Neanderthals and early humans both buried their dead, and the Levant may be where it started

Story: ~50,000 B.C.E.  |  Last updated: January 3, 0001

Around 120,000 years ago, in the caves and rock shelters of what is now the Middle East, two different human species began doing something no creature had clearly done before: placing their dead in the ground with care, objects, and apparent intention. That both species did this, in the same region, at roughly the same time, tells us something profound — and still debated — about the origins of symbolic thought.

Key findings

• Deliberate burial: The oldest well-documented evidence comes from sites in the Levant — a region encompassing modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and the Palestinian territories — dating to approximately 120,000 years ago, making this area the likely cradle of intentional burial.
• Neanderthal graves: Analysis of sites including Shanidar Cave in Iraq and Ein Qashish in northern Israel confirmed that pits holding Neanderthal remains were deliberately excavated, not natural depressions, with grave goods including limestone slabs, tortoise shells, and flint artifacts.
• Homo sapiens burials: Early Homo sapiens in the region buried their dead in rock shelters and cave terraces, often with red ochre pigment and seashell beads brought from distant places — objects that point to identity, kinship, and belief.

What the evidence actually shows

The debate over whether early humans and Neanderthals buried their dead on purpose has run for more than a century. Natural processes can move bones. Caves collapse. Animals disturb remains. For a burial to count as intentional, researchers need more than a skeleton in a pit — they need evidence the pit was dug, the body placed deliberately, and that the act carried meaning.

A study published in L’Anthropologie by archaeologist Omry Barzilai of the University of Haifa and paleoanthropologist Ella Been of Tel Aviv University offers the most systematic comparison yet. Examining five Neanderthal burial sites and two Homo sapiens burial sites across the Levant — all dating to the period when both species shared this region, roughly 120,000 to 50,000 years ago — the researchers found a striking mix of similarities and differences.

Both species buried men, women, and children. Both placed animal remains in graves — ungulate horns, antlers, jawbones. But the two species chose different locations and positions. Neanderthals buried almost exclusively inside caves. Homo sapiens used rock shelters and terraces at cave entrances. Homo sapiens were buried consistently on their backs or sides in a curled, fetal-like position. Neanderthal burial positions varied more widely.

The Homo sapiens graves also contained objects with clear symbolic weight: red ochre pigment that may have decorated bodies or marked status, and shell beads carried from far away — personal ornaments that likely signified identity, age, or social bonds. These objects suggest not just grief, but a social world rich enough to require marking.

A territorial theory of the first graves

Why did both species start burying their dead at the same time and in the same place? Barzilai and Been offer a hypothesis that reframes burial as something more than mourning.

Both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were semi-nomadic, but they returned seasonally to the same caves — which were valuable assets offering shelter, warmth, and safety. The researchers argue that burying the dead in or near these locations may have been a way of claiming territory: a kind of Paleolithic property deed, legible to competing groups.

“A cave is an asset,” Barzilai has said. “Where species are meeting and interacting, they are defining boundaries.”

Graeme Barker, an archaeologist at Cambridge University who has worked on Shanidar Cave, finds the general idea plausible. Burial has long been recognized as a way of marking landscape and asserting continuity — a pattern visible in later agricultural societies as well. But Barker cautions that no single explanation captures everything, and the evidence remains fragmentary.

Adding weight to the territorial theory: once Neanderthals disappeared from the Levant around 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens burials in the region disappear too — as if the practice was bound up with the presence of a rival species, not just with grief or ritual alone.

A shared origin, or parallel discovery?

One of the most debated questions is whether burial was invented once and spread, or whether it emerged independently in different lineages. Barzilai argues the practice began in the Levant and radiated outward — to Africa, where the oldest known Homo sapiens burial outside the region, a child at Panga ya Saidi in Kenya, dates to 78,000 years ago, and to Europe, where most known burials are 60,000 years old or younger.

But that picture may reflect the limits of the archaeological record as much as actual history. Most of what we know about archaic humans in Africa comes from a small number of sites. In 2023, researchers proposed that Homo naledi — a small-brained human relative — may have used a South African cave as a burial ground around 100,000 years before most documented human and Neanderthal burials, though that finding remains contested among specialists.

The Qafzeh Cave site in northern Israel, where a child was interred with a deer skull and antlers around 115,000 years ago, remains one of the most powerful single pieces of evidence for early intentional burial anywhere — and it sits squarely in the Levant region at the center of this new analysis.

Lasting impact

The emergence of deliberate burial is one of the clearest signals we have that early humans — and apparently Neanderthals — had developed what archaeologists call behavioral modernity: the capacity for symbolic thought, social identity, and care that extends beyond the living moment.

Burial is how communities encode memory, assert continuity with the past, and communicate to others that this place and these people matter. The deliberate graves at La Chapelle-aux-Saints in France, reanalyzed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, confirmed that Neanderthals were doing this as intentionally as any Homo sapiens. That finding has reshaped how scientists understand Neanderthal cognition — moving them from brutish near-humans to beings capable of ritual, loss, and meaning.

It also means that when modern humans encounter questions about how to honor their dead, they are participating in a tradition at least 120,000 years old — one that predates agriculture, writing, cities, and every religion now practiced on Earth.

Blindspots and limits

The dataset Barzilai and Been worked from is small: five Neanderthal sites and two Homo sapiens sites. Drawing broad conclusions about cultural practices or territorial behavior from seven sites spread across tens of thousands of years requires caution. Africa is especially underrepresented — not because burial was absent, but because fewer sites have been excavated with the resources devoted to European and Near Eastern archaeology. The full story of where and how burial began almost certainly involves chapters we haven’t yet found.

Read more

For more on this story, see: National Geographic

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• The Good News for Humankind archive on prehistory

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