bear in his winter accommodation and bring it to their settle-ment There it is killed and eaten by the villagers under different ritualregulations The bones of the dead game are put into a holy place orare carefully buried near the village but never brought back again tothe dwelling of the bear

The most impressive arguments against cave bear worship comenevertheless from the bone deposits itself Crucial palaeontologica lobjections are to be stated rst of all Both the cave bear (Ursusspelaeus) which was extinct at the end of the last ice age and thebrown bear (Ursus arctos) which spread all over Eurasia since theEem period show a strong preference for cave accommodation There

73 See Lascu et al 1996 19-20 and Maringer 1956 91-9674 See Lascu et al 199675 Narr 1957 1076 Wunn 1999a 3-23

Beginning of Religion 437

they hide during wintertime and give birth to their young The caveswhere the relics of alleged bear worship were found are the naturalhabitat of the animals where they spend the long winters and hidetheir young At those places the bears sometimes died for severalreasons for example age illness lack of food Therefore their bonefossils are bound to be found in those places if they were not carriedoff by carrion eaters or removed by sedimentologica l processes Theoccurrence of cave bear bones in the caves of the ice age which servedgenerations of bear families as shelter is just what a palaeontologis twould expect

The proponents of Palaeolithic bear worship did not only think themere occurrence of bear bones in the caves to be remarkable butalso their alleged assortment and arrangement in which they werefound However there rst takes place an amassment of bear bones incertain places by the activities of the bears themselves as Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan correctly noticed The parts of skeletons of the deceasedanimals which originally are in their anatomical order are thrownin disorder or scattered by later generations of bears Sometimes theyare pressed to the walls where they are relatively protected againstfurther decay77 Also the outweighing of skulls and long bones is aresult of a process of natural decay and not due to human activitiesThe mentioned parts of the skeleton are relatively heavy and compactso that they are more able to resist decomposition processes thanthe small vertebrae ribs foot-bones or hand-bones A result of thoseprocesses is the natural selection of the bone material78 But notonly decomposition in uences the state of the bones During theirhistory the caves were ooded several times as the accumulatedsediments prove Such oodings do not remain without in uence onthe fossil material With high water level and stronger current all loosematerial is either rinsed away or carried for a certain distance andthen dropped at a place where there is a weaker current During theseprocesses the anatomical bone order is radically altered Therefore

77 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 3978 Ziegler 1975 44-45

438 Ina Wunn

the accumulation of several skulls in one place and the absenceof other bones is due to geological and sedimentologica l processesand not to human intervention The oating ability of sediments canbe reduced by prominent parts of the walls or unevenness of the oor resulting in some bone parts being deposited in the proximityof obstacles A concrete example of this effect is the discovery ofseveral skulls deposited in a crosslike pattern in the Cold Cave ofthe Bihor Mountains The obstacle which reduced the transportabilityof the skulls crucially was a stone at which the fossil skulls weredeposited79 Just as little as the assortment of the bone material isproof of human activities so the adjustment of the fossils is anunnatural process The movements of a transport medium be it windsediment or water are transferred to the material to be transportedso that the movement in a special direction leads to its assortmentTherefore the assortment of bear skulls is not due to human activitiesbut to the owing water or other transport mediums in the caves Itcannot be said clearly enough There was no cave bear worship inthe middle Palaeolithic period at all The bear caves show exactlywhat a palaeontologis t would expect Nothing suggests that the naturalprocess of decay and sedimentation was at any time interrupted ordisturbed80

Combined burials of man and cave bear

In connection with assumed bear worship the opinion was heldthat sometimes men and bear were buried together in one grave81 Asevidence served the excavations at Le Reacutegourdou near Lascaux whereunder a hill of debris both the remains of a bear and a Neanderthal manwere preserved The French archaeologist Fabienne May demonstratedthat the remains of the bear bore no connection with the human

79 See Lascu et al 1996 30 plate 380 Wunn 1999a 6ff81 Rust 1986 15

Beginning of Religion 439

skeleton and questioned whether there was a funeral at Le Reacutegourdouat all82

Skull deposits and skull worship

Just as the bear worship was regarded as irrefutable fact there washardly any doubt that Neanderthal man subjected the heads of thedeceased to a special treatment and set them up for ritual purposesOther scholars are convinced that Neanderthal man hunted fellowhumans to kill and eat them83 It is said that the skulls of the killedlater became the focal point of a ritual This hypothesis is suggestedby Ioan Couliano ldquoEinige Schaumldel sind in einer Weise verformtdie den Gedanken an ein Herausloumlsen des Gehirns nahelegenrdquo84

Alfred Rust expresses himself absolutely clearly He is sure that the nds of isolated lower jaws and craniums are closely connected withreligious customs85 Detailed and critically Johannes Maringer arguesthe question of the skull cult He discusses the nds which wereconsidered as proof of the presence of the alleged practices Thereis for example the crushed childlike skull from Gibraltar or the nds of human remains at Weimar-Ehringsdorf and particularly theoutstanding nd of the skull of Monte Circeo which is mentionedby every author as evidence of the described ritual practice Finallyhe comes to the following result ldquoDas Fundbild der Guattari-Grottespricht klar fuumlr einen Kult in dessen Mittelpunkt der Schaumldel standUrspruumlnglich scheint er auf einem Stock aufgesteckt gewesen zusein Einem heiligen Bannkreis gleich umgab ihn der Kranz vonSteinen Der ganze Houmlhlenteil erweckt den Eindruck als habe er den inder vorderen Houmlhle wohnenden Urmenschen als Heiligtum gedientrdquo86

and further ldquoDie Schaumldelsetzungen duumlrften aller Wahrscheinlichkeitnach eine Art Schaumldelkult darstellen in dem das Gedaumlchtnis der

82 Ibid 1583 Ullrich 1978 293ff See also the overview in Henke and Rothe 1999 27784 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2885 Rust 1991 19486 Maringer 1956 80

440 Ina Wunn

Verstorbenen gep egt und ihre Hilfe wie auch ihr Schutz fuumlr die Sippeer eht wurderdquo87 Even Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan agrees that the skull ofMonte Circeo is an intentional deposition of a skull but he refusesto draw any conclusions concerning religious customs88 On the otherhand he can prove that all other nds of isolated heads or jaws arethe result of taphonomic processes89 After a careful re-examinationof the original reports of the excavations Fabienne May states thatnone of the descriptions of the excavations is suf cient to con rm ordisprove the hypothesis of a ritual90 The discovery of a supposed cultsite at Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan where the skull of a child was set upbetween several skulls of ibex does not prove the hypothesis of a cultIn this case the remnants of ibexes and the skull of the child have noconnection at all91 Since it could be shown that even the skull depositof Monte Circeo was not the result of human activities but that thedamages of the skull were due to the work of hungry hyenas the lastargument in favour of a skull cult is disproved92

Cannibalism

Cannibalism has already been mentioned in connection with thedeposition of human skulls Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan expresses him-self as follows ldquoDie Existenz eines religioumlsen Kannibalismus imPalaumlolithikum mag wahrscheinlich sein doch laumlszligt sich dies bei dergegenwaumlrtigen Materiallage absolut nicht beweisen Und dennochspricht kein Autor von der palaumlolithischen Religion ohne fuumlr odergegen die Kannibalismusthese Stellung zu beziehen wobei in groumlszlige-rem Umfang auf ethnographische Beispiele zuruumlckgegriffen wirdrdquo93

But particularly those ethnographic analogies give strong argumentsagainst the hypothesis of prehistoric cannibalism The anthropologis t

87 Ibid 8588 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 5389 Ibid 54-5690 May 1986 1791 Ibid 33-3492 Henke and Rothe 1994 52793 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 56

Beginning of Religion 441

Gabriele Weiss and the archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher discuss thetopic of cannibalism carefully94 They state that the ethnographic ma-terial itself is frequently not convincing because it is based mainly onsensational reports of past adventurers There are no assertions by eye-witnesses but stories of man eaters were always reported by writerswho only stated that they had heard about those customs The cus-tom of cannibalism itself was always stated to have been given upjust several years before the arrival of the traveller95 Frequently theassumption that a certain people was guilty of cannibalism was usedpropagandistically in order to be able to lead a war against this peo-ple or to force them into slavery96 On the other hand it was a wellknown rumour in Africa even up to the beginning of this century thatEuropeans fed on the esh of African children97 It is argued by HeidiPeter-Roumlcher that there is no evidence of cannibalism among recentpeoples at all98 This means that it is nonsense to search for the reasonand the origin of that custom in prehistoric times It cannot be decidedto what extent Sigmund Freud with his hypothesis of the origin of hu-man society must be blamed for evoking the idea of early man-eatersIn his Totem und Tabu he made several statements about the origin ofhuman society claiming that at the beginning of prehistory a group ofhumans was ruled by a despotic patriarch until he was killed and eatenby his sons99 The subtitle of his book ldquoEinige Uumlbereinstimmungen imSeelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotikerrdquo100 re ects however the

94 Weiss 1987 142-159 and Peter-Roumlcher 198995 Volhard 1939 36996 Gabriele Weiss (1987 152) mentions the example of a decree of Queen Isabella

in 1503 who gave permission to enslave the Caribbean Indians because they weresaid to be man-eaters

97 Ibid 15098 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 On the contrary the American anthropologist Christy Turner

is convinced that the Anasazi an Indian people who lived in the southern parts of theUnited States during historical times did human hunting See Turner 1999

99 See Weiss 1987 44-45100 Weiss 1987 44

442 Ina Wunn

opinion of many of his contemporaries and colleagues and contributesto the picture of the mentality of Neanderthal man until today101

The facts on which the theory of prehistoric cannibalism are basedare usually poor Frequently it was suf cient to assume cannibalismexisted if a skeleton was found incomplete or not in anatomical or-der102 It is still considered a strong proof for cannibalism when splithuman bones occur as were excavated at Krapina The defenders ofthe cannibalism thesis argue that the remnants of human bones lookabsolutely similar to the scattered animal bones at the same excava-tion site Therefore they come to the conclusion that Neanderthal mantreated fellow humans in the same way as he treated game This argu-ment is still stressed by the anthropologist s Tim White and Alban De- eur Scattered bones of human beings and deer in the cave of Moula-Guercy show the same scratches103 This argument presupposes how-ever that the humans as well as the animals were killed by Neanderthalman Both the humans and the animals could however have been thevictims of carnivores for example hyena or cave lion or the scratcheson human and animal bones may be due to taphonomic processes104

This thesis would explain the remains of Krapina as well as the ndingsof Moula-Guercy In any case the identical treatment of human andanimal bones and the missing of any traces of a ritual do not promotethe hypothesis of a religious custom In this case Krapina and Moula-Guercy would prove that Neanderthal man hunted other humans formeat This seems however to be unlikely because the hunters of theMousterian lived in a habitat full of game which was for sure easier tokill than humans

101 Campbell 1987 339102 Maringer 1956 81f In the excavation report of the site Weimar-Ehringsdorf

cannibalism is not mentioned at all See Feustel 1989 391-393103 De eur et al 1999 128-131104 It is still more than dif cult to decide whether scratches on bones are due to

human activities to carnivores or to taphonomic processes The topic is still debated

among scientists For an overview see Henke and Rothe 1994 19-25

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

436 Ina Wunn

a deposit of long bones arranged together with cave bear skulls in theSalzhofen Cave in the Austrian Alps73

The latest nd of supposed traces of prehistoric cave bear worshipwas published in 1996 In the Rumanian Bihor-Mountains ChristianLascu et al discovered a cave rich in palaeontologica l cave beardeposits74 Scholars such as Johannes Maringer or Aringke Hultkrantzrefer to the reports of the excavators when they interpret the depositsas the remainder of cult practice The historian Karl Narr also gives anaccount of the deposits of cave bear skulls and long bones but remainssceptical75

A detailed discussion of the nds of cave bear bones from a palaeon-tological and ethnographic point of view led to completely differentresults76 The careful and critical use of ethnographic analogues onwhich the theories of a cave bear cult is founded in the end leads toeven contrary results If H neanderthalensi s had known cave bear wor-ship its traces would have been found inside the settlements The re-mains of such a cult would have been the bone deposits of Neanderthalmanrsquos favourite and most dangerous game among which howeverthe bear did not rank Recent peoples who know the bear cult catchor kill a bear in his winter accommodation and bring it to their settle-ment There it is killed and eaten by the villagers under different ritualregulations The bones of the dead game are put into a holy place orare carefully buried near the village but never brought back again tothe dwelling of the bear

The most impressive arguments against cave bear worship comenevertheless from the bone deposits itself Crucial palaeontologica lobjections are to be stated rst of all Both the cave bear (Ursusspelaeus) which was extinct at the end of the last ice age and thebrown bear (Ursus arctos) which spread all over Eurasia since theEem period show a strong preference for cave accommodation There

73 See Lascu et al 1996 19-20 and Maringer 1956 91-9674 See Lascu et al 199675 Narr 1957 1076 Wunn 1999a 3-23

Beginning of Religion 437

they hide during wintertime and give birth to their young The caveswhere the relics of alleged bear worship were found are the naturalhabitat of the animals where they spend the long winters and hidetheir young At those places the bears sometimes died for severalreasons for example age illness lack of food Therefore their bonefossils are bound to be found in those places if they were not carriedoff by carrion eaters or removed by sedimentologica l processes Theoccurrence of cave bear bones in the caves of the ice age which servedgenerations of bear families as shelter is just what a palaeontologis twould expect

The proponents of Palaeolithic bear worship did not only think themere occurrence of bear bones in the caves to be remarkable butalso their alleged assortment and arrangement in which they werefound However there rst takes place an amassment of bear bones incertain places by the activities of the bears themselves as Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan correctly noticed The parts of skeletons of the deceasedanimals which originally are in their anatomical order are thrownin disorder or scattered by later generations of bears Sometimes theyare pressed to the walls where they are relatively protected againstfurther decay77 Also the outweighing of skulls and long bones is aresult of a process of natural decay and not due to human activitiesThe mentioned parts of the skeleton are relatively heavy and compactso that they are more able to resist decomposition processes thanthe small vertebrae ribs foot-bones or hand-bones A result of thoseprocesses is the natural selection of the bone material78 But notonly decomposition in uences the state of the bones During theirhistory the caves were ooded several times as the accumulatedsediments prove Such oodings do not remain without in uence onthe fossil material With high water level and stronger current all loosematerial is either rinsed away or carried for a certain distance andthen dropped at a place where there is a weaker current During theseprocesses the anatomical bone order is radically altered Therefore

77 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 3978 Ziegler 1975 44-45

438 Ina Wunn

the accumulation of several skulls in one place and the absenceof other bones is due to geological and sedimentologica l processesand not to human intervention The oating ability of sediments canbe reduced by prominent parts of the walls or unevenness of the oor resulting in some bone parts being deposited in the proximityof obstacles A concrete example of this effect is the discovery ofseveral skulls deposited in a crosslike pattern in the Cold Cave ofthe Bihor Mountains The obstacle which reduced the transportabilityof the skulls crucially was a stone at which the fossil skulls weredeposited79 Just as little as the assortment of the bone material isproof of human activities so the adjustment of the fossils is anunnatural process The movements of a transport medium be it windsediment or water are transferred to the material to be transportedso that the movement in a special direction leads to its assortmentTherefore the assortment of bear skulls is not due to human activitiesbut to the owing water or other transport mediums in the caves Itcannot be said clearly enough There was no cave bear worship inthe middle Palaeolithic period at all The bear caves show exactlywhat a palaeontologis t would expect Nothing suggests that the naturalprocess of decay and sedimentation was at any time interrupted ordisturbed80

Combined burials of man and cave bear

In connection with assumed bear worship the opinion was heldthat sometimes men and bear were buried together in one grave81 Asevidence served the excavations at Le Reacutegourdou near Lascaux whereunder a hill of debris both the remains of a bear and a Neanderthal manwere preserved The French archaeologist Fabienne May demonstratedthat the remains of the bear bore no connection with the human

79 See Lascu et al 1996 30 plate 380 Wunn 1999a 6ff81 Rust 1986 15

Beginning of Religion 439

skeleton and questioned whether there was a funeral at Le Reacutegourdouat all82

Skull deposits and skull worship

Just as the bear worship was regarded as irrefutable fact there washardly any doubt that Neanderthal man subjected the heads of thedeceased to a special treatment and set them up for ritual purposesOther scholars are convinced that Neanderthal man hunted fellowhumans to kill and eat them83 It is said that the skulls of the killedlater became the focal point of a ritual This hypothesis is suggestedby Ioan Couliano ldquoEinige Schaumldel sind in einer Weise verformtdie den Gedanken an ein Herausloumlsen des Gehirns nahelegenrdquo84

Alfred Rust expresses himself absolutely clearly He is sure that the nds of isolated lower jaws and craniums are closely connected withreligious customs85 Detailed and critically Johannes Maringer arguesthe question of the skull cult He discusses the nds which wereconsidered as proof of the presence of the alleged practices Thereis for example the crushed childlike skull from Gibraltar or the nds of human remains at Weimar-Ehringsdorf and particularly theoutstanding nd of the skull of Monte Circeo which is mentionedby every author as evidence of the described ritual practice Finallyhe comes to the following result ldquoDas Fundbild der Guattari-Grottespricht klar fuumlr einen Kult in dessen Mittelpunkt der Schaumldel standUrspruumlnglich scheint er auf einem Stock aufgesteckt gewesen zusein Einem heiligen Bannkreis gleich umgab ihn der Kranz vonSteinen Der ganze Houmlhlenteil erweckt den Eindruck als habe er den inder vorderen Houmlhle wohnenden Urmenschen als Heiligtum gedientrdquo86

and further ldquoDie Schaumldelsetzungen duumlrften aller Wahrscheinlichkeitnach eine Art Schaumldelkult darstellen in dem das Gedaumlchtnis der

82 Ibid 1583 Ullrich 1978 293ff See also the overview in Henke and Rothe 1999 27784 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2885 Rust 1991 19486 Maringer 1956 80

440 Ina Wunn

Verstorbenen gep egt und ihre Hilfe wie auch ihr Schutz fuumlr die Sippeer eht wurderdquo87 Even Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan agrees that the skull ofMonte Circeo is an intentional deposition of a skull but he refusesto draw any conclusions concerning religious customs88 On the otherhand he can prove that all other nds of isolated heads or jaws arethe result of taphonomic processes89 After a careful re-examinationof the original reports of the excavations Fabienne May states thatnone of the descriptions of the excavations is suf cient to con rm ordisprove the hypothesis of a ritual90 The discovery of a supposed cultsite at Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan where the skull of a child was set upbetween several skulls of ibex does not prove the hypothesis of a cultIn this case the remnants of ibexes and the skull of the child have noconnection at all91 Since it could be shown that even the skull depositof Monte Circeo was not the result of human activities but that thedamages of the skull were due to the work of hungry hyenas the lastargument in favour of a skull cult is disproved92

Cannibalism

Cannibalism has already been mentioned in connection with thedeposition of human skulls Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan expresses him-self as follows ldquoDie Existenz eines religioumlsen Kannibalismus imPalaumlolithikum mag wahrscheinlich sein doch laumlszligt sich dies bei dergegenwaumlrtigen Materiallage absolut nicht beweisen Und dennochspricht kein Autor von der palaumlolithischen Religion ohne fuumlr odergegen die Kannibalismusthese Stellung zu beziehen wobei in groumlszlige-rem Umfang auf ethnographische Beispiele zuruumlckgegriffen wirdrdquo93

But particularly those ethnographic analogies give strong argumentsagainst the hypothesis of prehistoric cannibalism The anthropologis t

87 Ibid 8588 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 5389 Ibid 54-5690 May 1986 1791 Ibid 33-3492 Henke and Rothe 1994 52793 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 56

Beginning of Religion 441

Gabriele Weiss and the archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher discuss thetopic of cannibalism carefully94 They state that the ethnographic ma-terial itself is frequently not convincing because it is based mainly onsensational reports of past adventurers There are no assertions by eye-witnesses but stories of man eaters were always reported by writerswho only stated that they had heard about those customs The cus-tom of cannibalism itself was always stated to have been given upjust several years before the arrival of the traveller95 Frequently theassumption that a certain people was guilty of cannibalism was usedpropagandistically in order to be able to lead a war against this peo-ple or to force them into slavery96 On the other hand it was a wellknown rumour in Africa even up to the beginning of this century thatEuropeans fed on the esh of African children97 It is argued by HeidiPeter-Roumlcher that there is no evidence of cannibalism among recentpeoples at all98 This means that it is nonsense to search for the reasonand the origin of that custom in prehistoric times It cannot be decidedto what extent Sigmund Freud with his hypothesis of the origin of hu-man society must be blamed for evoking the idea of early man-eatersIn his Totem und Tabu he made several statements about the origin ofhuman society claiming that at the beginning of prehistory a group ofhumans was ruled by a despotic patriarch until he was killed and eatenby his sons99 The subtitle of his book ldquoEinige Uumlbereinstimmungen imSeelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotikerrdquo100 re ects however the

94 Weiss 1987 142-159 and Peter-Roumlcher 198995 Volhard 1939 36996 Gabriele Weiss (1987 152) mentions the example of a decree of Queen Isabella

in 1503 who gave permission to enslave the Caribbean Indians because they weresaid to be man-eaters

97 Ibid 15098 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 On the contrary the American anthropologist Christy Turner

is convinced that the Anasazi an Indian people who lived in the southern parts of theUnited States during historical times did human hunting See Turner 1999

99 See Weiss 1987 44-45100 Weiss 1987 44

442 Ina Wunn

opinion of many of his contemporaries and colleagues and contributesto the picture of the mentality of Neanderthal man until today101

The facts on which the theory of prehistoric cannibalism are basedare usually poor Frequently it was suf cient to assume cannibalismexisted if a skeleton was found incomplete or not in anatomical or-der102 It is still considered a strong proof for cannibalism when splithuman bones occur as were excavated at Krapina The defenders ofthe cannibalism thesis argue that the remnants of human bones lookabsolutely similar to the scattered animal bones at the same excava-tion site Therefore they come to the conclusion that Neanderthal mantreated fellow humans in the same way as he treated game This argu-ment is still stressed by the anthropologist s Tim White and Alban De- eur Scattered bones of human beings and deer in the cave of Moula-Guercy show the same scratches103 This argument presupposes how-ever that the humans as well as the animals were killed by Neanderthalman Both the humans and the animals could however have been thevictims of carnivores for example hyena or cave lion or the scratcheson human and animal bones may be due to taphonomic processes104

This thesis would explain the remains of Krapina as well as the ndingsof Moula-Guercy In any case the identical treatment of human andanimal bones and the missing of any traces of a ritual do not promotethe hypothesis of a religious custom In this case Krapina and Moula-Guercy would prove that Neanderthal man hunted other humans formeat This seems however to be unlikely because the hunters of theMousterian lived in a habitat full of game which was for sure easier tokill than humans

101 Campbell 1987 339102 Maringer 1956 81f In the excavation report of the site Weimar-Ehringsdorf

cannibalism is not mentioned at all See Feustel 1989 391-393103 De eur et al 1999 128-131104 It is still more than dif cult to decide whether scratches on bones are due to

human activities to carnivores or to taphonomic processes The topic is still debated

among scientists For an overview see Henke and Rothe 1994 19-25

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

Beginning of Religion 437

they hide during wintertime and give birth to their young The caveswhere the relics of alleged bear worship were found are the naturalhabitat of the animals where they spend the long winters and hidetheir young At those places the bears sometimes died for severalreasons for example age illness lack of food Therefore their bonefossils are bound to be found in those places if they were not carriedoff by carrion eaters or removed by sedimentologica l processes Theoccurrence of cave bear bones in the caves of the ice age which servedgenerations of bear families as shelter is just what a palaeontologis twould expect

The proponents of Palaeolithic bear worship did not only think themere occurrence of bear bones in the caves to be remarkable butalso their alleged assortment and arrangement in which they werefound However there rst takes place an amassment of bear bones incertain places by the activities of the bears themselves as Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan correctly noticed The parts of skeletons of the deceasedanimals which originally are in their anatomical order are thrownin disorder or scattered by later generations of bears Sometimes theyare pressed to the walls where they are relatively protected againstfurther decay77 Also the outweighing of skulls and long bones is aresult of a process of natural decay and not due to human activitiesThe mentioned parts of the skeleton are relatively heavy and compactso that they are more able to resist decomposition processes thanthe small vertebrae ribs foot-bones or hand-bones A result of thoseprocesses is the natural selection of the bone material78 But notonly decomposition in uences the state of the bones During theirhistory the caves were ooded several times as the accumulatedsediments prove Such oodings do not remain without in uence onthe fossil material With high water level and stronger current all loosematerial is either rinsed away or carried for a certain distance andthen dropped at a place where there is a weaker current During theseprocesses the anatomical bone order is radically altered Therefore

77 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 3978 Ziegler 1975 44-45

438 Ina Wunn

the accumulation of several skulls in one place and the absenceof other bones is due to geological and sedimentologica l processesand not to human intervention The oating ability of sediments canbe reduced by prominent parts of the walls or unevenness of the oor resulting in some bone parts being deposited in the proximityof obstacles A concrete example of this effect is the discovery ofseveral skulls deposited in a crosslike pattern in the Cold Cave ofthe Bihor Mountains The obstacle which reduced the transportabilityof the skulls crucially was a stone at which the fossil skulls weredeposited79 Just as little as the assortment of the bone material isproof of human activities so the adjustment of the fossils is anunnatural process The movements of a transport medium be it windsediment or water are transferred to the material to be transportedso that the movement in a special direction leads to its assortmentTherefore the assortment of bear skulls is not due to human activitiesbut to the owing water or other transport mediums in the caves Itcannot be said clearly enough There was no cave bear worship inthe middle Palaeolithic period at all The bear caves show exactlywhat a palaeontologis t would expect Nothing suggests that the naturalprocess of decay and sedimentation was at any time interrupted ordisturbed80

Combined burials of man and cave bear

In connection with assumed bear worship the opinion was heldthat sometimes men and bear were buried together in one grave81 Asevidence served the excavations at Le Reacutegourdou near Lascaux whereunder a hill of debris both the remains of a bear and a Neanderthal manwere preserved The French archaeologist Fabienne May demonstratedthat the remains of the bear bore no connection with the human

79 See Lascu et al 1996 30 plate 380 Wunn 1999a 6ff81 Rust 1986 15

Beginning of Religion 439

skeleton and questioned whether there was a funeral at Le Reacutegourdouat all82

Skull deposits and skull worship

Just as the bear worship was regarded as irrefutable fact there washardly any doubt that Neanderthal man subjected the heads of thedeceased to a special treatment and set them up for ritual purposesOther scholars are convinced that Neanderthal man hunted fellowhumans to kill and eat them83 It is said that the skulls of the killedlater became the focal point of a ritual This hypothesis is suggestedby Ioan Couliano ldquoEinige Schaumldel sind in einer Weise verformtdie den Gedanken an ein Herausloumlsen des Gehirns nahelegenrdquo84

Alfred Rust expresses himself absolutely clearly He is sure that the nds of isolated lower jaws and craniums are closely connected withreligious customs85 Detailed and critically Johannes Maringer arguesthe question of the skull cult He discusses the nds which wereconsidered as proof of the presence of the alleged practices Thereis for example the crushed childlike skull from Gibraltar or the nds of human remains at Weimar-Ehringsdorf and particularly theoutstanding nd of the skull of Monte Circeo which is mentionedby every author as evidence of the described ritual practice Finallyhe comes to the following result ldquoDas Fundbild der Guattari-Grottespricht klar fuumlr einen Kult in dessen Mittelpunkt der Schaumldel standUrspruumlnglich scheint er auf einem Stock aufgesteckt gewesen zusein Einem heiligen Bannkreis gleich umgab ihn der Kranz vonSteinen Der ganze Houmlhlenteil erweckt den Eindruck als habe er den inder vorderen Houmlhle wohnenden Urmenschen als Heiligtum gedientrdquo86

and further ldquoDie Schaumldelsetzungen duumlrften aller Wahrscheinlichkeitnach eine Art Schaumldelkult darstellen in dem das Gedaumlchtnis der

82 Ibid 1583 Ullrich 1978 293ff See also the overview in Henke and Rothe 1999 27784 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2885 Rust 1991 19486 Maringer 1956 80

440 Ina Wunn

Verstorbenen gep egt und ihre Hilfe wie auch ihr Schutz fuumlr die Sippeer eht wurderdquo87 Even Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan agrees that the skull ofMonte Circeo is an intentional deposition of a skull but he refusesto draw any conclusions concerning religious customs88 On the otherhand he can prove that all other nds of isolated heads or jaws arethe result of taphonomic processes89 After a careful re-examinationof the original reports of the excavations Fabienne May states thatnone of the descriptions of the excavations is suf cient to con rm ordisprove the hypothesis of a ritual90 The discovery of a supposed cultsite at Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan where the skull of a child was set upbetween several skulls of ibex does not prove the hypothesis of a cultIn this case the remnants of ibexes and the skull of the child have noconnection at all91 Since it could be shown that even the skull depositof Monte Circeo was not the result of human activities but that thedamages of the skull were due to the work of hungry hyenas the lastargument in favour of a skull cult is disproved92

Cannibalism

Cannibalism has already been mentioned in connection with thedeposition of human skulls Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan expresses him-self as follows ldquoDie Existenz eines religioumlsen Kannibalismus imPalaumlolithikum mag wahrscheinlich sein doch laumlszligt sich dies bei dergegenwaumlrtigen Materiallage absolut nicht beweisen Und dennochspricht kein Autor von der palaumlolithischen Religion ohne fuumlr odergegen die Kannibalismusthese Stellung zu beziehen wobei in groumlszlige-rem Umfang auf ethnographische Beispiele zuruumlckgegriffen wirdrdquo93

But particularly those ethnographic analogies give strong argumentsagainst the hypothesis of prehistoric cannibalism The anthropologis t

87 Ibid 8588 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 5389 Ibid 54-5690 May 1986 1791 Ibid 33-3492 Henke and Rothe 1994 52793 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 56

Beginning of Religion 441

Gabriele Weiss and the archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher discuss thetopic of cannibalism carefully94 They state that the ethnographic ma-terial itself is frequently not convincing because it is based mainly onsensational reports of past adventurers There are no assertions by eye-witnesses but stories of man eaters were always reported by writerswho only stated that they had heard about those customs The cus-tom of cannibalism itself was always stated to have been given upjust several years before the arrival of the traveller95 Frequently theassumption that a certain people was guilty of cannibalism was usedpropagandistically in order to be able to lead a war against this peo-ple or to force them into slavery96 On the other hand it was a wellknown rumour in Africa even up to the beginning of this century thatEuropeans fed on the esh of African children97 It is argued by HeidiPeter-Roumlcher that there is no evidence of cannibalism among recentpeoples at all98 This means that it is nonsense to search for the reasonand the origin of that custom in prehistoric times It cannot be decidedto what extent Sigmund Freud with his hypothesis of the origin of hu-man society must be blamed for evoking the idea of early man-eatersIn his Totem und Tabu he made several statements about the origin ofhuman society claiming that at the beginning of prehistory a group ofhumans was ruled by a despotic patriarch until he was killed and eatenby his sons99 The subtitle of his book ldquoEinige Uumlbereinstimmungen imSeelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotikerrdquo100 re ects however the

94 Weiss 1987 142-159 and Peter-Roumlcher 198995 Volhard 1939 36996 Gabriele Weiss (1987 152) mentions the example of a decree of Queen Isabella

in 1503 who gave permission to enslave the Caribbean Indians because they weresaid to be man-eaters

97 Ibid 15098 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 On the contrary the American anthropologist Christy Turner

is convinced that the Anasazi an Indian people who lived in the southern parts of theUnited States during historical times did human hunting See Turner 1999

99 See Weiss 1987 44-45100 Weiss 1987 44

442 Ina Wunn

opinion of many of his contemporaries and colleagues and contributesto the picture of the mentality of Neanderthal man until today101

The facts on which the theory of prehistoric cannibalism are basedare usually poor Frequently it was suf cient to assume cannibalismexisted if a skeleton was found incomplete or not in anatomical or-der102 It is still considered a strong proof for cannibalism when splithuman bones occur as were excavated at Krapina The defenders ofthe cannibalism thesis argue that the remnants of human bones lookabsolutely similar to the scattered animal bones at the same excava-tion site Therefore they come to the conclusion that Neanderthal mantreated fellow humans in the same way as he treated game This argu-ment is still stressed by the anthropologist s Tim White and Alban De- eur Scattered bones of human beings and deer in the cave of Moula-Guercy show the same scratches103 This argument presupposes how-ever that the humans as well as the animals were killed by Neanderthalman Both the humans and the animals could however have been thevictims of carnivores for example hyena or cave lion or the scratcheson human and animal bones may be due to taphonomic processes104

This thesis would explain the remains of Krapina as well as the ndingsof Moula-Guercy In any case the identical treatment of human andanimal bones and the missing of any traces of a ritual do not promotethe hypothesis of a religious custom In this case Krapina and Moula-Guercy would prove that Neanderthal man hunted other humans formeat This seems however to be unlikely because the hunters of theMousterian lived in a habitat full of game which was for sure easier tokill than humans

101 Campbell 1987 339102 Maringer 1956 81f In the excavation report of the site Weimar-Ehringsdorf

cannibalism is not mentioned at all See Feustel 1989 391-393103 De eur et al 1999 128-131104 It is still more than dif cult to decide whether scratches on bones are due to

human activities to carnivores or to taphonomic processes The topic is still debated

among scientists For an overview see Henke and Rothe 1994 19-25

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

438 Ina Wunn

the accumulation of several skulls in one place and the absenceof other bones is due to geological and sedimentologica l processesand not to human intervention The oating ability of sediments canbe reduced by prominent parts of the walls or unevenness of the oor resulting in some bone parts being deposited in the proximityof obstacles A concrete example of this effect is the discovery ofseveral skulls deposited in a crosslike pattern in the Cold Cave ofthe Bihor Mountains The obstacle which reduced the transportabilityof the skulls crucially was a stone at which the fossil skulls weredeposited79 Just as little as the assortment of the bone material isproof of human activities so the adjustment of the fossils is anunnatural process The movements of a transport medium be it windsediment or water are transferred to the material to be transportedso that the movement in a special direction leads to its assortmentTherefore the assortment of bear skulls is not due to human activitiesbut to the owing water or other transport mediums in the caves Itcannot be said clearly enough There was no cave bear worship inthe middle Palaeolithic period at all The bear caves show exactlywhat a palaeontologis t would expect Nothing suggests that the naturalprocess of decay and sedimentation was at any time interrupted ordisturbed80

Combined burials of man and cave bear

In connection with assumed bear worship the opinion was heldthat sometimes men and bear were buried together in one grave81 Asevidence served the excavations at Le Reacutegourdou near Lascaux whereunder a hill of debris both the remains of a bear and a Neanderthal manwere preserved The French archaeologist Fabienne May demonstratedthat the remains of the bear bore no connection with the human

79 See Lascu et al 1996 30 plate 380 Wunn 1999a 6ff81 Rust 1986 15

Beginning of Religion 439

skeleton and questioned whether there was a funeral at Le Reacutegourdouat all82

Skull deposits and skull worship

Just as the bear worship was regarded as irrefutable fact there washardly any doubt that Neanderthal man subjected the heads of thedeceased to a special treatment and set them up for ritual purposesOther scholars are convinced that Neanderthal man hunted fellowhumans to kill and eat them83 It is said that the skulls of the killedlater became the focal point of a ritual This hypothesis is suggestedby Ioan Couliano ldquoEinige Schaumldel sind in einer Weise verformtdie den Gedanken an ein Herausloumlsen des Gehirns nahelegenrdquo84

Alfred Rust expresses himself absolutely clearly He is sure that the nds of isolated lower jaws and craniums are closely connected withreligious customs85 Detailed and critically Johannes Maringer arguesthe question of the skull cult He discusses the nds which wereconsidered as proof of the presence of the alleged practices Thereis for example the crushed childlike skull from Gibraltar or the nds of human remains at Weimar-Ehringsdorf and particularly theoutstanding nd of the skull of Monte Circeo which is mentionedby every author as evidence of the described ritual practice Finallyhe comes to the following result ldquoDas Fundbild der Guattari-Grottespricht klar fuumlr einen Kult in dessen Mittelpunkt der Schaumldel standUrspruumlnglich scheint er auf einem Stock aufgesteckt gewesen zusein Einem heiligen Bannkreis gleich umgab ihn der Kranz vonSteinen Der ganze Houmlhlenteil erweckt den Eindruck als habe er den inder vorderen Houmlhle wohnenden Urmenschen als Heiligtum gedientrdquo86

and further ldquoDie Schaumldelsetzungen duumlrften aller Wahrscheinlichkeitnach eine Art Schaumldelkult darstellen in dem das Gedaumlchtnis der

82 Ibid 1583 Ullrich 1978 293ff See also the overview in Henke and Rothe 1999 27784 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2885 Rust 1991 19486 Maringer 1956 80

440 Ina Wunn

Verstorbenen gep egt und ihre Hilfe wie auch ihr Schutz fuumlr die Sippeer eht wurderdquo87 Even Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan agrees that the skull ofMonte Circeo is an intentional deposition of a skull but he refusesto draw any conclusions concerning religious customs88 On the otherhand he can prove that all other nds of isolated heads or jaws arethe result of taphonomic processes89 After a careful re-examinationof the original reports of the excavations Fabienne May states thatnone of the descriptions of the excavations is suf cient to con rm ordisprove the hypothesis of a ritual90 The discovery of a supposed cultsite at Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan where the skull of a child was set upbetween several skulls of ibex does not prove the hypothesis of a cultIn this case the remnants of ibexes and the skull of the child have noconnection at all91 Since it could be shown that even the skull depositof Monte Circeo was not the result of human activities but that thedamages of the skull were due to the work of hungry hyenas the lastargument in favour of a skull cult is disproved92

Cannibalism

Cannibalism has already been mentioned in connection with thedeposition of human skulls Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan expresses him-self as follows ldquoDie Existenz eines religioumlsen Kannibalismus imPalaumlolithikum mag wahrscheinlich sein doch laumlszligt sich dies bei dergegenwaumlrtigen Materiallage absolut nicht beweisen Und dennochspricht kein Autor von der palaumlolithischen Religion ohne fuumlr odergegen die Kannibalismusthese Stellung zu beziehen wobei in groumlszlige-rem Umfang auf ethnographische Beispiele zuruumlckgegriffen wirdrdquo93

But particularly those ethnographic analogies give strong argumentsagainst the hypothesis of prehistoric cannibalism The anthropologis t

87 Ibid 8588 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 5389 Ibid 54-5690 May 1986 1791 Ibid 33-3492 Henke and Rothe 1994 52793 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 56

Beginning of Religion 441

Gabriele Weiss and the archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher discuss thetopic of cannibalism carefully94 They state that the ethnographic ma-terial itself is frequently not convincing because it is based mainly onsensational reports of past adventurers There are no assertions by eye-witnesses but stories of man eaters were always reported by writerswho only stated that they had heard about those customs The cus-tom of cannibalism itself was always stated to have been given upjust several years before the arrival of the traveller95 Frequently theassumption that a certain people was guilty of cannibalism was usedpropagandistically in order to be able to lead a war against this peo-ple or to force them into slavery96 On the other hand it was a wellknown rumour in Africa even up to the beginning of this century thatEuropeans fed on the esh of African children97 It is argued by HeidiPeter-Roumlcher that there is no evidence of cannibalism among recentpeoples at all98 This means that it is nonsense to search for the reasonand the origin of that custom in prehistoric times It cannot be decidedto what extent Sigmund Freud with his hypothesis of the origin of hu-man society must be blamed for evoking the idea of early man-eatersIn his Totem und Tabu he made several statements about the origin ofhuman society claiming that at the beginning of prehistory a group ofhumans was ruled by a despotic patriarch until he was killed and eatenby his sons99 The subtitle of his book ldquoEinige Uumlbereinstimmungen imSeelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotikerrdquo100 re ects however the

94 Weiss 1987 142-159 and Peter-Roumlcher 198995 Volhard 1939 36996 Gabriele Weiss (1987 152) mentions the example of a decree of Queen Isabella

in 1503 who gave permission to enslave the Caribbean Indians because they weresaid to be man-eaters

97 Ibid 15098 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 On the contrary the American anthropologist Christy Turner

is convinced that the Anasazi an Indian people who lived in the southern parts of theUnited States during historical times did human hunting See Turner 1999

99 See Weiss 1987 44-45100 Weiss 1987 44

442 Ina Wunn

opinion of many of his contemporaries and colleagues and contributesto the picture of the mentality of Neanderthal man until today101

The facts on which the theory of prehistoric cannibalism are basedare usually poor Frequently it was suf cient to assume cannibalismexisted if a skeleton was found incomplete or not in anatomical or-der102 It is still considered a strong proof for cannibalism when splithuman bones occur as were excavated at Krapina The defenders ofthe cannibalism thesis argue that the remnants of human bones lookabsolutely similar to the scattered animal bones at the same excava-tion site Therefore they come to the conclusion that Neanderthal mantreated fellow humans in the same way as he treated game This argu-ment is still stressed by the anthropologist s Tim White and Alban De- eur Scattered bones of human beings and deer in the cave of Moula-Guercy show the same scratches103 This argument presupposes how-ever that the humans as well as the animals were killed by Neanderthalman Both the humans and the animals could however have been thevictims of carnivores for example hyena or cave lion or the scratcheson human and animal bones may be due to taphonomic processes104

This thesis would explain the remains of Krapina as well as the ndingsof Moula-Guercy In any case the identical treatment of human andanimal bones and the missing of any traces of a ritual do not promotethe hypothesis of a religious custom In this case Krapina and Moula-Guercy would prove that Neanderthal man hunted other humans formeat This seems however to be unlikely because the hunters of theMousterian lived in a habitat full of game which was for sure easier tokill than humans

101 Campbell 1987 339102 Maringer 1956 81f In the excavation report of the site Weimar-Ehringsdorf

cannibalism is not mentioned at all See Feustel 1989 391-393103 De eur et al 1999 128-131104 It is still more than dif cult to decide whether scratches on bones are due to

human activities to carnivores or to taphonomic processes The topic is still debated

among scientists For an overview see Henke and Rothe 1994 19-25

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

Beginning of Religion 439

skeleton and questioned whether there was a funeral at Le Reacutegourdouat all82

Skull deposits and skull worship

Just as the bear worship was regarded as irrefutable fact there washardly any doubt that Neanderthal man subjected the heads of thedeceased to a special treatment and set them up for ritual purposesOther scholars are convinced that Neanderthal man hunted fellowhumans to kill and eat them83 It is said that the skulls of the killedlater became the focal point of a ritual This hypothesis is suggestedby Ioan Couliano ldquoEinige Schaumldel sind in einer Weise verformtdie den Gedanken an ein Herausloumlsen des Gehirns nahelegenrdquo84

Alfred Rust expresses himself absolutely clearly He is sure that the nds of isolated lower jaws and craniums are closely connected withreligious customs85 Detailed and critically Johannes Maringer arguesthe question of the skull cult He discusses the nds which wereconsidered as proof of the presence of the alleged practices Thereis for example the crushed childlike skull from Gibraltar or the nds of human remains at Weimar-Ehringsdorf and particularly theoutstanding nd of the skull of Monte Circeo which is mentionedby every author as evidence of the described ritual practice Finallyhe comes to the following result ldquoDas Fundbild der Guattari-Grottespricht klar fuumlr einen Kult in dessen Mittelpunkt der Schaumldel standUrspruumlnglich scheint er auf einem Stock aufgesteckt gewesen zusein Einem heiligen Bannkreis gleich umgab ihn der Kranz vonSteinen Der ganze Houmlhlenteil erweckt den Eindruck als habe er den inder vorderen Houmlhle wohnenden Urmenschen als Heiligtum gedientrdquo86

and further ldquoDie Schaumldelsetzungen duumlrften aller Wahrscheinlichkeitnach eine Art Schaumldelkult darstellen in dem das Gedaumlchtnis der

82 Ibid 1583 Ullrich 1978 293ff See also the overview in Henke and Rothe 1999 27784 Eliade and Couliano 1991 2885 Rust 1991 19486 Maringer 1956 80

440 Ina Wunn

Verstorbenen gep egt und ihre Hilfe wie auch ihr Schutz fuumlr die Sippeer eht wurderdquo87 Even Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan agrees that the skull ofMonte Circeo is an intentional deposition of a skull but he refusesto draw any conclusions concerning religious customs88 On the otherhand he can prove that all other nds of isolated heads or jaws arethe result of taphonomic processes89 After a careful re-examinationof the original reports of the excavations Fabienne May states thatnone of the descriptions of the excavations is suf cient to con rm ordisprove the hypothesis of a ritual90 The discovery of a supposed cultsite at Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan where the skull of a child was set upbetween several skulls of ibex does not prove the hypothesis of a cultIn this case the remnants of ibexes and the skull of the child have noconnection at all91 Since it could be shown that even the skull depositof Monte Circeo was not the result of human activities but that thedamages of the skull were due to the work of hungry hyenas the lastargument in favour of a skull cult is disproved92

Cannibalism

Cannibalism has already been mentioned in connection with thedeposition of human skulls Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan expresses him-self as follows ldquoDie Existenz eines religioumlsen Kannibalismus imPalaumlolithikum mag wahrscheinlich sein doch laumlszligt sich dies bei dergegenwaumlrtigen Materiallage absolut nicht beweisen Und dennochspricht kein Autor von der palaumlolithischen Religion ohne fuumlr odergegen die Kannibalismusthese Stellung zu beziehen wobei in groumlszlige-rem Umfang auf ethnographische Beispiele zuruumlckgegriffen wirdrdquo93

But particularly those ethnographic analogies give strong argumentsagainst the hypothesis of prehistoric cannibalism The anthropologis t

87 Ibid 8588 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 5389 Ibid 54-5690 May 1986 1791 Ibid 33-3492 Henke and Rothe 1994 52793 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 56

Beginning of Religion 441

Gabriele Weiss and the archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher discuss thetopic of cannibalism carefully94 They state that the ethnographic ma-terial itself is frequently not convincing because it is based mainly onsensational reports of past adventurers There are no assertions by eye-witnesses but stories of man eaters were always reported by writerswho only stated that they had heard about those customs The cus-tom of cannibalism itself was always stated to have been given upjust several years before the arrival of the traveller95 Frequently theassumption that a certain people was guilty of cannibalism was usedpropagandistically in order to be able to lead a war against this peo-ple or to force them into slavery96 On the other hand it was a wellknown rumour in Africa even up to the beginning of this century thatEuropeans fed on the esh of African children97 It is argued by HeidiPeter-Roumlcher that there is no evidence of cannibalism among recentpeoples at all98 This means that it is nonsense to search for the reasonand the origin of that custom in prehistoric times It cannot be decidedto what extent Sigmund Freud with his hypothesis of the origin of hu-man society must be blamed for evoking the idea of early man-eatersIn his Totem und Tabu he made several statements about the origin ofhuman society claiming that at the beginning of prehistory a group ofhumans was ruled by a despotic patriarch until he was killed and eatenby his sons99 The subtitle of his book ldquoEinige Uumlbereinstimmungen imSeelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotikerrdquo100 re ects however the

94 Weiss 1987 142-159 and Peter-Roumlcher 198995 Volhard 1939 36996 Gabriele Weiss (1987 152) mentions the example of a decree of Queen Isabella

in 1503 who gave permission to enslave the Caribbean Indians because they weresaid to be man-eaters

97 Ibid 15098 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 On the contrary the American anthropologist Christy Turner

is convinced that the Anasazi an Indian people who lived in the southern parts of theUnited States during historical times did human hunting See Turner 1999

99 See Weiss 1987 44-45100 Weiss 1987 44

442 Ina Wunn

opinion of many of his contemporaries and colleagues and contributesto the picture of the mentality of Neanderthal man until today101

The facts on which the theory of prehistoric cannibalism are basedare usually poor Frequently it was suf cient to assume cannibalismexisted if a skeleton was found incomplete or not in anatomical or-der102 It is still considered a strong proof for cannibalism when splithuman bones occur as were excavated at Krapina The defenders ofthe cannibalism thesis argue that the remnants of human bones lookabsolutely similar to the scattered animal bones at the same excava-tion site Therefore they come to the conclusion that Neanderthal mantreated fellow humans in the same way as he treated game This argu-ment is still stressed by the anthropologist s Tim White and Alban De- eur Scattered bones of human beings and deer in the cave of Moula-Guercy show the same scratches103 This argument presupposes how-ever that the humans as well as the animals were killed by Neanderthalman Both the humans and the animals could however have been thevictims of carnivores for example hyena or cave lion or the scratcheson human and animal bones may be due to taphonomic processes104

This thesis would explain the remains of Krapina as well as the ndingsof Moula-Guercy In any case the identical treatment of human andanimal bones and the missing of any traces of a ritual do not promotethe hypothesis of a religious custom In this case Krapina and Moula-Guercy would prove that Neanderthal man hunted other humans formeat This seems however to be unlikely because the hunters of theMousterian lived in a habitat full of game which was for sure easier tokill than humans

101 Campbell 1987 339102 Maringer 1956 81f In the excavation report of the site Weimar-Ehringsdorf

cannibalism is not mentioned at all See Feustel 1989 391-393103 De eur et al 1999 128-131104 It is still more than dif cult to decide whether scratches on bones are due to

human activities to carnivores or to taphonomic processes The topic is still debated

among scientists For an overview see Henke and Rothe 1994 19-25

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

440 Ina Wunn

Verstorbenen gep egt und ihre Hilfe wie auch ihr Schutz fuumlr die Sippeer eht wurderdquo87 Even Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan agrees that the skull ofMonte Circeo is an intentional deposition of a skull but he refusesto draw any conclusions concerning religious customs88 On the otherhand he can prove that all other nds of isolated heads or jaws arethe result of taphonomic processes89 After a careful re-examinationof the original reports of the excavations Fabienne May states thatnone of the descriptions of the excavations is suf cient to con rm ordisprove the hypothesis of a ritual90 The discovery of a supposed cultsite at Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan where the skull of a child was set upbetween several skulls of ibex does not prove the hypothesis of a cultIn this case the remnants of ibexes and the skull of the child have noconnection at all91 Since it could be shown that even the skull depositof Monte Circeo was not the result of human activities but that thedamages of the skull were due to the work of hungry hyenas the lastargument in favour of a skull cult is disproved92

Cannibalism

Cannibalism has already been mentioned in connection with thedeposition of human skulls Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan expresses him-self as follows ldquoDie Existenz eines religioumlsen Kannibalismus imPalaumlolithikum mag wahrscheinlich sein doch laumlszligt sich dies bei dergegenwaumlrtigen Materiallage absolut nicht beweisen Und dennochspricht kein Autor von der palaumlolithischen Religion ohne fuumlr odergegen die Kannibalismusthese Stellung zu beziehen wobei in groumlszlige-rem Umfang auf ethnographische Beispiele zuruumlckgegriffen wirdrdquo93

But particularly those ethnographic analogies give strong argumentsagainst the hypothesis of prehistoric cannibalism The anthropologis t

87 Ibid 8588 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 5389 Ibid 54-5690 May 1986 1791 Ibid 33-3492 Henke and Rothe 1994 52793 Leroi-Gourhan 1981 56

Beginning of Religion 441

Gabriele Weiss and the archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher discuss thetopic of cannibalism carefully94 They state that the ethnographic ma-terial itself is frequently not convincing because it is based mainly onsensational reports of past adventurers There are no assertions by eye-witnesses but stories of man eaters were always reported by writerswho only stated that they had heard about those customs The cus-tom of cannibalism itself was always stated to have been given upjust several years before the arrival of the traveller95 Frequently theassumption that a certain people was guilty of cannibalism was usedpropagandistically in order to be able to lead a war against this peo-ple or to force them into slavery96 On the other hand it was a wellknown rumour in Africa even up to the beginning of this century thatEuropeans fed on the esh of African children97 It is argued by HeidiPeter-Roumlcher that there is no evidence of cannibalism among recentpeoples at all98 This means that it is nonsense to search for the reasonand the origin of that custom in prehistoric times It cannot be decidedto what extent Sigmund Freud with his hypothesis of the origin of hu-man society must be blamed for evoking the idea of early man-eatersIn his Totem und Tabu he made several statements about the origin ofhuman society claiming that at the beginning of prehistory a group ofhumans was ruled by a despotic patriarch until he was killed and eatenby his sons99 The subtitle of his book ldquoEinige Uumlbereinstimmungen imSeelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotikerrdquo100 re ects however the

94 Weiss 1987 142-159 and Peter-Roumlcher 198995 Volhard 1939 36996 Gabriele Weiss (1987 152) mentions the example of a decree of Queen Isabella

in 1503 who gave permission to enslave the Caribbean Indians because they weresaid to be man-eaters

97 Ibid 15098 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 On the contrary the American anthropologist Christy Turner

is convinced that the Anasazi an Indian people who lived in the southern parts of theUnited States during historical times did human hunting See Turner 1999

99 See Weiss 1987 44-45100 Weiss 1987 44

442 Ina Wunn

opinion of many of his contemporaries and colleagues and contributesto the picture of the mentality of Neanderthal man until today101

The facts on which the theory of prehistoric cannibalism are basedare usually poor Frequently it was suf cient to assume cannibalismexisted if a skeleton was found incomplete or not in anatomical or-der102 It is still considered a strong proof for cannibalism when splithuman bones occur as were excavated at Krapina The defenders ofthe cannibalism thesis argue that the remnants of human bones lookabsolutely similar to the scattered animal bones at the same excava-tion site Therefore they come to the conclusion that Neanderthal mantreated fellow humans in the same way as he treated game This argu-ment is still stressed by the anthropologist s Tim White and Alban De- eur Scattered bones of human beings and deer in the cave of Moula-Guercy show the same scratches103 This argument presupposes how-ever that the humans as well as the animals were killed by Neanderthalman Both the humans and the animals could however have been thevictims of carnivores for example hyena or cave lion or the scratcheson human and animal bones may be due to taphonomic processes104

This thesis would explain the remains of Krapina as well as the ndingsof Moula-Guercy In any case the identical treatment of human andanimal bones and the missing of any traces of a ritual do not promotethe hypothesis of a religious custom In this case Krapina and Moula-Guercy would prove that Neanderthal man hunted other humans formeat This seems however to be unlikely because the hunters of theMousterian lived in a habitat full of game which was for sure easier tokill than humans

101 Campbell 1987 339102 Maringer 1956 81f In the excavation report of the site Weimar-Ehringsdorf

cannibalism is not mentioned at all See Feustel 1989 391-393103 De eur et al 1999 128-131104 It is still more than dif cult to decide whether scratches on bones are due to

human activities to carnivores or to taphonomic processes The topic is still debated

among scientists For an overview see Henke and Rothe 1994 19-25

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

Beginning of Religion 441

Gabriele Weiss and the archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher discuss thetopic of cannibalism carefully94 They state that the ethnographic ma-terial itself is frequently not convincing because it is based mainly onsensational reports of past adventurers There are no assertions by eye-witnesses but stories of man eaters were always reported by writerswho only stated that they had heard about those customs The cus-tom of cannibalism itself was always stated to have been given upjust several years before the arrival of the traveller95 Frequently theassumption that a certain people was guilty of cannibalism was usedpropagandistically in order to be able to lead a war against this peo-ple or to force them into slavery96 On the other hand it was a wellknown rumour in Africa even up to the beginning of this century thatEuropeans fed on the esh of African children97 It is argued by HeidiPeter-Roumlcher that there is no evidence of cannibalism among recentpeoples at all98 This means that it is nonsense to search for the reasonand the origin of that custom in prehistoric times It cannot be decidedto what extent Sigmund Freud with his hypothesis of the origin of hu-man society must be blamed for evoking the idea of early man-eatersIn his Totem und Tabu he made several statements about the origin ofhuman society claiming that at the beginning of prehistory a group ofhumans was ruled by a despotic patriarch until he was killed and eatenby his sons99 The subtitle of his book ldquoEinige Uumlbereinstimmungen imSeelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotikerrdquo100 re ects however the

94 Weiss 1987 142-159 and Peter-Roumlcher 198995 Volhard 1939 36996 Gabriele Weiss (1987 152) mentions the example of a decree of Queen Isabella

in 1503 who gave permission to enslave the Caribbean Indians because they weresaid to be man-eaters

97 Ibid 15098 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 On the contrary the American anthropologist Christy Turner

is convinced that the Anasazi an Indian people who lived in the southern parts of theUnited States during historical times did human hunting See Turner 1999

99 See Weiss 1987 44-45100 Weiss 1987 44

442 Ina Wunn

opinion of many of his contemporaries and colleagues and contributesto the picture of the mentality of Neanderthal man until today101

The facts on which the theory of prehistoric cannibalism are basedare usually poor Frequently it was suf cient to assume cannibalismexisted if a skeleton was found incomplete or not in anatomical or-der102 It is still considered a strong proof for cannibalism when splithuman bones occur as were excavated at Krapina The defenders ofthe cannibalism thesis argue that the remnants of human bones lookabsolutely similar to the scattered animal bones at the same excava-tion site Therefore they come to the conclusion that Neanderthal mantreated fellow humans in the same way as he treated game This argu-ment is still stressed by the anthropologist s Tim White and Alban De- eur Scattered bones of human beings and deer in the cave of Moula-Guercy show the same scratches103 This argument presupposes how-ever that the humans as well as the animals were killed by Neanderthalman Both the humans and the animals could however have been thevictims of carnivores for example hyena or cave lion or the scratcheson human and animal bones may be due to taphonomic processes104

This thesis would explain the remains of Krapina as well as the ndingsof Moula-Guercy In any case the identical treatment of human andanimal bones and the missing of any traces of a ritual do not promotethe hypothesis of a religious custom In this case Krapina and Moula-Guercy would prove that Neanderthal man hunted other humans formeat This seems however to be unlikely because the hunters of theMousterian lived in a habitat full of game which was for sure easier tokill than humans

101 Campbell 1987 339102 Maringer 1956 81f In the excavation report of the site Weimar-Ehringsdorf

cannibalism is not mentioned at all See Feustel 1989 391-393103 De eur et al 1999 128-131104 It is still more than dif cult to decide whether scratches on bones are due to

human activities to carnivores or to taphonomic processes The topic is still debated

among scientists For an overview see Henke and Rothe 1994 19-25

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

442 Ina Wunn

opinion of many of his contemporaries and colleagues and contributesto the picture of the mentality of Neanderthal man until today101

The facts on which the theory of prehistoric cannibalism are basedare usually poor Frequently it was suf cient to assume cannibalismexisted if a skeleton was found incomplete or not in anatomical or-der102 It is still considered a strong proof for cannibalism when splithuman bones occur as were excavated at Krapina The defenders ofthe cannibalism thesis argue that the remnants of human bones lookabsolutely similar to the scattered animal bones at the same excava-tion site Therefore they come to the conclusion that Neanderthal mantreated fellow humans in the same way as he treated game This argu-ment is still stressed by the anthropologist s Tim White and Alban De- eur Scattered bones of human beings and deer in the cave of Moula-Guercy show the same scratches103 This argument presupposes how-ever that the humans as well as the animals were killed by Neanderthalman Both the humans and the animals could however have been thevictims of carnivores for example hyena or cave lion or the scratcheson human and animal bones may be due to taphonomic processes104

This thesis would explain the remains of Krapina as well as the ndingsof Moula-Guercy In any case the identical treatment of human andanimal bones and the missing of any traces of a ritual do not promotethe hypothesis of a religious custom In this case Krapina and Moula-Guercy would prove that Neanderthal man hunted other humans formeat This seems however to be unlikely because the hunters of theMousterian lived in a habitat full of game which was for sure easier tokill than humans

101 Campbell 1987 339102 Maringer 1956 81f In the excavation report of the site Weimar-Ehringsdorf

cannibalism is not mentioned at all See Feustel 1989 391-393103 De eur et al 1999 128-131104 It is still more than dif cult to decide whether scratches on bones are due to

human activities to carnivores or to taphonomic processes The topic is still debated

among scientists For an overview see Henke and Rothe 1994 19-25

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

Beginning of Religion 443

The archaeologist Heidi Peter-Roumlcher scrutinised the theories ofalleged cannibalism in early history In this connection she discussedthe nds of Krapina in detail In her conclusion she points out thatthe human fossils of Krapina do not stem from a group of humanskilled during a single event but stem from frequent usage of the caveover a period of 40 000 years One of the main arguments in favourof the hypothesis of cannibalism was the bad condition of the bonesSince however the excavators operated with dynamite the conditionof the bones hardly allows any conclusions about the cause of death105

Scratches on the bones supposed to be traces of stone tools havenot been examined with the help of a scanning electron microscopeWithout such an examination the cause of the scratches cannot bedetected at all In the long run there is not a single point of referencewhich could prove the theory of ritual cannibalism in the Palaeolithicperiod

Funerals and cult of the dead

An intended funeral is considered a clear indication of conceptionsof a life after death106 Although the archaeologist Fabienne Mayremains sceptical mdash archaeology can probably prove the facts buthardly nd the intellectual background mdash funerals can at least serveas indications of possible religious conceptions if not as proof107

Therefore reports of alleged funerals always cause attention even ifcautious archaeologists warn about overinterpreting badly documented

105 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41106 Heiler 1979 516 and Wiszligmann 1980 730 Wiszligman explains ldquoIn der Reli-

gionsgeschichte begegnet eine Vielzahl von zumindest teilweise religioumls motiviertenVerhaltens- und Vorstellungsformen die mdash hier dem Begriff Bestattung zugeordnetmdash den Umgang der Lebenden mit dem Leichnam des Verstorbenen kennzeichnen unddie darin implizit enthaltenen Vorstellungen oder explizit geaumluszligerten Anschauungendie dessen Existenzform im Tod oder jenseits des Todes das Verhaumlltnis des Toten zu

den Lebenden oder dem Leben selbst betreffenrdquo107 May 1986 3

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

444 Ina Wunn

excavations108 Ioan Couliano and Mircea Eliade are convinced thatNeanderthal man buried his dead109 Eliade not only takes the funeralsfor granted but believes that the position of several skeletons indicatethat Neanderthal man feared the return of the dead or hoped forrebirth110 Both conceptions are well known in the history of religionMany funeral ceremonies among primitive cultures show that the kinof the dead tried to prevent the return of the deceased In doing sothe corpse was bound or struck Wholes were cut into the shoulders orthe belly and the sinews were destroyed These precautionary actionswere supposed to prevent the dead body from rising and returning111

Aringke Stroumlm and Haralds Biezais mention an example of the belief inrebirth from historical times They interpret funerals of the Germanicpeople as follows The corpse was buried in a manner resembling theposition of a child in its motherrsquos uterus so that the dead could bereborn after a certain period112 Johannes Maringer is convinced of theexistence of funerals since the Mousterian too As proof he describesthe excavations at Kiik-Koba the Mountain of Carmel and Teshik-Tash He also mentions places in Western Europe such as Le MoustierLa Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie113 The excavation reportsseem to prove that the hunter of the Mousterian already believedin life after death The young man of Le Moustier was buried asJohannes Maringer believes in a sleep posture ldquoIt is dif cult to saywhether he understood this sleep as temporary and expected to wake

108 A comment of Andreacute Leroi-Gourhan ldquoSo ist das Problem der Palaumloanthropinen-Graumlber nur sehr unvollkommen erhellt die Verantwortung trifft voll und ganz dieAusgraumlber die nicht dem Wunsch zu widerstehen vermochten lsquodas Fossil ihresLebensrsquo zu ndenrdquo (Leroi-Gourhan 1981 67)

109 Couliano speci es as follows ldquoDie unter dem Namen Neandertaler bekannteMenschenrasse glaubte zweifellos an eine Art von Uumlberleben Ihrer Toten dieauf der rechten Seite liegend und den Kopf nach Osten gewandt begraben wurdenrdquo(Couliano 1991 28)

110 Eliade 1978 20-22111 Wiszligmann 1980 733112 Stroumlm and Biezais 1975 65113 Maringer 1956 71-76

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

Beginning of Religion 445

up in another worldrdquo Maringer explains114 The foetal position of thehuman skeletons found at La Ferrassie and Carmel is strong prooffor the hypothesis that Neanderthal man bound his dead because hefeared their return115 Traces of re in those caves which servedas temporary shelter he interprets as remnants of funeral customsldquoVielleicht hielt der Urmensch die Aschenschicht fuumlr eine Deckedie kein Toten zu durchdringen vermoumlge die ihn also an sein Grabbanne Der Abwehrkraft des Feuers steht wiederum seine wohltuendewaumlrmende Wirkung gegenuumlber Moumlglicherweise sollte das Feuer denerkalteten Leichnam erwaumlrmen ein Zug der Totenfuumlrsorgerdquo116 InJohannes Maringerrsquos opinion the excavation reports do not prove theexistence of funeral gifts But the bones of ungulates which werefrequently found in close proximity of the tombs are Maringer thinksthe traces of meals to honour the deceased117 All documents of theexcavations which Johannes Maringer used to prove his opinion offuneral rites in the Palaeolithic period were recently examined byFabienne May118 She comes to the following conclusions Not all socalled funerals deserve that name Neither at Le Regourdou nor LaQina or Le Roc de Marsal did a single funeral take place Many non-European excavations do not support the idea of Mousterian burialsfor example places like Carmel or Teshik-Tash At other places eg LaChapelle-aux-Saints or outside Europe in Shanidar the circumstancesat the excavation sites allow us to assume that intentional funerals tookplace Nearly all graves contain only a single corpse with the exceptionof La Ferrassie where two children were buried together and Qafzehwhere the skeletons of an adult and a child were found together Thegrave of Shanidar could probably be a collective burial site as well14 corpses out of 34 alleged funerals were found in cavities or gravesall without additional installations Fabienne May states that natural

114 Ibid 76115 Ibid 77116 Ibid 77117 Ibid 77-78118 May 1986 11-35

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

446 Ina Wunn

recesses could be selected consciously in order to accommodate thecorpse but that this hypothesis can not be veri ed119 All graves werefound in the direct neighbourhood of settlements mdash that is the mainreason they were detected at all The remains of re were found at someburial sites but Fabienne May points out that those res were lit bylater generations in the caves and settlements and have no connectionwith funeral rites by mourners or kin120 In the middle Palaeolithic thedead were occasionally covered by slabs of stone This can be provenin six cases121

In connection with assumed funeral sites as for example Krapinaor Kebara the question arises whether Neanderthal man may havesubjected his dead ones to a special treatment ie whether they tookoff the esh from the corpses and only buried the bones There is rst evidence for this custom in the Neolithic period122 In the caseof the excavation site at Krapina the cause for this assumption is thebad condition of the bones This however is more likely due to theactivities of predatory animals Later in the upper Palaeolithic theother single reason to assume such funeral rites was the presenceof ochre at the bones Consequently the excavators came to theconclusion that the bones themselves must have been coloured Onthe other hand an inquiry into the facts demonstrated that the bonesquickly take on the ochre colouring if it is present in the directenvironment which was often the case in camp sites of Neanderthalman123 Traces of cremation are not found in the middle PalaeolithicAll skeletons whose position could be reconstructed with the helpof the excavation reports were buried lying on their back or theirside with bent but not extremely bent legs This means that the

119 Ibid 149120 Ibid 150121 These are two burial sites at La Ferrassie and the ones at Reacutegourdou Monte

Circeo (which can no longer count as funeral) La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Qafzeh(ibid 152)

122 Peter-Roumlcher 1998 41123 May 1986 162

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

Beginning of Religion 447

corpses were not bound before the burial There was no evidence offuneral gifts Fabienne May comes to the following conclusions Thereis scarcely any evidence for intentional funerals in the MousterianFrequently the excavators preferred to interpret their archaeological ndings instead of describing them carefully Nevertheless it seemscertain that Neanderthal man buried very few of his dead by puttingthem into a natural cavity or covering them with slabs Ochre was notyet used in connection with funerals during the middle Palaeolithicperiod Fireplaces in proximity of the grave bear no connection tothe latter Many caves were inhabited later so that the traces of dailyactivities are frequently found on and near the graves That means thatknives and other items found there cannot be interpreted as funeralgifts124

The only fact which remains of Johannes Maringerrsquos extensiveconsiderations is the mere existence of only few funerals during theMousterian It seems natural that Neanderthal man must have knownfeelings such as mourning rage despair and incredulity at the nal lossof a beloved person Obviously those feelings induced Neanderthalman from time to time to handle the corpse of the deceased in anaffectionate way This does not mean that he had to believe in a lifeafter death or that he was capable of religious feelings Especially thelack of any funeral rites proves the absence of a certain common beliefOn the other hand those rare funerals can be a rst hint of an initialfeeling or hope that there might be a certain form of existence evenafter death

Conclusion

For the whole lower and middle Palaeolithic there is no evidence ofany religious practice All such notions are either products of a certainmental climate at the time of the discovery of the fossils or of ide-ologies The results of palaeanthropologica l research show that neitherHomo habilis nor Homo erectus were capable of developing a compli-cated symbol system In the middle Palaeolithic the time of Homo ne-

124 Ibid 211-212

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

448 Ina Wunn

anderthalensis things were different This early representative of thegenus Homo had already developed advanced intellectual abilities Butneither in connection with his hunting customs nor at his settlementscould any traces of cult practice be found First signs of a beginningof religious belief in a form of existence after death are given by therare burials But there are no funeral rituals or funeral gifts All as-sumptions that Neanderthal man already believed in an afterlife aremere speculation Theories of rituals during the middle Palaeolithic ofcannibalism or bear worship belong to the realm of legend

The question of the origin of religion is still unsolved The originand the development of religious feeling can be read from archaeolog-ical nds of burials It is only in the middle Palaeolithic period that a rst hesitation to abandon a beloved is provable Proper funerals andpossible funeral gifts can be made out during the upper PalaeolithicOnly the European Mesolithic and the early Neolithic of Asia Minorknow regular funeral customs and rituals a certain spectrum of funeralgifts and secondary burials125 An increasing care for the dead duringthe last 100 000 years is nevertheless easily to detect It can be sup-posed that the developing funeral customs were closely connected tothe belief in an afterlife Obviously religion which means the belief ina supreme being in supernatural power in an afterlife the feeling ofthe ldquoHolyrdquo in the sense of Rudolf Otto was not a part of human naturefrom the very beginning as Mircea Eliade assumes but had to developover a period of thousands of years126

Klingerstrasse 1 INA WUNN

D-30655 Hannover Germany

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam Karl Dietrich

1991 ldquoDer Steinheimer Urmenschen-Schaumldelrdquo In Heilbronn und das mittlereNeckarland zwischen Marbach und Gundelsheim Stuttgart 216-219

125 See Wunn 1999b 130ff126 Otto 1963

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

Beginning of Religion 449

Atran Scott

1990 Cognitive Foundations of Natural History Towards an Anthropology ofScience Cambridge

Binford Lewis R

1984 Die Vorzeit war ganz anders MuumlnchenCampbell Joseph

1987 Primitive Mythology New York London TorontoDe eur Alban Tim White Patricia Valensi Ludovic Shinak and Evelyne Creacutegut-Bonnoure

1999 ldquoNeanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy Ardegraveche Francerdquo Science286 128-38

Dickson Bruce

1990 The Dawn of Belief Religion in the Upper Palaeolithic of SouthwesternEurope Tucson

Edsman Carl-Martin

1957 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed 1 841Eliade Mircea

1978 Geschichte der religioumlsen Ideen vol 1 Freiburg Basel Wien

Eliade Mircea and Ioan P Couliano

1991 Handbuch der Religionen Zuumlrich Muumlnchen

Feustel Rudolf

1989 ldquoDer Homo sapiens und das Jungpalaumlolithikumrdquo In Joachim Herrmann(ed) Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik LeipzigJena Berlin 1 55-64

Gimbutas Marija

1987 ldquoPrehistoric Religionsrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 11 505-515

1996 Die Sprache der Goumlttin Frankfurt am Main

Goodall Jane

1990 Through a Window My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of GombeBoston

Grim John A

1998 ldquoBaumlrenfestrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1 1107-1108

Grzimek Bernhard (Ed)

1972 Grzimeks Tierleben vol 10 Saumlugetiere I Zuumlrich

Hartmann Fritz

1957 ldquoAnthropologie Irdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed1 403

450 Ina Wunn

Heiler Friedrich

1979 Erscheinungsformen und Wesen der Religion Stuttgart Berlin KoumllnMainz

Herrmann Joachim (Ed)

1989 Archaumlologie in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik Leipzig JenaBerlin 2 vols

Henke Win ed and Hartmut Rothe

1994 Palaumloanthropologie Heidelberg1999 Stammesgeschichte des Menschen Berlin etc

Heyden Doris

1987 ldquoCavesrdquo In Encyclopedia of Religion 4 127-133Hultkrantz Aringke

1998 ldquoArktische Religionrdquo In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4th ed 1746-752

Isaac Glynn

1978 ldquoThe Food-sharing Behaviour of Proto-human Hominidsrdquo Scienti c Amer-ican 238 90-108

James EO

1957 Prehistoric Religion A Study in Prehistoric Archaeology New YorkLascu Cristian Florian Baciu Mihai Gligan and Serban Sarbu

1996 ldquoA Mousterian Cave Bear Worship Site in Transylvania RoumaniardquoJournal of Prehistoric Religion 10 17-30

Leroi-Gourhan Andreacute

1981 Die Religionen der Vorgeschichte Frankfurt am MainMania Dietrich and Thomas Weber

1986 ldquoBilzingsleben III Homo erectus mdash seine Kultur und seine Umweltrdquo InVeroumlffentlichungen des Landesmuseums fuumlr Vorgeschichte in Halle vol 39Berlin

Maringer Johannes

1956 Vorgeschichtliche Religion Zuumlrich KoumllnMay Fabienne

1986 Les Sepultures Preacutehistoriques ParisMichaels Axel (Ed)

1997 Klassiker der Religionswissenschaft Von Friedrich Schleiermacher bisMircea Eliade Muumlnchen

Mithen Steven

1996 The Prehistory of the Mind The Cognitive Origins of Art and ScienceLondon

Beginning of Religion 451

Muumlhlmann Wilhelm Emil

1957 ldquoUrmonotheismusrdquo In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3rd ed6 1198

Narr Karl

1957 Deutschland in Ur- und fruumlhgeschichtlicher Zeit KonstanzOtte Marcel

1995 ldquoThe Prehistory of Religion Data and Methodrdquo Journal of PrehistoricReligion 9 55-75

Otto Rudolf

1963 Das Heilige Muumlnchen

Peter-Roumlcher Heidi

1998 Mythos Menschenfresser Muumlnchen

Raphael Max

1978 Wiedergeburtsmagie in der Altsteinzeit Hg Shirley Chesney und IlseHirschfeld nach einem Manuskript Max Raphaels Frankfurt am Main

Reynolds Tim

1990 ldquoThe Middle-Upper Palaeolithic Transition in Southwestern France Inter-preting the Lithic Evidencerdquo In Paul Mellars (ed) The Emergence of Mod-ern Humans Edinburgh 262-302

Ripinski-Naxon Michael

1995 ldquoCognition Symbolization and the Beginnings of Shamanismrdquo Journal ofPrehistoric Religion 9 43-54

Rust Alfred

1991 ldquoDer primitive Menschrdquo In Golo Mann and Alfred Heuszlig (eds) PropylaumlenWeltgeschichte Berlin Frankfurt am Main 1 155-226

Schrenk Friedemann

1997 Die Fruumlhzeit des Menschen MuumlnchenSchulz Hermann

1993 Stammesreligionen Stuttgart Berlin KoumllnSpelke Elizabeth S

1991 ldquoPhysical Knowledge in Infancy Re ections on Piagetrsquos Theoryrdquo In SusanCarey and Rochel Gelman (eds) The Epigenesis of Mind Essays onbiology and cognition Hillsdale NY 133-169

Stolz Fritz

1988 Grundzuumlge der Religionswissenschaft GoumlttingenStrait David Frederick Grine and Marc Moniz

1997 ldquoA Reappraisal of Early Hominid Phylogenyrdquo Journal of Human Evolution32 17-82

452 Ina Wunn

Stroumlm Aringke V and Haralds Biezais

1975 Germanische und Baltische Religion Stuttgart Berlin Koumlln MainzThieme Hartmut

1997 ldquoLower Palaeolithic Hunting Spears from Germanyrdquo Nature 385 807-810Turner Christy

1999 Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest Univ ofUtah

Ucko Peter J (Ed)

1977 Form in Indigenous art Schematisation in the Art of Aboriginal Australiaand Prehistoric Europe Canberra

Ullrich Herbert

1978 ldquoKannibalismus und Leichenzerstuumlckelung beim Neandertaler von Krap-inardquo In Krapinski Pracovjek i Evolucija Hominida Zagreb 293-318

Verkamp Bernard J

1995 The Evolution of Religion A Re-examination ScrantonVolhard Ewald

1939 Kannibalismus StuttgartWeiss Gabriele

1987 Elementarreligionen Wien New YorkWhiten Andrew (Ed)

1991 Natural Theories of Mind Evolution Development and Simulation ofEveryday Mindreading Oxford

Wiszligmann Hans

1980 ldquoBestattung I Religionsgeschichtlichrdquo In Theologische Realenzyklopaumldie5 730

Wunn Ina

1999a ldquoBaumlrenkult in urgeschichtlicher Zeit Zur religioumlsen Deutung mittel-palaumlolithischer Baumlrenfossilienrdquo Zeitschrift fuumlr Religionswissenschaft 7 3-23

1999b Goumltter Muumltter Ahnenkult mdash Neolithische Religionen in AnatolienGriechenland und Deutschland Diss Hannover (in press)

2000 ldquoDer ethnographische Vergleich in der Religionswissenschaftrdquo Zeitschriftfuumlr Missions- und Religionswissenschaft (in press)

Ziegler Bernhard

1975 Allgemeine Palaumlontologie Stuttgart