NEANDERTHAL FLOWER POWER

The 1976 discovery of a 50,000-year-old Neanderthal skeleton together with clusters of ancient pollen grains and plant stalks convinced many scientists that it had been deliberately buried with garlands of wildflowers. [...]

About the same time, however, zoo-archaeologist Richard Redding excavated several burrows of Meriones crassus, a gerbil-like rodent found in Zagros Mountains, and observed that the animal stores large numbers of similar flowers in its tunnels. [...] Jeffrey D. Sommer, of the University of Michigan´s Museum of Anthropology, reexamined accounts of the Shanidar excavations and noticed references to preserved rodent bones and burrows „very close to the sceletons“. Sommer proposes that the flowers may well been deposited at Shanidar by the Persian jird, M. persicus, another inhabitant of the region´s barren and rocky slopes. [...] he concludes, „the flower pollen recovered near Shanidar IV is more likely to have resulted from the activities of rodents than Neanderthals.“ Cambridge Archaeological Journal 9:1, 1999

Aus Natural History: The magazine of American Museum of Natural History – New York, March 2000

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