The question of ritual burial by non-sapiens humans is a divisive topic: evidence is scanty, possibly partly because if bury they did, it was in shallow graves. Now an international group of researchers has concluded that a Neanderthal toddler was deliberately buried about 41,000 years ago at the La Ferrassie rock shelter in Dordogne, France.
     About 2 years old at death, the infant had been placed in a pit dug into an otherwise archaeo-paleontologically sterile sediment layer, Antoine Balzeau of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and colleagues reported in Nature. The child had been part of one of the latest Neanderthal groups in the region.
     Dozens of Neanderthal remains have been unearthed in Eurasia, though many were found before the advent of modern archaeological techniques, leading to dubiety about the findings and their interpretation. Confusing the issue, Neanderthal groups exhibited a range of relationship with the dead - possibly burying some, but eating others.
     Given the number of bodies found in the La Ferrassie rock shelter, seven so far, some consider it to be a Neanderthal cemetery of a sort. In the newly reported case, the child was identified as Neanderthal based on mitochondrial DNA. Six partial or complete Neanderthal bodies had already been found in the same site about a century ago. They have been subsequently identified as two adults and five children of various ages, an unsurprising proportion given childhood mortality rates in prehistory.
     The new paper analyzes the information gathered to date, noting that a return to the site did not recover more bones, though more bones were identified in previously collected material. The researchers could, however, perform new genetic and structural analysis of the remains.
     Based on the original notes from decades ago, the researchers conclude that the child's head had been positioned higher than its pelvis. Interestingly, write the researchers, its remains evince a relatively strong inclination to the west, in contrast to the general lie of the sediment and archaeological layers in this sector. In other words, the remains do not follow the natural lie of the land - which argue that its grave had been dug.
     Its bones were better preserved than those of animals whose remains were found in the same archaeological layer, indicating that the child's body was buried quickly after death, and the remains show no alterations. This means that the toddler had been deliberately buried around 41,000 years ago. Does it prove that all Neanderthals buried their dead? Certainly not, but it strongly indicates that some did.

Edited from Science Daily (9 December 2020), Haaretz (19 December 2020)