It’s no secret that what happens to us after we die varies wildly depending on your culture and religion – as well as wishes stated before your demise.

In many Western cultures, death and funerary behavior is rarely spoken about, with people seemingly preferring not to confront the issue until it is upon them.

Other cultures, however, embrace death as a part of life, with mourning more of a public practice, and saying goodbye more of a celebration of a person’s life.

And as humans, we’ve been observing our own funerary practices since the beginning – and fascinatingly, the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) in Spain are on a mission to understand how funerary behavior was present even for the Neanderthals.

As explained in their paper, which was recently published by the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, we have long understood early funeral practices from other parts of Europe, in which the dead were buried underground – much like many of our cultures still do today.

However, evidence of Neanderthal funerary practices in the Iberian Peninsula have not been identified – and the team at CENIEH determined to change that.

Of course, Neanderthals were prevalent in Iberia, from between 400,000 and 40,000 years ago, with many fossils long discovered. And it is these remains that formed the basis for their research, as CENIEH’s Nohemi Sala explained in a statement:

“The absence of formal burials in the Iberian Peninsula does not mean that the Neanderthal populations of this region lacked burial practices. On the contrary, the findings invite us to broaden our gaze and reconsider what we mean by funerary behavior.”

To truly understand the funerary behavior, they considered where the Neanderthal remains had been located, and in many cases this was an accumulation in places like caves.

With this in mind, they had to consider whether these accumulated fossils were the result of carnivores predating on the Neanderthals or their remains, or whether the Neanderthal corpses were deliberately placed there after death, as Sala continued:

“Once other contexts were ruled out, we analyzed what type of mortuary activity it was: formal burial, cannibalism practices or the intentional accumulation of corpses in specific places.”

Their conclusion? Though it might not replicate what we might consider a funerary practice now – nor does it match what other Neanderthals were doing in other areas of Europe – the deliberate accumulation of bodies in these designated places proves that the Iberian Neanderthals did observe traditional funerary behaviors, demonstrating once and for all that their societies had social norms when it came to death.

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