<<Shreeve relates:
"But the Neandertals' true humanity revealed itself in the actions of
their souls. At the 50,000-year-old site of Hortus in southern France, two
French archaeologists in 1972 reported the discovery of the articulated bones
of the left paw and tail of a leopard. Their arrangement suggested that the
fragments were once the remnants of a complete leopard hide worn as a
costume."~James R. Shreeve, The Neandertal Enigma, (New York: William Morrow
and Co., 1995), p. 52>>
I won't come down too hard on you for this, because it is easy to make this
mistake. What you've failed to note is that the quote comes from Shreeve's
Chapter Two, which is an overview of the history of Neanderthal
interpretation. Shreeve is merely reporting what others have asserted. This is
clear two pages later, when Shreeve writes:
"And then, suddenly, it all came crashing down again. In the 1980's, just when
it looked as if the Neandertals had secured a permanent place on OUR side of
the gartel, their humanness took a precipitous fall. Some anatomists looked at
the structure of their vocal tracts and decided that they had lacked fully
human speech. A couple of archaeologists gathered together all the
indisputable evidence for a symbolic sense among Neandertals, and found they
had gathered nothing. People began to question their hunting abilities, their
organizational talents, even their habit of burying the dead." [Shreeve, p.
54]
So Shreeve is not reporting on Neanderthal humanity. Indeed, Shreeve thinks
Neanderthal possessed a "different sort of self and a different kind of
consciousness" than we do. [p. 340]. He doesn't argue for their humanity.
That's why his book is called The Neandertal ENIGMA and not The Neandertal
Human.
This same thought is echoed by Richard Leakey in The Origin of Humankind
(1994) p.156:
"Neanderthals, as I've suggested, and probably other archaic sapiens, did have
an awareness of death and therefore undoubtedly a highly developed reflective
consciousness. But was it of the same luminosity as we experience today?
Probably not."
On the supposed "shaman cape" referred to above, Glenn writes:
<<The arrangement was as if the individual was wearing a leopard skin cape.
This is attested by several facts. The position of the paw indicate that the
bones of the paw were left in the skin. The fact that a human skeleton was
found without large parts of a leopard skeleton indicates that there was not a
lot of leopard skeleton when the man was buried.>>
Wait a minute. I searched in vain for a reference to a human body and/or
burial here (Shreeve, pg. 52) but there is none. Nothing about human bones.
Nada. Maybe you had some other reference for this, but it isn't from the book
you quoted.
<<Now, if we have Neanderthal engaging in shamanism, then Neanderthal must be
a spiritual being.>>
But that is the very question. A few have suggested there is evidence of
shamanism, but it is scant and not persuasive. By contrast, the shamanism of
modern man is explosive, pervasive, recent and clear.
Mark Twain once remarked, "The difference between the right word and the
almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug."
With Neanderthal, we have the "lightning bug" of consciousness, compared to
the "lightning" of true humanity. And this lightning is recent. As Leakey puts
it:
"Modern humans became modern when they spoke like us and experienced the self
as we do. We surely see evidence of this in the art of Europe and Africa from
35,000 years onward and in the elaborate ritual that accompanied burial in the
Upper Paleolithic." (pg. 156)
Jim