Every wellness trend points back to the basics: get in tune with the earth and cosmos. Learn to enjoy your own company, and keep your circle tight. Keep yourself strong, but don’t get distracted by the pursuit of aesthetic perfection. Consume less and better. Choose local, cook at home. Slow down, tune in, be intentional. Get off that damn phone.

Get in touch with something higher—something spiritually fulfilling. Humble yourself before the great mysteries of life, love, and death.

We can try to learn from our favorite influencers, creatives, thinkers, or opium-addled stoic philosophers. Or, we could look to our deep ancestral past, where a sensitive but robust nomadic people lived harmoniously with nature’s most unforgiving mood swings for half a million years. Would it be a far-fetched utopian fallacy to claim Neanderthals are the true fulfillment of the Rousseauian “noble savage” ideation, or would it be insanely true?

We may never know, we would do well to reintroduce some of the conditions we evolved for…

Dawn

Let’s start at sunrise.

You might default to a pastoral scene of more recent memory, like a farmhouse. My great-grandparents were farmers, and there’s been a collective spirit of longing for that simplicity in the family ever since. But let’s not get sappy: hunter-gatherers rose with the sun for millions of years before a row was ever tilled. In fact, the urge to settle that instigated this whole “agriculture” thing was our first step into hell. Civilization came in hot on the farmer’s tail, and we all know how that ended up. Mankind has never been the same; slowly self-domesticating into a sad poodle of a hominid, unable to remember his one-time login code for long enough to switch apps and type it in. Thanks, Early European Farmers.

No—in the forests and plains of the Old Stone Age, there were no landlords, no crop blights, far less tooth decay, and fewer signs of widespread physical degeneration. There was the looming threat of being dismembered or gorged by giant mammalian super-predators, but these are risks we’re willing to take for a free and fulfilled life. As the sun prepared to creep over the horizon, humanity was roused awake naturally, like the rest of the earth’s daytime creatures.

Waking up as a response, not a task, is an essential function of the healthy human. It guarantees circadian regulation, low cortisol, heightened sensory attunement, and increased reaction time for those pesky cave hyenas and dire wolves. Being forced awake during your developmental years can disrupt the natural calibration of the body’s internal clock, desynchronizing sleep cycles, hormone release, and even cognitive performance later in life.

Modern chronobiology has made it clear: the human organism is tuned to light. As the sun rises, cortisol increases gradually, body temperature rises, and melatonin recedes. The body prepares itself, without instruction, for awareness and movement. This is a simple baseline function that has been proven in studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer groups. Ideal sleep follows environmental cues like light, temperature, and social rhythm, which cause people to fall asleep and wake gradually.

Instead of being jolted awake by sudden noise and expected to spring into action without any leverage for proper orientation, hunter-gatherers ease into the morning, often waking before sunrise, as the world begins to stir around them. There is no abrupt transition, only a shift from rest into awareness. We will wake up this morning not to immediately chase that bread, but to find the bread in good time.

Coffee will not be on the menu for several millennia. Perhaps some mint tea.

Motion

“In working with a piece of flint or primitive needle, in joining together animal hides or wooden planks, in preparing a fishhook or an arrowhead, in shaping a clay statuette, the imagination discovers unsuspected analogies among the different levels of the real; tools and objects are laden with countless symbolisms, the world of work—the micro-universe that absorbs the artisan’s attention for long hours—becomes a mysterious and sacred center, rich in meaning.” Mircea Eliade

The bison won’t hunt themselves.

It’s not a daily grind: Neanderthals alter their activity and diet seasonally, like other animals, or like a locally-sourced artisan restaurant. But once the ice recedes—if only partially since we are dealing with an Ice Age—it would behoove us to stock up on game, not a smidgen of which will go to waste. What is taken must be taken seriously.

The key to a successful hunt is teamwork, foresight, and coordination—all strong suits for the Neanderthal brain. Having endured the northern hemisphere for hundreds of thousands of years of Ice Age climates and cataclysms, planning ahead became an evolutionary must.

But more importantly than any plan is the execution. Without reliable tribesmen, the level of hunting (especially megafauna) required to stay fed through a long winter could not be achieved. Neanderthal brains were adapted for socialization with small, tight-knit groups; anything outside of which would be met tentatively, that is to say, awkwardly. But together, the tribe collaborated ingeniously to survive long, brutal winters. Trust ran deep because otherwise the tribe would die. Think of it like the bond between veterans who fought together in war. An Ice Age trauma bond.

Physically, Neanderthals were suited for cold weather, with stockier frames that conserved heat and supported powerful, full-body exertion. Hunting large game at close range required strength that could be applied under pressure. Lifting, carrying, striking, and endurance were practiced continuously and with consequence—the perfect example of integrated, functional strength.

When winter got too rough for survival, Neanderthals migrated south. Hunter-gatherer society is a lot more nimble, not reliant on permanent settlements, and therefore able, in this case, to traverse wide geographical expanses without drastically sacrificing lifestyle, making them adaptable and resilient.

It was also these migrations that likely introduced Neanderthals to Homo Sapiens in the Levant and Northern Africa, resulting in early hybridization that would go on to determine the fate of our species.

But that’s a discussion for a different day.

Diet

The “Paleo diet”, devised in the mid-1970s and popularized in the 90s, was based on the idea that our Stone Age ancestors regularly consumed a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet. At its core, it rests on a compelling observation: that our modern diet is out of alignment with the conditions under which we evolved. In that sense, it is not wrong, but it is incomplete.

In recent years, this idea has been pushed even further, rebranding itself in some circles as a purely meat-based “carnivore” diet. Now—eat whatever works for you—but if we are looking to Neanderthals as our model, the record tells a different story.

Their food intake was never fixed, but seasonal, regional, and opportunistic. Large game certainly played a major role, particularly in colder climates, but evidence from dental calculus and residue analysis shows that they also consumed plant foods, including starches, seeds, and occasionally sugars from fruits or honey, along with cooked carbohydrates when available. Their diet expanded and contracted with the environment, rather than adhering to a single principle.

And whatever they were doing, it worked.

Skeletal remains show physically robust individuals, with strong bones and relatively low rates of chronic degeneration. Tooth decay, while not absent, appears far less common than in post-agricultural populations. There is also evidence that Neanderthals used plants for medicinal purposes, suggesting a level of dietary awareness that went beyond simple consumption.

Food existed within the environment itself, encountered as needed, prepared, and shared within the rhythms of daily life, never taken to the point where nature suffered a deficit by their hands.

The Neanderthal diet cannot be reconstructed in any literal sense, but its variable structure—shaped by conditions rather than imposed upon them—can still be recognized. In that sense, it was less a diet than a relationship.

Free time

“Whereas modern man builds cities of stone…Neanderthal was content to build cities of dreams.” Stan Gooch

For the conveniences and technology we enjoy, we pay a hefty price.

The average working adult, after 45 hours locked in, 50 hours sleeping, and however many hours are needed for meals, chores, and exercise, has very little meaningful free time, and what he does have, he’d often prefer to spend relaxing.

Still, you might ask, what is there to show for so much free time compounded over hundreds of thousands of years? The vast majority of our society may feel their time is not their own, but their Paleolithic counterparts never invented airplanes, industrial systems, or striped toothpaste. The archaeological record is quiet. But silence is not absence; it merely suggests attention directed elsewhere. Unlike the medieval peasantry, who still enjoyed leagues more free time than we do, Neanderthals were deeply creative, just not in the way we associate with advancement today.

For hunter-gatherers, “work” is largely just what it takes to survive, if it could be separated into its own category at all. The concept of expansion was applied to the same end: maximizing quality of life and thereby survival, but not in the way we think in a post-agricultural society. Progress was not counted in numbers, but in depth. The dream culture of Neanderthals survives today in our collective unconscious through the various customs we practice and stories we tell. The continuity of northern cultures from a common ancestor makes it clear.

So, no, they may not have left behind megalithic structures, but their predecessor, the cave, is the cornerstone of Neanderthal ritual life.

And it’s where we will wrap our journey.

Dusk

A group sits in the half-light, the fire low, the walls alive with movement. Someone begins a story that has been told before, though never quite the same way twice.

Neanderthals were making fires 400,000 years ago. The flickering flames made cave paintings dance. Stories were passed down from memory, encoded with practical and esoteric knowledge. The dead were honored with funerary rites. The association with death and new life in pagan cultures suggests that in the caves where burials took place, initiation rituals may have been performed—child initiates exiting the yonic cave inhabited by the ancestral spirit.

We don’t know how old surviving ancient fairy tales, myths, and customs are. But their structure—the descent into darkness, the encounter with something other, the return—can already be glimpsed in the earliest human environments, with an unbroken lineage carrying on through the ages in animistic cultures across the world.

“Neanderthal paganism” might lack the widely accepted framework that has labeled Neanderthals the evolutionary “missing link” between apes and ourselves, but the anthropological lineage that constructs it remains scattered. It just needs melding. Cohesion.

Our remote ancestors will get the respect they deserve, and they get closer with every new Neanderthal appreciator. Their way of life may be out of reach, but something of it remains in us.

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Works Cited & Further Reading

• Weston A. Price, 1939 – Nutrition and Physical Degeneration

• Stan Gooch, 2006 – The Dream Culture of the Neanderthals

• Mircea Eliade, 1976 – A History of Religious Ideas, Vol. I

• NYT, December 2025: Archaeologists Find Oldest Evidence of Fire-Making

• Annual Review of Anthropology, 1995: Biological Changes in Human Populations with Agriculture

• Journal of Anthropological Research, 1980: Time and Leisure in the Elaboration of Culture

• Sapiens, 2019: The Neanderthal Diet—From Teeth to Guts

• Oxford, 2023: Archaic Introgression Shaped Human Circadian Traits

• Patheos, 2023: Evidence of a Neanderthal religion dates back 175,000 years

Teeth are the only part of the human body that visibly replace themselves at a single, specific moment in every individual’s life. From the present day deep into prehistory, the transition from temporary to permanent teeth has been marked by ritual across the world, with lost teeth exchanged for coins, tossed onto rooftops, or buried beneath homes. Small objects such as coins, seeds, beans, and pebbles frequently orbit myths of initiation and transformation, suggesting that these familiar rituals are part of a much older relationship between bodily development, mental transformation, and the symbolic world.

Through the lens of modern science, the weight attached to teeth in folklore appears less arbitrary. Teeth are closely linked to cognition and memory, and the transition to permanent teeth occurs at a time of major cognitive development. They are also among the most durable parts of the human body, remaining intact for tens of thousands of years and serving as a primary source of evidence in archaeology and paleoanthropology.

Within their mineral structure, they preserve records of malnutrition, disease, stress, diet, and even migration patterns of ancient humans. This is possible because enamel forms in incremental layers during early development and does not remodel, preserving a permanent record of physiological stress. In some cases, they retain molecular traces that allow scientists to reconstruct genetic relationships and speculate with more precision what ancient life was like. We largely owe our understanding of our own past as a species to ancient teeth.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that some of the oldest myths we have treat teeth as something more than ordinary fragments of the body. They are seeds of life, encoded with memories of ourselves.

Ritual & Initiation

At a certain age, the child’s teeth loosen and fall away, replaced by new ones that will remain unchanged for life. It is a quiet but decisive transformation, visible in the body but extending beyond it, marking a shift in how the child experiences the world and their place within it.

For the child, the loss of baby teeth coincides with a broader internal shift. Early childhood is characterized by a greater dominance of theta brainwave activity, associated with immersion and imaginative engagement. As development progresses—around the same period that permanent teeth emerge—alpha activity becomes more prominent, corresponding to increasing attention and the formation of internal representations. This helps explain why younger children can ‘make believe’ so completely that their imagination becomes their reality. As this shift unfolds, the child moves toward a more structured mode of thought, accompanied by social integration, the development of reason, and a more stable sense of personal identity, marking significant changes from the primarily immersive experience of earlier childhood. Developmental psychologist Jean Piaget identified this transition as the shift into the “concrete operational stage,” when the child begins to consistently separate imagination from external reality.

There is a Japanese saying that embodies this phenomenon: “A child is a kami until age seven,” or “before seven, with the gods.” Before this initiatory stage, when permanent teeth begin to emerge, children exist in a more impressionable, fluid state, and are, in a sense, much more spiritual beings. Their cognition is highly receptive, their identity is still forming rather than fixed, and their experience of the world is less sharply divided between self and environment.

To ancient observers of growing children, it must have seemed purposeful that this mental switch coincides with the replacement of baby teeth with deeply rooted permanent teeth. Like a snake sheds its skin, children shed the teeth that they first developed in utero. They wean from the nursing period and begin to form their personality and fend for themselves in social settings.

In many traditional cultures, early childhood is understood as a period in which the child is not yet fully individuated, but still closely tied to ancestral or spiritual continuity. Among those who have explored this idea, researcher Marie Cachet interprets the transition of teeth in initiatory terms. In cultures shaped by reincarnation beliefs, it can be understood as the ancestor symbolically “taking root” in the child-initiate.

When a child loses their first baby tooth, they still believe in the tooth fairy. By the time the last are gone, around age ten, that belief has disappeared. The threshold has been crossed.

These observations are where rites of initiation originate. Nature supplies the framework, and man builds his dwelling. There is no better time to effectively integrate the child into the continuation of the family, the tribe, the tradition, than the time of the changing of teeth. This example from Arthur Van Gennep’s Rites of Passage highlights its universality:

“Among certain southern Bantu groups, the eruption of the second teeth marks a decisive break in the child’s life. The mat on which mother and child once slept is burned, the child is separated from women, and instruction begins. What is merely a biological process becomes the basis for social reclassification, the transitional period between baby and permanent teeth marking a threshold the child is crossing.”

In traditions outside of Europe and North America, teeth are thrown onto rooftops with spoken wishes for strong replacements, buried beneath the home, or given to animals—often mice or rats—whose ever-growing teeth make them natural agents of renewal. The practices differ in form, but all follow the logic that the tooth retains its connection to the child even after it has left the body, and must be properly transferred rather than carelessly discarded.

In The Golden Bough, James Frazer noted that fragments of the body—hair, nails, afterbirth, and teeth—are often treated with particular care across cultures. Rather than reducing this to fear of misuse, it may reflect a broader intuition that such fragments remain bound to the person even after separation. Teeth follow this pattern, but with the important distinction that they mark a visible shift in the life of the individual.

Myth & Symbol

Greek myth tells the story of young Cadmus, who, in archetypal fashion, slays the cave-dwelling dragon by piercing its neck after it kills his men. He then hears the voice of Athena, who instructs him to remove the teeth from the dragon’s mouth, and sow them in tilled soil like seeds. From the ground, a new crop of men called Spartoi (“sown men”) emerges armed and ready for battle.

A fantastic image, not extraordinary for mythology, but it demonstrates—explicitly in this case—the symbolic power given to teeth. They push through the soil as seeds would, and as they do in the mouths of children. Cadmus had lost his men to a mysterious, threatening force, which turned out to be the same force that provided new, more permanent men, who helped him establish himself and found the city of Thebes, wherein lies an analogy for the symbolic rebirth that occurs around the change of teeth.

In another Greek tale, after a great flood has destroyed humanity, Deucalion and Pyrrha are instructed to “throw the bones of their mother” behind them. Interpreting this as the stones of the earth, they cast them over their shoulders, and from these stones new men and women arise. As with the sowing of dragon’s teeth, life continues not through flesh, but from what remains after it—in this case, durable fragments that persist beyond the destruction of the living body.

These motifs often appear through symbolic placeholders—seeds, beans, pebbles, coins, and bone fragments—each tied to themes of growth, memory, guidance, and patience. A common structure runs through these stories: life arising or prevailing through small, enduring objects that would otherwise seem inconsequential.

In Cinderella, the ancestral heroine is tasked with separating lentils or grains from the ashes. This is a seemingly humble task, but ultimately determines her transformation. Ash is what remains after fire, but also acts as a preservative for what it holds. From this indistinct mass, small, durable seeds must be recovered and distinguished. In this sense, the lentils function as the surviving elements of identity, drawn out from dissolution and prepared for renewal. Only once they are gathered can Cinderella be transformed.

One way to approach this recurring motif is through the work of Cachet, who has suggested that such objects symbolically parallel the role of teeth in human development. In this reading, they represent continuity and the emergence of a more permanent form, namely the ancestor within the child-initiate.

This interpretation illuminates certain aspects of familiar stories. In Hansel and Gretel and Tom Thumb, children are guided through the forest by a trail of white pebbles. When replaced by crumbs, which are consumed and disappear, they get lost. In Jack and the Beanstalk, a handful of beans traded to Jack for an old cow (remember the correlation between losing teeth and the end of the weaning period) produces a towering structure that initiates him into a new world.

In ancient Rome, during the festival of Lemuria, beans were cast behind the body to appease the spirits of the dead. Pythagorean traditions treated beans as sacred or forbidden, associating them with the souls of the departed. In an Italian variant of Little Red Riding Hood, the child is told to eat beans from a pot, only to find that they are too hard because they are, in fact, teeth. The distinction collapses entirely. There is clearly a thread of association with these ‘lookalike’ objects that Cachet argues are used in myth as symbols of initiation and ancestral return. Another example cited by Cachet is the European king cake tradition, in which a small object is hidden within a cake. The child who bites into it is crowned, echoing the moment when a child loses a tooth by biting into food.

Through myth and tradition, form is given to processes that are otherwise only experienced in the body. Meaning is given to universal experiences; religion and biology are intertwined, imbuing the ordinary with the gravity of immorality and self-understanding that defines the essence of the human experience.

Mind & Memory

The symbolic weight of teeth also appears in the inner life. Dreams of losing teeth, whether through crumbling, breaking, loosening, or rotting, are among the most commonly reported across cultures, often arising during periods of instability or reorientation. For the psychoanalysts, these images were understood as responses to moments when something established begins to loosen and give way to a new form. Their prevalence suggests that the experience of losing teeth leaves a lasting imprint that the mind returns to when confronting later changes.

This connection between the change of teeth and the formation of the inner life has also been noted in more recent educational theory. In the Waldorf tradition, founded by Rudolf Steiner, the emergence of permanent teeth marks a decisive shift in child development. Prior to this stage, Steiner argued, the child does not yet form inward images in the same way, but lives in a state of immediate perception and imitation, closer to the world, and less differentiated from it. He echoes the same concept we saw earlier in Japanese folk culture: that children are kami or are “with the gods” until the age of seven:

“Until the change of teeth, a human being lives entirely in the senses. A child surrenders entirely to the environment and is thus by nature a religious being.”

What Steiner describes in pedagogical terms aligns with a broader pattern: before the change of teeth, the child remains closely integrated with immediate experience; afterward, an inner life begins to take shape. Memory becomes pictorial, experience becomes something that can be held and recalled, and identity stabilizes.

Understanding this shift helps clarify the commonness of tooth-loss imagery in dreams. The change of teeth marks both a physical shift in the body and a reorganization in how experience is held and recalled. What was once lived directly becomes something that can be revisited and reshaped internally. In this sense, the event establishes a pattern: something familiar gives way, and a more stable structure takes its place. This pattern—first encountered in early childhood—remains available to the mind as a formative structure through which later changes are registered.

It is during the period between the change of teeth and adolescence, Steiner argued, that fairy tales and legends take hold most deeply, emerging as images that meet the child’s developing inner life. Rather than being analyzed or interpreted, they are absorbed, forming part of the structure through which the child begins to understand the world. The symbolic language of myth, which appeared outwardly in the previous section, now finds its counterpart within.

Teeth & The Nervous System

If this shift in perception and memory coincides so consistently with the change of teeth, it raises the further question of whether this pattern is purely symbolic or reflects a broader developmental reorganization.

Modern neuroscience does, in fact, observe a significant transition in early childhood, as patterns of brain activity begin to consolidate. In infancy, cognition is largely driven by immediate sensory engagement and imitation of the surrounding environment. As the child approaches the age at which permanent teeth begin to emerge, this mode gives way to more structured forms of attention and recall, allowing experience to be stabilized and revisited rather than simply lived through.

One of the clearest markers of this shift is the development of autobiographical memory. Most adults retain few, if any, memories from before the age of five or six—a phenomenon known as childhood amnesia—which is caused by the immaturity of the neural systems responsible for organizing memory into a stable narrative. As the hippocampus and related structures continue to develop during early childhood, the child gains the ability to encode and retrieve long-term, self-referential memories. Around the same period that permanent teeth erupt, memory becomes anchored to a continuous sense of self.

Teeth themselves are not passive within this process. They are among the most densely innervated structures in the body, connected through the trigeminal nerve to regions involved in sensation and perception. Within the dental pulp, researchers have identified stem cells capable of differentiating into multiple tissue types, including cells with neural characteristics. These cells originate from the neural crest, the same embryonic structure that gives rise to key components of the nervous system and face. What appears as a hardened, mineral structure retains a latent connection to the body’s developmental pathways, linking it directly to the formation of the nervous system.

There is also evidence that the functional use of teeth plays a role in cognitive health. Studies have shown that tooth loss and reduced chewing ability are associated with increased risk of cognitive decline and conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. Chewing stimulates neural activity, increases blood flow to the brain, and engages pathways connected to memory and attention.

If teeth are so closely bound to these integral aspects of the individual, they are also uniquely suited to persist beyond it. Unlike bone, which can heal and remodel, teeth do not regenerate. Their structure is primarily mineral, which gives them a hardness and permanence more akin to stone than to living bone.

Deep Time

Teeth are one of the primary ways we understand ancient humans. They persist long after soft tissue has disappeared, preserving a record of early life across tens of thousands of years. Much of what is known about Neanderthals and early human populations comes from dental remains. In fact, much of what has informed the “humanization” of Neanderthals in the last fifteen years of anthropology has come from revelations from the dental record.

Through the analysis of enamel, plaque, and microscopic wear, researchers have reconstructed diets, environments, and behavior. Starch grains preserved in dental calculus have shown that Neanderthals consumed a wide variety of plant foods, including cooked grains, challenging the long-standing image of them as purely meat-eating hunters. Isotopic analysis of teeth has revealed patterns of migration, while wear patterns and grooves suggest that teeth were used as tools, functioning as a kind of “third hand” in daily life. Even signs of dental manipulation indicate self-care and practical knowledge.

This record is made possible by the structure of enamel itself, which forms in layers during early development, much like the rings of a tree, and does not change once formed. Each layer captures a moment in time, preserving traces of nutrition, stress, and environmental conditions experienced during childhood. Researchers can read these microscopic growth lines to identify periods of hardship, such as seasonal stress or malnutrition, as well as patterns of weaning and early development. Analysis of microbiomes extracted from teeth has revealed evidence of plant-based medicines, including compounds associated with natural antibiotics and pain relief, suggesting not only dietary diversity but also a knowledge of healing. Findings like these have steadily shifted the image of Neanderthals from a crude intermediary form to a highly adaptive and behaviorally sophisticated human population.

For paleoanthropologists, teeth are a literal manifestation of the trail of white pebbles that lead characters like Hansel and Gretel and Tom Thumb through the forest and safely back home. Without their durability, the archaeological record would be far more fragmentary, and our understanding of where we come from far less certain.

And ultimately, these clues from our deep past, no larger than a fingertip, once belonged to an individual with their own personality and experience. Just like all of us, they crossed a threshold, around age seven, into permanence, taking on something that will go on unchanged. By surviving early childhood, we all participate in a continuity that extends beyond our singular lives. Our individuality, which crystallizes at this time, is also being encoded onto our enamel in a way that can be interpreted long after our lives have ended. They tell part of our story for us.

What will our contribution to this long and winding trail be? Research on hunter-gatherer populations, supported by archaeological evidence, shows that tooth decay is relatively rare under conditions our ancestors lived in during the Paleolithic, becoming widespread only with modern changes in diet and environment. Today, despite advances in dental technology, rates of decay remain high. The capacity to repair damage has grown, but the conditions that support long-term resilience have diminished. Will it be evident to posterity that our health was sacrificed, adapted to an unnatural system?

Or will the unchanging elements of our collective psyche overshadow the physical deficits of our age? No matter our legacy, what will persist are the fairy tales, myths, and customs whose origins are so deep, they’re untraceable. They don’t rely on our understanding to survive—we are programmed to pass them on—to interpret them however makes us feel they’re worthy of preservation. Under their dreamlike facade, our traditions have a baked-in solution of biology, symbol, and narrative that maintains the knowledge of our ancestors like embers under a pile of ash.

The image of the white pebble trail in Hansel and Gretel is simple, but it captures the essence of the idea that what persists allows for return. The teeth, sprouting like seedlings from spring soil, mark the ancestral spirit manifesting itself in the child, one that existed long before the child’s birth, and will last long after the life of the child has ended. Through their persistence, we come to understand where we have been. We trace our way back, not only to our origins as individuals, but to the deeper story of the human species itself.

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Works Cited & Further Reading

• Arthur Van Gennep, 1909 – The Rites of Passage

• Kunio Yanagita, 1945 – About our Ancestors

• Marie Cachet, 2017 – The Secret of the She-Bear, Paganism Explained

• Rudolf Steiner, 1930 – The Roots of Education (PDF)

• James George Frazer, 1890 – The Golden Bough

• The Conversation: Why Do People Have Baby Teeth and Adult Teeth?

• Smithsonian Insider, 2011: Starch grains found on Neandertal teeth debunks theory that dietary deficiencies caused their extinction

• Smithsonian, 2017: Scientists Delve Into Neanderthal Dental Plaque to Understand How They Lived and Ate

• Repository of neanderthal teeth images

• Stefan Milo, 2026: The hunt for the oldest ‘human’ genetics (video)

“The afterlife of our people, the eternal existence of souls within our land and not in a distant place, has been firmly maintained from the beginning of the world until now.” —Kunio Yanagita

Author’s Note

Intellectual discovery is an unparalleled thrill. Being a relatively niche project, finding lore or literature that fits into Neanderthal Paganism like a puzzle piece, even in times of tireless and indulgent curiosity, is rare. For years, I had been aware of Kunio Yanagita as the father of Japanese folklore studies (minzokugaku), famous for first-hand compilations like The Legends of Tōno (1912). Although he remains an obscure figure in the West, bordering on unknown, recent translations of his anthologies have at least earned him a place on the bookshelf for readers of mythology.

I do not remember exactly how I discovered his work—possibly through studying folkloric elements in Hayao Miyazaki’s films—but his out-of-print About Our Ancestors: The Japanese Family System became a constant on my list of rare books to find. It stood out in his bibliography as something broader and more reflective than a collection of folk stories or analyses thereof. I knew there was a possibility that it contained little of interest. But the prospect of an elder folklorist who had walked the countryside recording its living traditions writing directly on the subject of ancestral religion was too compelling to ignore.

It was nowhere to be found online. The only regional copy was held under restricted access in a special collections library. It was only by a chance meeting with an archivist there that I salvaged a chance at getting my hands on this slippery title. Through a combination of persistence and luck (and the archivist’s generous willingness to help) I was able to read, in the comfort of my home, About Our Ancestors two times through, diligently taking notes for future reference. It read in a conversational tone, but with urgency, completely aligned with the essence I hope to capture with Neanderthal Paganism.

Religion in Japan & the Legacy of Kunio Yanagita

Japan’s religious history is defined by the distinctive way foreign forms were absorbed and naturalized. Buddhism, Confucian philosophy, and later Western modernity all reshaped the country’s intellectual life. Yet an older animistic sensibility remained central: the veneration of ancestors, the cyclical return of spirits, and a conception of life and death inseparable from the land. Unlike the West, the indigenous Shinto tradition remains an official major religion of the country.

This endurance did not arise from political unity. For much of its history, Japan functioned as a mosaic of regional clans and dialect areas shaped by mountain, coast, and valley, closer in structure to the Celtic world or pre-colonial North America than to a centralized kingdom. Local customs varied in gesture and tone, yet the great rituals of the year—Bon, New Year, the midsummer and midwinter observances—were recognized across the islands. The result was a mosaic culture: diverse in expression, yet bound by a continuous rhythm of life, death, and return.

The source of this coherence lay not in imperial chronicles or doctrinal institutions, but in the rituals of daily life: household altars, seasonal festivals, funerary customs, and inherited songs. These practices preserved the pre-Buddhist worldview beneath later layers of philosophy and governance. It was this subterranean continuity of spirit that Kunio Yanagita later recognized in his travels. Expecting fragmentation, he found recurring patterns of memory that revealed an unbroken cultural genealogy.

Conflict over the role of Buddhism began early. In the sixth century, a monk sent from Korea proposed its adoption at court, promising diplomatic advantage and cultural prestige. The Soga clan, likely of Korean origin themselves, welcomed the new religion while rival clans such as Mononobe and Nakatomi opposed it, warning that “the kami (god/deity) of our land will be offended if we worship a foreign kami.” When the Soga gained dominance, Buddhism and Confucian bureaucratic models entered Japan together.

Shōtoku Taishi (574–622), the most prominent Soga-aligned statesman, sponsored temple construction, sent embassies to China, and reshaped administration along continental lines. The Soga held influence for almost a century, and the institutions established under their rule remained in place after their decline. Buddhism had already entered the structure of the state, in part because its temple networks, written doctrine, and hierarchical organization provided a ready-made framework for governance.

Once the Soga were overthrown, to integrate the new faith with ancestral belief, Japanese rulers developed Shinbutsu-shūgo: the alignment of kami and buddhas. Rather than replacing local practices, Buddhism was absorbed into them, its symbols and stories settling into patterns already long established.

For over twelve centuries, this syncretic order shaped Japanese religious life. Gradually, however, Buddhist institutions became entangled with mechanisms of state control. By the Edo period, the danka system required all households to register with Buddhist temples for taxation and surveillance, binding religious identity to state administration.

By then, the prestige of imported systems had begun to dull. The Kokugaku (“National Learning”) scholars of the late Edo era—Motoori Norinaga, Hirata Atsutane, and others—shifted their focus from Chinese classics to ancient Japanese texts. Identity was reframed not as something to be acquired, but remembered. The Meiji Restoration (1868) intensified this shift, forcibly separating Shinto and Buddhism. Years of resentment toward the temple bureaucracy erupted in Haibutsu Kishaku (“abolish Buddhism and destroy Shākyamuni”), a widespread, often locally driven movement that damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of temples and stripped monastic institutions of land and authority. The state then attempted to sculpt a new national identity around mythic Japanese origins.

Yanagita emerged in the generation after this rupture. Yet unlike the Kokugaku scholars before him, he did not attempt to purify Japanese tradition through texts alone. Motoori Norinaga and Hirata Atsutane had turned to ancient literature in search of a pristine origin, but in doing so they relied upon the very Buddhist and Confucian frameworks they hoped to reject. Their vision of Japan remained, in Yanagita’s eyes, a history written from the perspective of court thinkers rather than from the life of the people. Yanagita sought continuity elsewhere: in the living customs of villages, households, and seasonal rites. He believed that the real inheritance of Japan persisted not in scholarly systems but in the practices that had survived quietly, unbroken, in places where doctrine held little sway.

His work marked a shift from antiquarian scholarship to the study of folklore and ethnography—the attempt to understand a culture not by what was said about it, but by what its people continued to do.

About Our Ancestors

Yanagita completed About Our Ancestors in the spring of 1945, while Tokyo burned around him. He was seventy-one. The book reads like the record of a man who has seen an old world passing and wishes to place something in the hands of those who will inherit whatever remains. It is written in a familiar voice—one speaking from within a tradition rather than from above it. What he preserves is not the image of Japanese religion found in state shrines or doctrinal systems, but the older order that lived in households and seasonal rites, where the boundary between the living and the dead was porous and continually negotiated.

The central claim is simple: the foundation of Japanese religious life is the ancestor. Many of the gods of shrines and mythic genealogies, Yanagita writes, are ancestral figures whose identities have diffused and expanded across generations; “many other gods are nothing but disguised or forgotten ancestral spirits” (p.6). The household is not merely a grouping of the living but a continuum with the dead. Even when descendants disperse, the family remains conceptually gathered around a single origin, “like petals of a flower with a center” (p.32). The past is not a separate time, but a mode of presence.

This continuity is maintained not through doctrine but through practice. Tradition (dento) is something shown rather than stated, learned through repetition and proximity. It is, Yanagita writes, “handed down to the next generation from what can be ascertained by the ear and eye or something outwardly manifest” (p.40). A tradition persists only as long as it is enacted.

The ritual year expresses this worldview with clarity. New Year and Bon, later separated in tone, were originally variations of the same act: the welcoming of ancestral spirits home (pp.46, 71). Before the turning of the year, houses were swept, purified, and adorned. In some regions, the ancestor returned in the form of Toshi-gami, a kindly elder bringing mochi to renew the household’s vitality—“unless this mochi is eaten, another year cannot be added” (p.59). Bon in midsummer followed the same logic. Fires were lit to guide spirits home and lit again to send them forth. In mountain villages, families led horses into forests to sense the presence of returning ancestors (pp.135–137, 162).

These rites are the lived expression of a cosmology in which the worlds of the living and the dead overlap in ongoing cycles of inheritance, rather than symbols of metaphysical claims.

It is here that the tension with Buddhism becomes visible. Buddhist teaching encourages the dead to depart for other states of existence; the ancestral worldview holds that they remain tied to the land and to the family. The two systems coexisted not by conceptual synthesis but through a layered practice. Priests taught departure, but families continued to welcome return. Yanagita notes that the Buddhist recommendation to “give up their hope of returning to this world” was “not thoroughly accepted” (p.69). Ritual memory proved more durable than philosophical instruction.

Rebirth follows the same inward logic. The spirit does not return into an arbitrary body, nor into a universal cycle without distinction. It returns within its own lineage. One would “surely be reborn to the same kin group and to the same blood line” (pp.174–175). Grandparents reappear in grandchildren; names rotate across generations; a tree planted at a grave may come to signify continuity rather than mere remembrance. Identity is not an individual possession but an intergenerational thread.

By the 1940s, Yanagita feared that the conditions for this continuity were failing. Industrial life drew youth away; the household fractured; festivals narrowed their scope to the recently deceased. “Continuance of the family is a big problem now,” he writes with a quiet directness that would acquire new resonance in the decades that followed (p.178). The question was not merely whether traditions could be preserved, but whether the very structure that sustained memory and gave it legitimacy—the family itself—would continue.

If the line breaks, the relationship between living and dead breaks with it. If the dead are no longer received, they no longer return. And if they no longer return, the world that made their presence intelligible dissolves.

About Our Ancestors is therefore an attempt to articulate the principles of a worldview before they cease to be lived. It assumes the past is not behind us, but alongside us, and remains so only through practice. Without it, Japan’s identity, like so many other modern cultures, would face existential threats different from the air raids that cried over Tokyo—more subtle, and slow.

The worldview Yanagita describes is local in its expression, yet spacious in implication. It belongs to particular villages, households, and seasonal rites, but the structure of thought—the sense of time as cyclical, of ancestry as presence, of the living as stewards of the dead—resonates far beyond Japan.

When we step back, what emerges is not a uniquely Japanese pattern, but a form of human experience that appears in different languages and landscapes. The more closely one studies the rituals of return, inheritance, and seasonal renewal, the more they begin to resemble a shared grammar of belief, shaped by climate, labor, kinship, and memory. Yanagita understood this, even if his work rarely framed it explicitly. His final writings gesture toward a broader horizon, one in which the study of folklore becomes a way of understanding the deep structures of the human world.

The Need for Comparative Study

“The comparative study of folklore still has a long way to go. We think of this comparative study as the final stage of human self-understanding and wait impatiently for the day it will come to maturity.” —Kunio Yanagita, 1962

After the war, Japan entered a period of unusually open cultural exchange with the West. What followed was not replacement or dilution, but a reorganization of expression. The older sensibilities did not disappear; they found new modes of appearance in film, literature, design, and everyday aesthetics. As Japanese culture became increasingly visible beyond its borders, it carried with it a way of seeing shaped over centuries: a world understood as layered with unseen presences, time felt as seasonal and circular rather than linear, memory experienced as something that still participates in the present.

What has become clear in the postwar era is the compatibility of the European and Japanese mind, demonstrated through modern cultural mediums, and indebted in part to our historical overlap in recent centuries, but rooted in a shared inheritance in the deepest sense.

This is exactly what Yanagita suspected when he called the comparative study of folklore “the final stage of human self-understanding.” It is the reason why Hayao Miyazaki’s heroic and deeply folkloric films resonate globally. His worlds are shaped by the same sensibility Yanagita describes: that the land is alive, that the dead return, that the invisible world lies close to the visible one. Certain narrative patterns—the crossing of thresholds, the seasonal return, the coexistence of the living and the dead—belong to no single culture, but to the deeper structure of the human mind.

Our tribal civilizations faced the coming of universal religious systems from top down simultaneously: Buddhism encroaching from China, Christianity from Rome—both fueled by the desire for power and control. In both regions, we lagged behind the sophisticated hive minds and war machines, but were equipped with a spiritual inheritance that could not be cut down or overshadowed—that still, in our rapidly changing world, enjoys unbroken continuity.

In Europe, the old festivals continued under Christian names. In Japan, the kami rites continued beneath Buddhist ones. In both cases, the form shifted while the underlying logic remained. The anthropologist Kuroda has pointed out that what we now call “Shinto” was not originally a distinct religion, but a conceptual framework used to describe localized ritual and ancestor worship within the dominant Buddhist vocabulary. The West has a parallel phenomenon in what might be called “interpreted Europe,” where pre-Christian mythological structures are frequently encountered in texts written by Christian chroniclers, filtered through their metaphysical assumptions and theological boundaries. Both “Shinto” and “Paganism” as labels were invented to differentiate indigenous practices from imported religions.

When we place these worlds side by side, there is clearly a way of understanding life and death that emphasizes return, continuity, kinship, and the land as a vessel of memory. The northern hemisphere developed these patterns under similar environmental and seasonal conditions; the winter-summer cycle, the solstices and equinoxes, the dependence on stored food through dark months, the need for communal ceremony to renew meaning during seasonal scarcity. These conditions shaped religious expression long before Buddhism or Christianity arrived.

Yanagita believed that continuity was not sustained through ideology or state power, but through the ongoing relationship between the living and the dead. A culture persists when the living understand themselves as belonging to a lineage rather than standing alone. The form of the household may change, the rites may simplify, but the idea that the past remains present through us is what allows a tradition to remain alive.

We are only beginning to understand how deep this inheritance runs. The similarities between distant ritual traditions—between the Japanese summer fires that welcome the ancestors and the midsummer bonfires of Europe, between the household altar and the remembrance of the dead at the family hearth, between the return of Toshi-gami and the ancestral visitations of the Celtic year—suggest not coincidence, but memory. A memory older than organized religion, older than imperial systems, older than writing. It is carried in seasonal rhythms, in the instinct to speak to the dead as if they still listen, in the understanding that the land remembers those who have walked it. To study these worlds side by side is not to collapse them into sameness, but to recognize that both are branches of an ancient root—an inheritance of the northern world carried forward through the long passage of time.

Our task now is not to reconstruct what has been lost, nor to return to an imagined past, but to learn to recognize the shape of inheritance when it appears, to tend it where it still lives, and to remember that we stand inside a story far older than ourselves.

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Works Cited & Further Reading

• The Japanese Experience: A Short Story of Japan by W.G. Beasley (1999)

• About Our Ancestors: The Japanese Family System by Kunio Yanagita*

Links

• Shinto Museum

• The Soga Clan

• Kokogaku (“national learning” academic movement)

• Shinbutsu Bunri (Separation of Buddhism and Shinto)

• Shinbutsu Shugo (Syncretization of Buddhism and Shinto)

*For those interested in reading About Our Ancestors directly, I have uploaded my scans to the Internet Archive for preservation and study here.

“I am Osiris, I reappear through you. The gods are living in me, for I live and grow in the corn that sustains the Honored Ones. I cover the earth; whether I live or die, I am barley. I am not destroyed.”

Scholars have long explained the great mysteries of antiquity through the lens of agriculture. The Eleusinian rites in Greece, the Osiris cult in Egypt, and Samhain in the Celtic world are said to have drawn their meaning from the seasonal cycle of sowing and reaping, the burial of seed and the cutting of grain. There is truth in this interpretation, but it begins the story too late. In the later years of Greece and Egypt, and still more in Rome which inherited from them, the source of the mysteries had grown distant, obscured by generations of prosperity. Their rituals were elaborate, their symbolism refined, but their original meaning had become half-forgotten. To understand their origin, we must look further back, into the Paleolithic, when men first entered the cave and enacted the descent into darkness as the price of renewal.

The equinoxes and solstices were the earliest annual markers and remain enduring thresholds. Twice each year the sun balances day and night; twice each year it stands at its extremes. Ancient peoples across the world watched for these days. Stone circles and tombs at Newgrange and Stonehenge show how carefully they were tracked, their axes aligned with the rising or setting sun. These were the hinges of the world, the fixed points by which the cosmos could be observed. The same pattern seen in the heavens was mirrored on earth, most clearly after the autumn equinox, when the dark begins to overtake the light.

Burrowing animals disappear into the earth to emerge in spring with offspring, as if born from the soil itself. Seeds fall to the ground, endure the cold, and are quickened under winter’s cover. The sun follows the same pattern, declining until it begins to rebound at the winter solstice. In the Paleolithic mind, these served as proofs that what recedes does not die without a trace, but will be reborn.

The Greeks clothed this logic in the myth of Persephone. Each autumn she was taken by Hades into the underworld, and her mother Demeter mourned until she returned. At Eleusis, this became the center of the greatest mystery cult of the classical world. Each year in September, just after the equinox, Athenians walked the Sacred Way to the sanctuary, reenacting Demeter’s search. There, in the darkened Telesterion, initiates underwent symbolic death and emerged into the promise of new life.

Ancient witnesses left us rare glimpses of its meaning. Cicero praised the Mysteries for teaching men “not only to live in joy, but to die with better hope.” Plutarch said they erased the fear of death. Plato spoke of the soul being opened to the realm of the gods. Aristotle remarked that the experience mattered more than knowledge. Yet to speak of the rites in detail was impious. They were to remain, as their name suggests, Mysteries—reflecting the hidden nature of what occurs underground, in the womb, and in the cave. Thus, though framed in agricultural imagery, the rite was the cave ritual made formal: a descent into darkness to discover immortality.

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Egypt had long before elevated this conviction into an entire theology. The myth of Osiris tells of death, dismemberment, and resurrection, first attested in the Pyramid Texts around 2400 BCE, although almost certainly derived from more archaic oral traditions. Every dead man was identified with him: In death, the Pharaoh became Osiris and rose again in the stars. Over time, this privilege extended beyond kings to initiates into the Mysteries, as reflected in the Book of the Dead. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, explained to his Greek readers that the Egyptians were ‘the first to have maintained the doctrine of the immortality of the soul’ (Histories 2.123). And yet, Egyptians themselves claimed to have inherited it from a more ancient source.

The same pattern appears in the Celtic world, where the year was divided at the cross-quarter days, the midpoints between solstice and equinox. Samhain, on November 1, fell halfway between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice, marking the true beginning of winter or the dark half of the year.

It has also been called the start of the Celtic year, the logic for which appears elsewhere: cycles begin in darkness. In Finnish tradition, the harvest festival of Kekri, considered the beginning of the new year, occurred approximately on modern-day Halloween and honored ancestors who were thought to visit at that liminal time. As the Japanese folklorist Kunio Yanagita observed, ‘We thought in terms of evening to morning, not morning to evening, in measuring a day…the boundary being set by the sinking sun.’ The new year, like the day, was planted at nightfall.

Early Irish sources describe Samhain as a liminal feast when the boundaries between worlds weakened. It was the season when the dead returned. Children begged at doors for food, embodying the dead who seek rebirth, like seeds seeking nourishment in the soil. The modern pumpkin, carved and lit from within, is a symbol in perfect continuity with this concept: a husk or a skull illuminated from within, death animated by the spark of life. Similarly, the Räbeliechtli processions in Switzerland, as well as other traditions across Europe, feature gourds and roots lit in kinship with Samhain customs and the later jack-o’-lantern.

Across the ocean, Día de los Muertos in Mexico expresses the same conviction. The Codex Borbonicus, one of the most important surviving Aztec manuscripts, records the festival months of Miccailhuitontli and Hueymiccailhuitl—feasts dedicated to the ancestors. Graves are still adorned, food and flowers prepared for the returning spirits. The season of descent is that of communion with the honorable dead and a revitalization of their memory.

The doctrines of rebirth and immortality underpinned these cultures, but their roots reached further back. What was dramatized in the Eleusinian hall or embalmed in the Egyptian tomb was already present in the caves of the Paleolithic: that descent into darkness was the condition of renewal.

If we return to the Paleolithic, we find the outlines of these later practices already in place. At sites such as Drachenloch in Switzerland and Regourdou in France, Neanderthals left behind traces of funerary monuments. In some caves, human and bear skulls appear to have been deliberately curated or displayed, leading scholars to suggest a form of early ‘head cult.’ Later, Romans accused the Celts of head-hunting, but this was less an act of barbarity than a practice of ancestral veneration—keeping the presence of the dead close at hand, preserving the skull as a vessel of spirit. The same impulse is recognizable in the carved pumpkin lit from within, or the skull imagery used by the Aztecs: the head as a symbol of continuity, a reminder that death did not sever the bond between the living and the departed.

The French researcher Marie Cachet has argued that Neanderthal children underwent initiatory rites within the cave at the seasonal threshold, later preserved in festivals such as Samhain and Halloween. Mirroring the bear’s descent into hibernation, Cachet suggests that a child initiate would enter a cave, representing the realm of the dead, in a symbolic effort to receive nourishment from the sleeping Ogress—the mythic she-bear figure who hoards enough sustenance to carry herself and her newborn cubs through the winter.

Archaeology offers glimpses of evidence that align with this hypothesis. The clay bear effigy at Montespan cave from the Upper Paleolithic may reflect a later, more symbolic version of the ritual (Halloween being its latest descendant). The footprints of a child alongside those of a dog at Chauvet, some 26,000 years ago, suggest the deliberate presence of youth in ritual cave settings. Elsewhere in Stone Age Europe, bear and human bones were closely associated in deliberate displays at burial sites.

More significant is the mythological evidence of an unbroken archetypal lineage: the tale of the child or hero who descends into the underworld, faces harrowing trials, and returns renewed. This pattern surfaces in the great epics later catalogued by Joseph Campbell as the Hero’s Journey, but also in the more intimate form of fairy tales analyzed by Cachet in The Secret of the She-Bear. Such stories have no clear historical beginning; they must have started somewhere, and Cachet’s theory places their origins plausibly in the caves of the Paleolithic.

Concerning Halloween’s ancient roots, she points to “Hansel and Gretel” as a telling example. The children enter the otherworld through the forest, find a house made of sweets, and are enticed by a hard-of-sight, keen-of-smell Witch. Just as the she-bear will absorb unimplanted embryos during hibernation, the children risk being devoured by the deceptive Witch, unless they can escape the candy house—the womb—the cave. The fairy tale, like the ancient rite of initiation, preserves the same structure: descent, peril, and the possibility of renewal.

“Witches have red eyes, and cannot see far, but they have a keen scent like the beasts, and are aware when human beings draw near.” —Hansel and Gretel

Later civilizations inherited these intuitions and elaborated them into theology, liturgy, and seasonal festivals. Egypt embalmed them, Greece dramatized them, the Celts kept them in masks and fires, and we still celebrate this heavily symbolic annual festival centered around children inhabiting the spirit of the dead. But their origin lies deeper, where men first saw themselves reflected in the processes of the earth and drew the conclusion that has haunted humanity ever since: death is not the end, but the passage into continuity.

The autumn equinox is the balance before descent. Samhain is the entry into darkness. The solstice is the rebirth of light. At each stage, men shaped ritual life to the natural cycle, combining culture and science, art and philosophy. The bear entering its cave, the seed buried in the ground, the child dressed as the dead demanding food—all are figures of the same law: To die is to return. To descend is to prepare for renewal. Reincarnation and immortality are the first philosophy, a primal science drawn from the deepest observations of nature and enshrined in ritual from the Neanderthal caves to the cities of the ancient world, and into the customs we keep today.

Works Cited & Further Reading

1. Homeric Hymn to Demeter (7th c. BC).

2. Cicero, On the Laws, II.14.

3. Pyramid Texts (c. 2400 BC).

4. Tochmarc Emire (early Irish text, c. 9th c.).

5. Codex Borbonicus (16th c. Aztec codex).

6. Herodotus, Histories, 2.123. Translated by G. C. Macaulay (1890).

7. Anssi Alhonen, Notes on the Finnish Tradition (1992).

8. Kunio Yanagita, About our Ancestors (1945).

9. Emil Bächler, Das Drachenloch: Die vorgeschichtliche Bärenhöhle im Drachenloch ob Vättis (Kt. St. Gallen) (1923).

10. Marie Cachet, Le Secret de l’Ours (2015).

“The Christ-symbol is as much a product of the collective unconscious as it is of history.” Carl Jung

The story of Christ did not arise in a vacuum. However singular its claims, the symbolic grammar in which it is written—the tomb and its resurrection, the sacred meal, the promise of light breaking into darkness—long predates the first century. These are not random inventions of the Near East, nor mere borrowings from Hellenistic cults. They belong to a lineage of religious thought as old as humanity itself, shaped first in the mind of Paleolithic man and carried forward through millennia of myth.

Much has been made of Christianity’s “pagan roots”: its festivals coinciding with solstices, its echoes of various world mythologies, its moral laws overlapping with older codes. To understand its deeper ancestry, we will return not to Athens or Babylon but to the Ice Age, where Neanderthals began enacting the symbolic dramas that would structure religion for hundreds of thousands of years.

The Resurrection

The cave was humanity’s first cathedral. Its darkness was not a shelter for daily life but a chamber reserved for ritual, for marking thresholds between death and life. Archaeologists at Shanidar, Drachenloch, and Regourdou have uncovered Neanderthal burials where bodies were carefully arranged: some curled into fetal positions, others dusted with red ochre, a pigment long associated with blood and renewal. Many were oriented east to west, mirroring the path of the sun. In the same chambers, cave bear skulls were set in niches, sometimes beside the dead. These details suggest a symbolic logic: the cave as both womb and tomb, death as a passage, and the promise of return in another form.

The choice of the bear is telling. Unlike herd animals hunted for food, the bear is a solitary creature that withdraws into the earth in winter, only to re-emerge in spring with her cubs. She is both a fearsome predator and nurturing mother, embodying death and renewal in a single form. To organize bear skulls in caves was to stage a ritual drama of hibernation, rebirth, and ancestral return. In the Paleolithic imagination, the cave was the cosmic womb, and the bear was its herald of resurrection.

Marie Cachet has suggested in The Secret of the She-Bear that caves also served as sites of initiation. She points to the famous Chauvet footprints, where a child’s bare steps are preserved beside those of a wolf-dog. The image is striking: the young initiate accompanied into darkness by a guide, leading him through the liminal space of death and rebirth. Such a descent was not for shelter but for transformation. To enter the cave was to enter death symbolically, to emerge reborn into the community with a new name as if resurrected.

In ancient times, science and ritual were interwoven. The reality of ancestral reincarnation—a child embodying the features and spirit of forebears—was mirrored in initiation rites that enacted a symbolic death and rebirth when the child came of age. The cycle of the bear, the return of the sun at solstice, and the rhythm of the seasons were all folded into this archetype of renewal.

This logic flowed outward through the ages. Orpheus descends into the underworld to rescue his other half, his beloved. (In his book Carnaval, René Gaignabet insists that Orpheus’ descent into the underworld and his eventual successful return represent a model borrowed and adapted from prehistoric bear ceremonies. In Christianity, Christ’s descent into hell mimics Orpheus and thus the bear.) Dionysus is torn apart and restored, observed in subterranean rites that promised renewal. Osiris is slain and dismembered, reassembled and enthroned as lord, his cycle ritually reenacted each year along the Nile as a promise of resurrection. Mithras springs from the rock, his cult gathered in cave-temples to feast by torchlight. Each figure replays the same sequence: descent, concealment, trial, and re-emergence.

Christianity takes up the symbol with extraordinary clarity. Christ is placed in the cave of death and rises into life. Tradition locates his nativity in a grotto, bookending his story in the same archetypal chamber. His resurrection is not an invention isolated in history but the flowering of the oldest ritual insight: that death, entered into fully, can open onto life transfigured.

The Sacred Meal and Sacrifice

If the cave was the first cathedral, the meal was its first liturgy. Across Paleolithic sites, animal remains in ritual contexts suggest that eating was not only a matter of sustenance, but also a means of social interaction and expression. Feasting together was a way of binding the living to the cycle of death and renewal, a communion with the sacred through the life that had been taken. In sharing the body of the animal, early humans made its vitality their own, transforming consumption into ritual.

This archetype carried forward into the ancient world. The followers of Dionysus consumed raw flesh in omophagic rites of divine participation, while Orphic initiates drank wine as the blood of the god. Egyptian worshipers of Osiris partook of bread and beer that represented his dismembered body restored to life, dramatizing both death and renewal through consumption. Among Greeks and Romans, funerary meals were shared at tombs in a refrigerium, blurring the line between the living and the dead as food was offered in common. In each case, the act of eating together was not mere nourishment but a symbolic sharing in death, and through it, in renewed life.

Christianity inherited this structure and transfigured it. The Last Supper, remembered in the Eucharist, is the sacred meal of sacrifice universalized. Bread becomes body, wine becomes blood; but no longer the seasonal flesh of an animal, nor the esoteric rite of an initiate. Instead, the sacrifice is Christ himself, offered once for all, and the meal is open to all who believe. The pattern is ancient, but its fulfillment is distinctive: a ritual of death and renewal that binds not only a tribe or cult, but the entire communion of the faithful.

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Light in Darkness

From the beginning, humans sought light in dark places: torches carried through narrow cave passageways, pressed against walls to draw animals that leapt by flicker. In these chambers of ritual darkness, flame was a symbol of eternal life. The cave became a theatre of illumination, where light itself was a sign of life breaking into shadow.

This logic extended outward into the landscape. In the Neolithic, megalithic tombs and dolmens—architectural descendants of the cave—were carefully aligned with the solstices. At Newgrange in Ireland, built more than 5,000 years ago, the midwinter sunrise pierces a narrow passage to flood the inner chamber with light. Across Eurasia, similar structures were oriented so that the first light of the solstice penetrated the tomb, dramatizing the sun's rebirth in the house of the dead. The cave had become a built stone structure, and the ancient drama of darkness and dawn was staged anew.

From these alignments, it is clear that the sun itself was a central figure in prehistoric religion. Its annual renewal at the winter solstice and daily arc across the heavens were woven into myths of dying and rising gods. Solar deities are prominent in countless traditions: Helios and Apollo in Greece, Sol Invictus in Rome, Mithras born on December 25th, and other gods who embodied renewal. Each transposed into myth what had been enacted ritually in the darkness of caves and the alignment of tombs.

Christianity entered this symbolic field already thick with meaning. To proclaim Christ as the “light of the world” was to speak in a language humanity had been rehearsing for millennia. His birth three days after the winter solstice was not a coincidence but a continuation of an age-old tradition. The moment of deepest dark had always been the threshold of renewal. The Prologue of John gives this ancient image its fullest voice: the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

The Trinity

“Augustine received the Christian doctrine of the trinity from the Pagan philosopher Plotinus (c. 205-270 c.e.), who ‘fed his mind on the attributes of the Pagan divinities and was steeped in Hellenistic rational religion and esotericism.’” Tom Harpur

Doctrines emerge from natural patterns. Much of prehistoric ritual moves in threes: life, death, return; day, night, dawn; autumn’s fading, winter’s hidden interval, and spring’s renewal. The cave already implies such a rhythm—entrance, sojourn, emergence—staged in darkness with fire and companions. Even if there is no written Neanderthal “theology of three,” the dramaturgy of rebirth they enacted naturally falls into a triadic arc.

Later Stone Age monuments make the motif visible in stone. Passage graves and carved rocks across Atlantic Europe favor triple motifs, especially the triple spiral at Brú na Bóinne, where a single sign turns upon itself three times, like a diagram of return. Their meanings are opaque; what is clear is recurrence. The builders repeatedly inscribed a rhythm in which a path goes out, turns, and comes back changed. The threefold mark is a way to draw renewal.

Greek number-philosophy later treats three as the first complete number: one proposes, two divides, three resolves. Pythagorean writers considered the triangle to be the first figure; harmony itself was described as small ratios that come in threes. Without forcing lines of descent, it is enough to say that Mediterranean intellectual culture found a natural language for completeness in the principle of three, an outlook that would shape the way later Christians expressed their experience of God.

Rites of passage give the old rhythm a vocabulary: separation, liminality, incorporation. An initiate is led away, challenged in some dramatic way, then restored to the community in a new state. Read through this lens, the Paleolithic descent becomes a textbook triad: the child steps from daylight into the earth, remains under guidance in the chamber where the people face death, and returns as someone else. The same rhythm shaped the Eleusinian Mysteries, which unfolded in descent, search, and ascent, culminating in an exalted vision of renewal. Mythic narrative preserves the pattern as well: trials often come in threes, and the hero’s journey reaches fulfillment not on the second attempt but on the third.

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Christianity follows the same logic: the descent into death, the harrowing of the underworld, and finally the ascent, resurrection, or ascension, as the decisive third act. This structure itself proved to be the simplest and most enduring map for transformation.

The baptismal and doxological name of the Christian Trinity presents one life expressed in threefold form: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The form is metaphysical, not merely symbolic, yet it is a form the human imagination already knows how to carry. A world that has long rehearsed transformation in threes will not stumble over a mystery expressed as a Trinity. It will feel, at some deep level, like a true shape for the thing being said.

If caves taught early humans to move from death through a middle night into renewed life, and if philosophers treated three as the mark of wholeness, then the Christian Trinity arrived in minds already prepared. The proclamation of one God in a threefold life could therefore take root in imaginations trained, for ages, that the journey of transformation has, from the beginning, unfolded in three acts.

Morality

Some might object that Christian symbols cannot be traced back to caves and bears because they are not merely natural metaphors. They are a moral vision, a revelation of divine love, that is to say, more than the observable cycle of seasons and the fear of death. Neanderthals and their descendants may have mirrored natural rhythms, but they did not proclaim commandments or absolve man of his inherent flaws.

The distinction is legitimate, but symbols do not become less powerful when they are joined to ethics; they become more so. Christianity is unique not because it invented the cave, the meal, the light, or the threefold pattern, but because it bound those ancient archetypes to a moral and spiritual vision of sacrifice and salvation. As Joseph Henderson observed in Man and His Symbols, “In contrast with the [pagan] central focus on nature’s eternal cycle of birth and death, the Christian mystery points forward to the initiate’s ultimate hope of union with a transcendent god” (139–40). Where the Paleolithic imagination saw in the cave the promise of return, Christ filled that promise in exchange for devotion to Him. Where the sacred meal once dramatized the bond between man and his surroundings, Christianity made it a communion with God.

In this sense, the moral code of the faith did not displace the old archetypes but inhabited them, giving their deep familiarity new weight. It resonates not because it invented a new language, but because it spoke in one already etched into human experience. To see this lineage apart from the political history of the church helps explain its endurance. A moral vision of love and salvation found its body in symbols that were already millennia old. That marriage of the eternal and the archaic is why, when the story is told, the human spirit still recognizes itself.

In the Ice Age north, the cave bear (Ursus spelaeus) and the even larger short-faced bear (Arctodus simus) were immense predators, heavier than any modern bear and towering over a man on its hind legs. Whether it was these extinct giants or the surviving subspecies, they lived where humans lived, roamed where humans roamed, and in winter vanished into the earth, breathing but unseen.

The first clear argument for a Paleolithic bear cult came from Swiss archaeologist Emil Bächler. In the early 20th century, while excavating Drachenloch cave, he uncovered stone-lined niches holding cave bear skulls, some neatly arranged as if for display. At Regourdou in France, a Neanderthal was buried alongside bear bones and stone tools. In Chauvet, famous for its painted lions and mammoths, cave bear claw marks run across the walls—even over some of the oldest art. The pattern is hard to ignore: repeated, deliberate encounters with the bear, and signs that its remains were treated with special care.

But why the bear? Why single out this animal, among all the great beasts of the Pleistocene, for such treatment?

Part of the answer lies in resemblance. Bears and humans share unusual traits: both can stand upright, use their forelimbs with dexterity, and eat a wide variety of foods—berries, roots, fish, and meat. Their forward-facing eyes and broad faces echo our own. They are intelligent, curious, and even playful. They also rear their young for an unusually long time compared to most mammals, with cubs staying close to their mothers for over two years. The image of a mother bear carrying her young on her back would have been as familiar then as now. Our verb to bear—to carry—comes from this act. The constellation Ursa Major, “the Great Bear,” also known as the Wagon, recalls both the mother’s burden and the mythic figure of Atlas bearing the weight of the world. Many Native American tribes called the bear “half-human,” a man without fire or ancestors, and some refused to eat its meat, considering it a form of cannibalism.

“Bears are strange animals, and often act in such a human way that one is tempted to credit them with a considerable reasoning power.” —Don Hitchcock

But resemblance alone doesn’t explain reverence. The bear’s life cycle mirrors the northern year. In autumn, as the sun weakens, it retreats into the earth. In midwinter—at the very moment of the sun’s rebirth at the solstice—bear cubs are born in the dark. By spring, mother and young emerge, just as the land renews itself. Bears could also be dangerous: short-sighted, fiercely protective, and, in the case of males, known to kill cubs that weren’t their own. These traits, remembered and retold, may have helped shape the ogres, witches, and man-eaters of later folklore.

This rhythm still runs through our traditions. Halloween, the last feast before the dark, has us fattening ourselves for winter with sweets—something bears instinctively do before their long sleep. The birth of Christ at the Winter Solstice, the sun’s return to the world, coincides with the birth of cubs in the den. By Easter, the bear emerges from the cave, as Christ from the tomb, both marking the triumph of life over death.

Some archaeologists have gone further, suggesting the bear figured into initiation rites. In Montespan Cave in France, the clay body of a bear was found, head missing but torso marked with holes as if from spears. In other caves, painted animals seem to move in the flicker of a torch—an effect only visible to those deep inside. Perhaps young initiates were led into that shifting darkness to face the image or presence of the bear. Emerging afterward would have been a symbolic rebirth—especially through the narrow ravines of caves like Bruniquel and Drachenloch—into the community, echoing the bear’s return from hibernation.

Bear worship is not some alien relic from a vanished world. Neanderthals are our ancestors, and their reverence for the bear is part of our inheritance. David Rockwell notes that “Native North Americans, European, and Asians possessed strikingly similar bear-hunting rituals—they used the same circumlocutions to address bears before and during their hunts, they used the same weapons to kill the animals, they decorated the carcasses in similar ways, they observed similar restrictions when they ate bear meat, and they disposed of the bones in the same way” (xii). The careful placing of a skull in a dark cave may seem strange to us now, but its meaning remains close: recognition of kinship, marking the year’s turning, hoping for renewal. The bear helped shape the beliefs of those who came before us, and because of them, it has shaped the rhythm of our spiritual life since.

Further Reading & Sources

• The Sacred Paw: The Bear in Nature, Myth, and Literature by Paul Shepard and Barry Sanders

• The Great Mother by Eric Neumann

• The Secret of the She-Bear: An unexpected key to understand European mythologies, traditions and tales by Marie Cachet

• Giving Voice to Bear: North American Indian Myths, Rituals, and Images of the Bear by David Rockwell

• The Bear and Cave Bear in Fact, Myth, and Legend by Don Hitchcock

“Nothing, in the end, was safe from the twins—not even the supports on which the world rests.”

There is a silence beyond memory. It is the silence of origin, the quiet before a name, before the severing.

Somewhere, long before language, a child was born, and with him came another, a thing not quite a brother, but not less than one. It fed him throughout his uterine journey, a mentor of sorts, and when the birth thundered into motion, it died quietly beside him, its work complete.

The impression of this enigma endured. It followed us out of the womb and into the world, shaping our stories, our symbols, and our perception of the world around us and above us. In time, we would see that pair of lights in the sky, the brightest stars of the constellation Gemini—so close, so constant—and remember.

It is this memory that gave rise to the myth of the twin.

The twin is one of humanity’s oldest and most enduring symbols, from the tales of Sumer and the Vedas, Greece and Rome, the Norse and the Maya, the Bible, and beyond. Wherever men have stood in awe of their origins, the mythical twin has loomed behind them as brother and rival, companion and sacrifice.

It is curious if taken at face value because real twins are rare. They are a biological aberration, yet they became the architects of mythic worlds: In the Popul Vhu, the sacred book of the Maya, Hunahpu and Xbalanque descended into the underworld to defeat death and clear the way for the age of humankind. The rivalry between Romulus and Remus ended in fratricide and the founding of Rome. Castor and Pollux (whose names mean “beaver” and “sweet” respectively, i.e., one who gnaws and one who is gnawed on), though not creators, became symbols of sacrifice and divine reunion—one mortal, one immortal—transfigured into stars that rise and fall together in the sky.

Again and again, myth begins with a separation: a double lost, a brother killed, a unity broken. Why?

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The answer may lie in biology—more precisely, in birth. The ancients, deprived of modern anatomy, were rich in intuition. They saw what science now confirms: that each child enters the world with a double. The placenta is, in truth, the first companion of life. It is formed of the same substance at the same time. It feeds, it breathes, it sustains. It dies so the infant may live. In modern hospitals, it is discarded. But there was a time when people revered this “tree of life” as a guardian, ancestor, and totem.

Thus was born, in the earliest mind, the idea of the sacred twin: a being inseparable from the self, but doomed to disappear. In some traditions, this twin was buried beneath the home or a tree; in others, it was named and revered. Among the Maori, it was called whenua, a word meaning both land and placenta. The Navajo buried it near the home. The Balinese regarded it as the elder sibling. In Ancient Egypt, the placenta was known as the Pharaoh’s twin.

The Struggle for Birth

Francis Mott, in his meditations on birth, claimed that all our emotional life is “the desperate search for the lost uterine twin.” The soul, he said, longs not only for wholeness but for reunion. Isis, in her sorrowful search for Osiris, carries the memory of the placenta: the twin dismembered, the breathless god. In the Old Testament, Samson, whose name means “sunlight,” marries a woman named Timnath, meaning “twin.” The light-child and his dark reflection, bound and lost. Similarly, the Norse Baldr (“shining one”) has a blind twin named Höðr.

Carl Jung said that the twin is the mirror of the soul: even in dreams, we remember the other one, the quiet one who did not speak. The Ho-Chunk have a saying: “Nothing, in the end, was safe from the twins—not even the supports on which the world rests.” Perhaps because, when we are severed from ourselves, everything trembles. The mother, the vessel of creation, is as threatened as we are.

Drawing from myth and embryology, Marie Cachet sees the placenta as the ancestor, the totem that must die so the child may be born. In her words, birth is not a passage but a struggle between the fetus and its twin. One must emerge; the other must yield “like the fighting of bulls.” The young must push past the old, and in so doing, take its life.

The Constellation Gemini

Across cultures, the constellation Gemini has long been seen as a symbol of duality. The Babylonians knew its two bright stars as Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea, divine twins who guarded the gates of the underworld. Their names, “The mighty lord who rises” and “He who comes forth from Meslam” (Meslam being a cultic name of the underworld temple of Nergal), mirror the duality of the fetus and placenta. In pre-Islamic Arab tradition, the stars were known as Al-Taʾamān, “The Twins,” imagined as two children bound together in celestial companionship. In the Greco-Roman world, they became Castor and Pollux, one mortal, one divine, brothers who connect life to the underworld.

Astronomically, their difference is as striking as their visual closeness: Pollux is a bright orange giant, singular and enduring. Castor is a hidden sextuple system, or a fractured multiplicity mistaken for unity. One star is whole and brilliant; the other is complex, unseen, and multiple. Pollux may represent the living child; Castor, the lost twin, the buried companion whose complexity belies its silence.

Gemini’s stars thus support not only the literal image of twins but a universal archetype of duality, separation, and mirrored existence, whether in the womb, in myth, or in the cosmos.

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Paleolithic Inheritance

Like the Great Bear (Ursa Major), whose identity as a bear appears across Indigenous American, Siberian, and Greek traditions, Gemini’s twin stars were recognized as such across disparate civilizations. These patterns point to a shared symbolic ancestry, when the first sky-watchers—perhaps Neanderthals or their hybrid descendants—projected their inner experience onto the stars. The myth of the sacred twin was not only born in the womb, but carried into the heavens by those who had already intuited the first great mystery: that to be born is to be divided.

Here, then, is the great secret buried in myth: our first act is separation. We are born through division, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to remember what we lost.

Every hero’s tale begins in a place we’ve all known.

Before myth or scripture, there was the struggle to be born out of darkness, through peril, and into the world. We recognize its pattern in every epic because it never leaves us: the descent and return, the death and renewal. These stories endure because they echo the rhythms we first lived in the womb.

Everything occurs in cycles. Whatever one observes, from pop culture to the rise and fall of civilizations, from microbiology to the stars, or flora and fauna of the earth, everything “new” contains the seed of its predecessor, and everything dying and dead contributes to the beginning of the next cycle.

Applied to humans and manifested through genes and memory, death and rebirth are the cornerstones of ancient spiritual belief. But instead of merely revering these processes symbolically, Humans strive to understand existence and to pass down knowledge so that it compounds into a greater and greater understanding. In the ancient world, they developed traditions and stories, weaving knowledge into both to preserve it through the ages.

The Hero’s Journey, famously identified and mapped by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, is the story arc followed by humanity’s most defining and universal characters from Odysseus, Gilgamesh, and Beowulf, to modern examples like Luke Skywalker, Frodo Baggins, Chihiro from Spirited Away, Simba from The Lion King, and many more.

Although the Epic of Gilgamesh has been credited as the first example of the Hero’s Journey, many older fairy tales whose origins are lost to the depths of prehistory suggest otherwise. It was not the advent of civilization and writing that spawned this universal archetype, but something older and more profound.

What was the blueprint for the Hero’s Journey?

Science existed in prehistory, but instead of formulas and charts, they used myth and ritual. Even in esteemed ancient civilizations, the barrier between science and religion as it stands today did not exist. When we identify the process of rebirth as a point of reverence for prehistoric people, it becomes possible to consider the application of modern science.

Therefore, we will look to the (still) mysterious realm of the womb, where the fight for birth, although veiled, is as treacherous and heroic as any tale of epic adventure. Drawing from developmental biology and fetology, we can map the Hero’s Journey directly onto human development in utero. Recognizing that this archetype is shared across cultures without a known first instance opens the door to a deeper origin of this archetype and a more sophisticated understanding of creation in the remote past.

Fetal Equivalents for the 12 Stages of the Hero’s Journey

1. The Ordinary World: Pre-implantation existence

The Hero begins in a place of comfort and familiarity. In the fetal version, this is the earliest stage: the fertilized egg (zygote) drifts through the fallopian tube, not yet attached to the uterine wall. It is a wanderer, full of potential but without form or direction, much like the archetypal farm boy or hidden princess, unaware of their destiny.

2. The Call to Adventure: Implantation into the uterine wall (~Day 6–10)

This is the moment the embryo accepts the “quest”, embedding itself in the uterine lining and committing to the path of development. Biologically, this is a critical threshold. Failure here means the end of the journey. Success means transformation begins.

3. Refusal of the Call/Threshold Guardians: Immunological challenges, chromosomal errors, miscarriage risks

Not all journeys are guaranteed. The body has mechanisms to reject embryos that seem genetically unviable. In this stage, maternal immune cells can act as “threshold guardians,” scrutinizing the newcomer. Many pregnancies end here, echoing myths where the hero turns back or is delayed before stepping into the unknown.

4. Meeting the Mentor: The placenta

Every hero finds guidance in a wise figure. Think Gandalf, Yoda, or a fairy godmother. The placenta is this biological mentor: a mysterious, temporary organ formed from fetal and maternal tissues that resembles the tree of life. It filters, nourishes, communicates, and produces hormones that alter maternal physiology, making the external world safer for the developing hero.

5. Crossing the First Threshold: Gastrulation (~Week 3)

The embryo’s cells undergo dramatic internal rearrangement, forming the three germ layers (ectoderm, mesoderm, endoderm). This is when an amorphous blob becomes a structured being. It is, as biologist Lewis Wolpert put it in Principles of Development, “the most important moment of your life.” This is the first true transformation, a commitment to a form.

6. Tests, Allies, Enemies: Organogenesis, neural development, environmental interaction

The second trimester brings rapid development: the heart beats, the brain forms, and reflexes emerge. The fetus starts responding to touch and sound. Maternal stress hormones, infections, and toxins can act as “enemies,” while amniotic fluid, hormones, and nutrients are “allies.” This is the hero's trial.

At week 21, the fetal skin is fully developed and coated in tiny “Lanugo” hairs, which act as the “primary sense organ…which touches its limited watery environment equally in all directions.” In The Nature of the Self, Francis Mott suggests a connection between this ‘shining’ fetal sensation and the mythological archetype of the shining god.

7. Approach to the Inmost Cave: Late pregnancy (~Weeks 30–40)

The womb, once expansive and Edenic, becomes tight and dark. The fetus begins turning downward, preparing for birth. Neurological patterns consolidate; some memory and learning occur. In mythology, the “inmost cave” is where the greatest ordeal lies, often underground or symbolic of the unconscious. In biological terms, it is quite literally the womb itself.

In Neanderthal times, the cave was not just a shelter, but a sacred space, the terrestrial womb. To descend into the cave was to symbolically return to the dark, enclosed space where transformation occurs—the origin. Caves across Europe are where we find the earliest evidence of ritual, art, and burial, all inseparable from their larger cyclical worldview.

8. The Ordeal/Death and Rebirth: Birth

No ordeal is greater than birth. The world turns upside-down. Fluid becomes air. The lungs scream to life. Compression, separation, and disorientation abound. The hero dies to the old self—fetal, fluid-borne—and is reborn as a breathing, independent being. In nearly every culture, this transition from darkness to light is echoed in ritual and myth.

“Rebirth” or reincarnation can be thought of strictly in scientific terms through DNA, which is made up of all one’s ancestors, whose earthly existence has been recycled into the “new” life. The modern study of epigenetics suggests that memory, behavior, and lifestyle all have their place in the genetic code.

This momentous “battle” ends with cutting the umbilical cord, or the slaying of the final serpentine foe, often mirrored in this stage of the Hero’s Journey by the literal slaying of a threatening dragon or serpent (Hercules and the Hydra, Prince Philip and the dragon Maleficent, Harry Potter and the Basilisk).

9. The Reward: First breath, first cry, mother-child bond

The newborn seizes the “elixir”—life. The reward is connection: skin-to-skin contact, oxytocin bonding, warmth, and food. This is the treasure at the journey’s center, just as Luke receives the lightsaber or Neo sees the Matrix.

10. The Road Back: Adaptation to external life

The umbilical cord, which guided the fetus through the prenatal process, tying it to the placenta and the mother, was severed at birth. Gravity exerts force for the first time. Light, sound, and digestion must be learned quickly as senses shift from the skin to the five orifices. This is the return from the dark realm. The newborn begins integrating into the world of others.

11. Resurrection: The “fourth trimester” (~First 3 months)

Neurologically, the newborn is still completing gestation outside the womb. This is a liminal time known as the “perinatal” phase, where we are neither fetal nor fully infant. Crying regulates the lungs; bonding patterns form that grounds the infant to the earth, as it was once grounded to the placenta. This is in itself a second transformation in which the Hero completes their rebirth into social, emotional, and sensory life.

12. Return with the Elixir: Conscious presence in the world

The infant brings the “elixir” back to the tribe, representing continuity of the lineage, into the future. New blood, new hope, new awareness. The Hero returns changed, and brings with them the potential to transform others.

Read More: Intro to Fetal Mythology

An ancient memory experienced by all

If this structure is present across independent cultures, and if it reflects something as universal as birth, then its origin likely predates writing, agriculture, and even our current state as a species.

Since the mysteries of death and rebirth can be traced to the Neanderthal culture, we can assume that, if they aren’t explicitly responsible for this scientific archetype, its basis in the veneration of the unseen—the womb, the cave, the realm of transformation—was at least formed by our ancient ancestors. Paleolithic rites may well have reenacted the Hero’s Journey in ritual form.

The universality of the Hero’s Journey allows for various interpretations and applications, but perhaps at its core is a biological memory, one woven into human consciousness through narrative. It resonates with us because it repeats the first rhythm we experience, since projected onto a method of storytelling. We’ve all made the passage, pressed through our first ordeal, descended into danger, and risen again into the world. The unconscious memory of this experience lingers in our minds; myth is simply the language we use to remember it.

In every age, we find the same battle playing out: rural versus urban culture, folk belief versus the official doctrine, the practical wisdom of generations versus the calculated intellect of authority. The term pagan originates from the Latin paganus, meaning country-dweller, a term designed to otherize. From the earliest days of Christian power in Rome to the suppression of traditional religion in China under Mao, we see the same phenomenon: one class of people, backed by power, imposing their worldview upon another, often erasing, distorting, or absorbing their beliefs. Yet, despite these efforts, so-called paganism never died. It persists because its roots are more profound than written records and official decrees. Even through the various civilizational leaps that have alienated us from nature, we hold on, largely subconsciously, to a worldview as old as time.

Like Neanderthals, whose spiritual depth was long denied, these traditions were never extinguished but adapted into new systems. Their survival owes not to official preservation but to the extent they are embedded in the land, memory, and daily life of the people. Like their many descendants, the Neanderthal worldview was embedded in the cycles of nature, not the abstractions of empire.

Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz, in The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, notes how the belief in fairies is dismissed as “superstition,” forgetting that in doing so, one severs themselves from something fundamentally human:

“The great majority of men in cities are apt to pride themselves on their own expansion from ‘superstition’, and to smile pityingly at the poor countrymen and countrywomen who believe in fairies. But when they do so they forget that, with all their own admirable progress in material invention, with all the far-reaching data of their acquired science, with all the vast extent of their commercial and economic conquests, they themselves have ceased to be natural.”

Just as indigenous knowledge systems were cast aside in favor of industrialized, bureaucratic worldviews for the desired ends of civilization, Paleolithic culture remains underappreciated. Yet, these traditions persist, embedded in folklore, annual traditions, daily customs, and the deep structures of mythology. The rituals of the old world have persisted through suppression because they are not dependent on institutions. They are rooted in the land and the experience of generations.

Tribal vs. Universal Systems

Traditional pagan and tribal belief systems are inherited from the Stone Age. This “religion” (which can be more simply described as “worldview” relative to the common understanding of religion) was an organic expression of a community’s connection to its environment. In stark contrast, universalist religions like Christianity and Buddhism were imposed well after the dawn of urban civilization, often facilitated by strategic alliances, political patronage, and the appropriation of earlier myths.

Their scriptures, morals, and customs are amalgamations, making them palatable. However, the tenets of suffering and alienation from one’s home and family mark a significant distinction between the universalist and the localized that are necessary for centralizing authority. Japanese Shinto, for example, does not share Buddhism’s desire to escape the wheel of rebirth. It instead praises the ability to return and continue the work left unfinished:

“I would come again despite eight sufferings, if I could return to lead mankind.” Murakami Yoshiko

A similar sentiment exists in Hinduism, where reincarnation is understood as part of one’s familial and communal responsibility, rather than a burden to be escaped. In contrast, the Buddhist view, which gained state sponsorship, redefined reincarnation as suffering and sought to sever individuals from their inherited bonds, similar to Christianity. Such theological shifts served ruling elites, who benefited from dissolving older kin-based societies in favor of centralized religious and political structures. Whereas land-based traditions emphasize continuity, familial bonds, and local cosmology, universalist systems often stress transcendence, detachment from the worldly, and internal moral discipline. These emphases aligned well with imperial ambitions and social management.

The Power Motive: Religion and Political Centralization

Throughout history, dominant political, economic, and religious systems have operated in ways that sever communities from their sense of unity and functional knowledge systems. Industrialization, bureaucratic governance, and the homogenizing forces of modernity have all contributed to dismantling spiritual continuity. By cutting people from their ancestral past, these systems impose a logic that values conformity over generational wisdom.

A historical example of this dynamic can be seen in Roman Alexandria, where early Christians, as documented in The Darkening Age by Catherine Nixey, worked to dismantle the existing order through violent infiltration. Temples were burned, icons were defaced, philosophers were attacked, and sacred sites that had existed for centuries were forcibly converted into Christian churches. This serves, according to Nixey, as a warning against the over-civilized mind and the excesses of comfort brought on by generations of prosperity. “The old laissez-faire Roman ways,” she writes, “in which the worship of one god might be added to the worship of all the other gods, were, preachers told their congregations, no longer acceptable.”

A similar pattern unfolded in Japan, where Buddhism did not take root through a gradual spiritual awakening but through the patronage of a powerful political family seeking to consolidate control. The Soga clan, who first supported Buddhism in the 6th century, recognized that an external, universalist religion could break the power of traditional Shinto clans and centralize governance under a single, imperial religious authority. Just as in Rome, the imposition of this new system led to violent clashes and the suppression of native traditions.

The Suppression of Neanderthal Culture and the Indigenous Parallel

Just as indigenous cultures have been subsumed into major religions, Neanderthal culture is wholly credited to its later manifestations in ancient civilizations. In many ways, Neanderthals are the country people of prehistoric studies, subjected to a similar intellectual erasure. If we accept this notion, then the tension between the self-domesticating civilization and its “barbaric” cultural roots is as old as humanity itself.

Prehistory is being reframed, however, with mounting evidence of Stone Age culture that challenges the old model of “progress,” in which intellectual sophistication is tied to urbanization and technological development. The reality is far more complex: Cultural richness and depth have always existed among those who live closely with nature. For centuries, the same logic that dismissed Neanderthals as subhuman has been used to justify the suppression of indigenous spiritual cultures, labeling them as superstitious or simplistic when, in reality, they may represent some of the most enduring and deeply rooted belief systems in human history.

Not only do modern populations carry significant Neanderthal DNA, but Neanderthals have been revealed to be the progenitors of the cyclical worldview colloquially called paganism. When compared to later indigenous traditions, striking parallels emerge, indicating that the mythologies and worldviews of Neanderthal-descended peoples share deep ancestral roots. Populations across the northern hemisphere continue to maintain, consciously or not, mythic traditions rooted in the Stone Age.

Despite centuries of persecution, suppression, and forced conversion, the pagan impulse persists. The cyclical worldview is maintained in annual traditions like Christmas, Easter, and Halloween, and ancestral veneration through customs such as the recycling of names, framed photographs on display, and the institution of marriage that conserves a traceable line of descent. Archetypes with similarly ancient origins still manifest in the stories we tell, including those of Christ and Buddha, which aren’t separated in spirit from the religious foundation of man, but used as tools for more recent efforts to centralize power. Although it exists in a different category than the major religions, paganism is not a historical footnote. It is an eternal undercurrent of human existence and the baseline for our understanding of divinity.

“The analogies between ceremonies documented at the farthest regions of the ecumene bear witness to a common tradition already developed during the Paleolithic.”

In shadowed caves beneath a sky unmarred by cities, humans observed the world for hundreds of thousands of years. Neanderthals persevered through the worst Mother Nature can offer: brutal and long ice ages, predatory megafauna, and continent-spanning natural disasters. Yet, their way of life emanates a simplicity, one without the distractions and conveniences, the many miracles and horrors of civilization, that provided the opportunity to experience nature in its rawest, most tangible form. And unlike the nineteenth-century assumption of primitive dullness, the Neanderthal experience was aided by brainpower equal to, arguably surpassing, our own.

Religion is often assumed to have emerged alongside civilization, a late crown atop humanity’s restless mind. But what if its roots stretch deeper, to a people long misjudged? What if the fairy tales and traditions of untraceable origin are rooted in our Stone Age ancestors? Was there something identifiable in the Neanderthal experience—or cognitive profile—that would inspire the spark of religiosity in man?

If civilization is a slow remembering and myth a torch through prehistory’s darkness, then the first architects of knowledge may not be who we suspect. It’s time to reconsider the Neanderthal as the first seekers of the divine.

The Neanderthal Brain

In the human brain, which averages 1,350 cubic centimeters, the prefrontal cortex generates abstract thought, including concepts of purpose and eternity. The parietal lobe integrates sensory input and spatial awareness, the occipital lobe refines visual perception, and the cerebellum fine-tunes movement, rhythm, and coordination.

Neanderthal brains, ranging from approximately 1,200 to 1,750 cc, surpassed modern human brain size and diverged in structure. Endocasts reveal an elongated skull, with an enlarged occipital lobe likely enhancing visual processing. The parietal lobe shows structural differences that may have influenced spatial cognition. Their prefrontal cortex was well-developed, supporting problem-solving and planning. A relatively smaller cerebellum may have influenced motor coordination and social cognition, possibly leading to distinct patterns of learning and interaction.

This wiring suggests a capacity for creativity and reverence. Their heightened occipital lobe sharpened vision, allowing them to track prey or observe the night sky with uncanny clarity. But this clarity was more than just physical; it shaped how they perceived connections in the natural world, revealing patterns of life, death, and renewal. A bear lumbering into a cave to 'die' in winter, only to emerge in spring with cubs, was not just a passing sight; it became a testament to the cycle of existence, reinforcing ideas of transformation, survival, and the image of the cave as both tomb and womb.

Neanderthal craftsmanship reinforces this notion. Their Levallois flake tools, struck with planned precision, reveal a mind capable of visualizing future outcomes. Their use of birch tar, distilled at exact temperatures, required methodical steps—mirroring ritual’s deliberate pacing. Their culture leaves more clues: Cueva de Ardales’ red ochre markings, 65,000 years old, combine visual acuity with symbolic intent. Bruniquel Cave’s stalagmite circles, built 176,000 years ago, stand as monuments to meaning rather than mere survival. The Shanidar burial, where a body was laid to rest with flowers, suggests death was not merely endured but marked, understood, and associated with rebirth. Even the first musical instrument—a flute carved from a cave bear’s femur—is a Neanderthal artifact. This brain cradled the first impulses of religious thought.

The Neurodivergent Neanderthal

Among these early humans, neurodivergence likely thrived—autism, in particular, providing a unique lens through which they saw the world. Today, autistic minds excel at spotting patterns: tracking a star’s shift, counting a herd’s steps, mapping chaos into order. They hyper-focus and perceive sensory detail with heightened clarity. Modern studies connect Neanderthal DNA—variants like rs7794745 on chromosome 7—to traits associated with autism: intense focus, sensory depth, and reduced social ease. Their smaller cerebellum (10-15% less than modern humans) and elongated brain suggest differences in social cognition, possibly placing less emphasis on complex group dynamics while heightening sensitivity to recurring natural patterns.

Hunter-gatherer life would have sharpened these abilities. Bands of twenty or thirty, tied to the land’s rhythms and reliant on its patterns, were undoubtedly aware of Orion’s rise signaling winter and salmon leaping from the river foretelling spring. An autistic Neanderthal might have fixated on these cycles to understand the patterns of nature, simultaneously increasing his chances of survival and revealing the sacred. The same minds that tracked migrations and celestial shifts would inevitably find meaning in repetition, laying the foundation for myth and ritual. Their burials—Shanidar’s flowers, La Chapelle’s careful interment—suggest an obsession with the significance of death and its proximity to creation. The bear skulls arranged in Chauvet, Drachenloch, and Unicorn Cave indicate reverence—pattern recognition evolving into sacred practice.

“In working with a piece of flint or primitive needle, in joining together animal hides or wooden planks, in preparing a fishhook or an arrowhead, in shaping a clay statuette, the imagination discovers unsuspected analogies among the different levels of the real; tools and objects are laden with countless symbolisms, the world of work - the micro-universe that absorbs the artisan’s attention for long hours - becomes a mysterious and sacred center, rich in meaning.”

This early evidence is the spark of religion. They were not simply surviving but seeking structure in nature’s chaos and meaning in its cycles. In their shadowed caves, the unseen took form, and the foundation of belief was laid.

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The Cyclical Worldview

The cyclical worldview—the foundation of early religion—was not an invention of civilization but a legacy of the Neanderthal mind. Their heightened pattern recognition, deep connection to nature, and neurodivergent tendencies made them uniquely predisposed to viewing existence as a cycle rather than a linear progression. Life, death, and rebirth were not separate states but part of an eternal rhythm reflected universally.

Ancient civilizations, from Mesopotamia to Egypt, claimed inheritance from a distant, forgotten past often dismissed as mythological. Yet the same wisdom that shaped the pyramids, mapped the solar system, and inspired the longest-enduring myths in human history must have had an origin. Neanderthals seeded this perspective long before written language.

Their worldview persists. Our annual seasonal holidays that we instinctively maintain reflect an ancient reverence for the interconnectivity of nature’s cycles. The bear, central in so many traditions, also stands as an emblem of this inheritance. A bear that sleeps and rises again mirrors life’s ebb and flow. Norse berserkers donned their skins, entering trance-like states. Sami rites honored them as kin. The mythic bear lingers across time with many names: Beowulf (bee wolf = bear), Artemis, Arthur, Artio, Diana.

The Neanderthal legacy runs deeper than the stories we tell about them; it is embedded in the ways we perceive and interpret the world. Their way of thinking evolved from an intimate relationship with the landscape, animal life, and seasonal rhythms. Their mindset favored symbolic association and layered meaning, leaving a lasting imprint on how humans respond to mystery.

From these habits of perception emerged the earliest forms of ritual knowledge—ways of understanding reality that would later develop into religion, philosophy, and scientific inquiry. What we inherit from them is an entire mode of knowing we have yet to fully decipher.

Relevant Studies & Sources

• Enrichment of a subset of Neanderthal polymorphisms in autistic probands and siblings – Molecular Psychiatry (2024). Link

• Differences in the Neanderthal BRCA2 gene might be related to their distinctive cognitive profile – Frontiers in Neuroscience (2018). Link

• (Quotes) Mircea Eliade – A History of Religious Ideas, Vol. 1 (1978).

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“I believe we have good grounds for considering that bear worship traces an unbroken line of descent from the altars of bear skulls, which Neanderthal built a hundred thousand years earlier.” —Stan Gooch

A Pan-Northern Hemisphere Myth

The Bear’s Son tale is one of the world’s most widely distributed folk narratives. The story follows a hero, often the offspring of a human mother and a bear father, whose supernatural strength and resilience set him apart. Raised in isolation or among animals, he embarks on a heroic journey, usually descending into an underworld or battling supernatural foes, often accompanied by companions with extraordinary abilities.

In 1910, Friedrich Panzer collected over 200 variants from across Eurasia. In a study conducted in 1959, researchers identified 57 Hungarian versions. In 1992, a study revealed that 120 variants existed in Scandinavia alone. Dr. Roslyn Frank notes that 47 versions of the Bear’s Son tale have been recorded in the Western Hemisphere—33 from Spanish America, nine from North American indigenous groups, and likely many more yet to be identified, highlighting the tale’s deep roots across human traditions.

Famous variants include Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon legend, in which the hero possesses extraordinary strength and battles a monstrous foe in an underworld-like setting, paralleling the trials of the Bear’s Son. Jean de l’Ours (John of the Bear) in France tells of a boy born to a woman and a bear, whose immense strength and adventures against supernatural foes mirror the core themes. Different versions vary in detail, but the recurring themes of a child with a bear connection, a bear-human marriage, and a heroic journey into the underworld reveal them to be branches of the same mythological tree.

The tale’s circumpolar presence aligns with the ancient veneration of bears across the Northern Hemisphere. From the burial sites of Neanderthals like Drachenloch and Le Regourdou to the annual Bear Dance still performed in Romania, there is strong evidence that early humans and their predecessors viewed bears as spiritually significant as part of an unbroken lineage going back to the Stone Age. After their annual pantomime of death, the bear emerges in spring, encapsulating the ancient cyclical worldview of rebirth that underpins later traditions. The cave became a sacred analog for the womb, a place of transformation and rebirth, and the bear a symbol of the ancestor and the dangerous and venerable mysteries of the realm of death.

The migration of early humans across the Bering Strait provided a direct link between Eurasia and the Americas, making it plausible that not only genes but also deeply rooted spiritual beliefs, including bear veneration, were carried across ancient migration routes. The 2010 breakthrough in paleogenomics confirmed that Neanderthal DNA is present in modern human populations, creating a vacuum for renewed discussions about the potential for cultural and mythological inheritance. If Neanderthals engaged in ritualistic behavior related to bears, it is plausible that this reverence carried forward into our later traditions, evolving independently yet maintaining key structural elements.

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Frank’s Colonial Transmission Hypothesis

The questions of origin and transmission to determine how Native Americans could have folktales that mirror the famous Bear’s Son tale was addressed by Dr. Roslyn Frank in her 2023 article, The European Bear's Son Tale: Its Reception and Influence on Indigenous Oral Traditions in North America. Tracing the historical record, Frank follows seventeenth and eighteenth-century fur traders through French territory in the Americas and concludes that mercantile relationships between Native tribes and French traders fostered a deeper exchange. Natives resonated with the Bear’s Son tale, shared via a translator in meetings meant to warm trade relations, enough to absorb it into their own ancient canon.

While this is a compelling historical framework, it rests on the assumption that indigenous cultures were largely passive recipients of European stories rather than the bearers of their own deeply rooted mythological traditions. Frank’s analysis reflects a long-standing academic tendency to privilege direct historical documentation over broader anthropological and comparative methodologies. While colonial transmission undoubtedly played a role in certain cultural exchanges, the widespread presence of the Bear’s Son tale across regions outside of French or even European influence suggests an independent origin—one that reaches far beyond the written record.

The Improbability of French Traders Reshaping Native Mythology

The idea that French fur traders, operating primarily in limited areas of North America, could have influenced the mythological landscape of the entire continent is improbable. Frank notes that variants of the Bear’s Son tale exist in multiple Native American languages, implying that it was circulated between tribes after the traders imparted the tale onto an eagerly impressionable audience. While French traders and indigenous peoples did form partnerships, these were largely economic and pragmatic rather than a deep cultural exchange. Unlike Christian missionaries, who explicitly sought to impose their religious doctrines, fur traders had no such incentive. Their priority was trade, not mythological conversion.

Additionally, although the French territory in North America was large, encompassing most of the Mississippi River Valley and the Great Lakes region, French trade routes were geographically constrained. Technically, they could have interacted with peoples such as the Algonquin, Cree, Ho-Chunk, and even the Inuit to the far north, who tell variants of the Bear’s Son tale. However, similar stories appear where French influence was minimal or non-existent, such as among the Tlingit and Haida tribes of the southeastern coast of Alaska and British Columbia, far from the main French fur trade hubs.

Motifs of the Bear’s Son tale exist in the East as well. In a Korean creation myth, a bear transforms into a woman, marries a heavenly prince, and gives birth to Dangun, the founder of Korea. Siberian tribes such as the Evenki and Khanty share bear myths where a child is raised by or born of a bear. The Ainu people of Japan famously revere the bear as a divine ancestor and have myths of bear-human hybrids and strong heroes with bear-like traits.

Frank herself acknowledges the cultural barriers to the sharing of sacred traditions. She notes that the Basques, with whom she has conducted extensive research, were "always careful not to share” the idea that their people descended from bears with non-Basque speakers. This secrecy is a common trait of indigenous oral traditions. Although the Catholic French traders might have had fewer qualms with sharing their indigenous tales if they suspected it would help trade, the Natives themselves would have likely been more protective of their already threatened heritage. The assumption that indigenous people would readily absorb and integrate a foreign folktale into their mythological framework without resistance underestimates their cultural autonomy.

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A Common Inheritance

Beyond the Bear’s Son tale, other cultural overlaps between pre-Christian Europe and Native America suggest a deeper shared inheritance. Both exhibit totemic animal relationships, gods and goddesses representing natural forces including trickster deities, vision quests as rites of passage, and the cyclical, animist worldview often called “paganism.” The Great Flood myth, also found in both traditions, suggests an Ice Age-era memory preserved in folklore or perhaps something more psychologically embedded from a common ancestor.

Even among Bear-related myths, the Bear’s Son tale is not an isolated instance of mythological parallelism but part of a broader cultural framework. Native American warriors channeled the strength and spirit of the bear in battle, much like Norse berserkers, who were believed to draw power from them. The Haida people believe in a divine Bear Mother who gave birth to children with a bear husband, a theme echoed in the European Jean de l’Ours and the Greek tale of Callisto, a woman turned into a bear and later immortalized as the constellation Ursa Major. Why Native Americans and Europeans both referred to this constellation as the “Great Bear” is another unanswered question.

This broader perspective suggests that the Bear’s Son tale is not a singularly European export but part of an inherited mythological tradition that spans millennia. It is unlikely that the core similarities between these narratives are the result of colonial diffusion when their geographic distribution predates European expansion. Instead, they point to an Ice Age-era inheritance of symbolic bear veneration that persisted across multiple cultures and populations, evolving along different but parallel trajectories.

The Paleolithic Connection: Neanderthal and Early Human Bear Worship

Looking further back in time, the evidence for bear-related spiritual traditions among prehistoric humans reinforces this argument. Archaeological sites associated with Neanderthals and early Europeans show striking evidence of bear veneration. The ritual placement of bear skulls and femurs suggest that Neanderthals saw the bear as more than just competition for vital resources, and aligns with later traditions in which bears are depicted as ancestors or divine beings.

Mythologically, marriage represents not a physical consummation but a symbolic pairing of forces. A bear-human marriage thereby imbues the human offspring with qualities associated with bears like extraordinary strength and the ability to descend into the otherworld and re-emerge transformed. Ancient man likely not only associated the bear with strength for obvious reasons but also the hyper-awareness and adrenaline the bear instilled in men in times of confrontation. As the clay bear figure in Montespan Cave suggests (among other Neanderthal sites), the bear was likely part of an initiation ritual that purposely struck the initiate with life-or-death hormonal surges—a reverent but also practical ritual in a hunter-gatherer society.

Rather than viewing the Bear’s Son tale as a recent European export, it should be understood as part of an ancient and widespread mythological inheritance. Frank’s work provides an important historical framework, but it falls into the common academic trap of prioritizing documented colonial interactions over broader anthropological and genetic evidence. The similarities between bear myths across Eurasia and the Americas point to a much older source—one that may date back to the shared cultural landscape of Ice Age peoples and, perhaps, even to our Neanderthal predecessors.

More than a tale of conquest or cultural exchange, the Bear’s Son narrative points to something far more primordial. It reflects a world in which humans and bears moved through the same landscapes, bound by reverence, fear, and kinship. The myth endures, not because it was imposed, but because it was always there, waiting to be remembered.

From the entwined serpents of the caduceus to the petrifying basilisk of medieval lore, the serpent is a fixture of the collective human imagination in its creative and destructive grandeur. What explains its persistent presence? One answer may lie in the Neanderthal, the Paleolithic man of the Northern Hemisphere, who first expressed a cyclical worldview through symbolic ritual and art. He is a common ancestor of Eurasian populations, whose indigenous cultures share this worldview and whose many instances of direct symbolic overlap largely remain an anthropological mystery. The prevalence of the serpent as a symbol of death and regeneration may be an inheritance from these archaic ancestors, encoded in the stories that survive to this day.

As we celebrate the Lunar New Year and the Year of the Snake, it is worth considering how this symbol has endured for millennia and what its polarized duality represents.

Serpent as Healer

Though often feared, the serpent also appears as a benevolent force in myth and folklore, associated with healing, birth, and regeneration. The Staff of Asclepius, still used as a symbol of medicine today, depicts a single snake coiled around a rod. The caduceus, also still employed in the same capacity, has two entwined snakes coiled around a rod, with wings on top. In Hindu and Buddhist traditions, the Nāgas are powerful serpent deities who guard treasures and sacred knowledge—similar to the perception of the dragon (from Greek drakōn ‘serpent’) in Eastern cultures. Another instance of entwined snakes comes from a creation story in Chinese folklore, between the union of Nüwa and Fuxi. The Rainbow Serpent of Australian Aboriginal mythology is also a creator figure, shaping the land and bringing water to the earth. The ouroboros, the self-consuming serpent, signifies eternity and the unbroken cycle of existence.

The Ancient Greeks considered the shedding of skin to make the serpent an obvious symbol of rebirth and healing. In medieval European folklore, serpents were sometimes associated with alchemical transformation, guarding hidden wisdom and elixirs of life. Even in cultures where serpents were seen as dangerous, they were often revered rather than merely feared.

Serpent as Foe

Yet, for all its positive associations, the serpent is just as frequently cast as an antagonist. The tale of Adam and Eve casts the serpent as a deceiver who tempts man into committing the original sin, forever associating the serpent with Satan in the Abrahamic tradition. European figures like the basilisk and Medusa could kill with a single glance. In Norse mythology, Jörmungandr, the World Serpent, coils around the earth and is destined to battle Thor during Ragnarök. The dragon, a close cousin of the serpent, is often depicted as a greedy, malevolent creature—hoarding treasure, abducting maidens, and poisoning the land.

Across cultures, serpents and dragons often appear as foes that must be slain by heroes, from St. George to Siegfried and Fáfnir to Hercules and the Lernaean Hydra, reinforcing the motif of serpents as dangerous, chaotic forces that must be overcome.

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The Umbilical Cord

A compelling interpretation of serpent symbolism links it to the umbilical cord, the first connection between mother and child. The cord embodies the qualities of the serpent in myth as the lifeline that sustains and nourishes us, but also as a threat that grows alongside the fetus, eventually culminating in its necessary destruction.

It is directly recorded that the Hopi of North America considered the snake a symbol of the umbilical cord, and hinted at in symbols like the Greek caduceus (the umbilical cord is made up of two entwined veins around an artery, much like the caduceus). Countless cultures from Ancient Egypt to remote tribes in Siberia practice birth rituals involving proper treatment of the placenta and cord. Concerning comparative interpretations, Francis J. Mott and Marie Cachet have argued that the mythological serpent represents the umbilical cord, drawing on prenatal symbolism in myth and obstetric biology.

The umbilical cord coils and twists, binding the fetus to its mother. The threat of strangulation looms in utero and increases substantially by the third trimester of every pregnancy. Its biological function is to feed the fetus by transferring nutrients from the placenta while recycling waste from the fetus and providing oxygenated blood in a constant back-and-forth rhythm, a self-consuming loop much like the ouroboros image. As the fetus grows and birth nears, the cord becomes less and less efficient at providing “clean blood” and so becomes a primordial anxiety for the fetus that once relied solely on its consistency, explaining why serpents are so often depicted as both life-giving and deadly, as healers and poisoners.

Other Interpretations

Beyond the umbilical connection, serpents have been subject to countless interpretations in mythology, psychology, and religious thought. The theologian’s view of the serpent as a manifestation of evil, particularly in Christian traditions, clashes with the Jungian perspective, which sees the serpent as a symbol of transformation, an embodiment of the unconscious mind and the instinctual forces that drive human behavior. In The Golden Bough, James Frazer links serpent myths to fertility cults and the agricultural cycle, noting that in many early agrarian societies, serpents were revered as guardians of the land and mediators between the spiritual and earthly realms.

Often, as with other prehistoric symbols, the serpent is anthropologically associated with vague superstitions such as “protection” and “fertility” without a deeper explanation of its symbolic function or what it represents. In the umbilical interpretation, ancient man harnessed the ability to explain the biological functions of the cord and its role in creation. Through myth, his knowledge was given a vessel in which it could be passed down.

Neanderthal Connection

If the serpent has been with us since the dawn of human consciousness, its persistence may be linked to the worldview of Neanderthals. Evidence from Paleolithic burials and cave sites suggests that they were the progenitors of what became the indigenous spiritual culture of the Northern Hemisphere. The cyclical worldview of “paganism” aligns with the utility of the serpent as a symbol. Just as the ouroboros devours itself to be reborn, and Odin sacrifices himself to himself, the Neanderthals understood life as an eternal cycle, one in which death and renewal are inseparable.

Deep within the caves they once inhabited, where flickering torchlight gave form to their first myths, the serpent may have been a potent, primal image that has remained in our collective memory ever since. Whether as a healer, a foe, or the very cord that binds us to life, the serpent remains one of humanity’s most enduring and enigmatic symbols. As we mark the Year of the Snake, we can recognize in this ancient symbol not just a relic of myth, but a reflection of our origins, stretching back to the first stirrings of human thought.

A Brief History of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology

Does mental life start in the womb, at birth, or after? Historically, this question is age-old. Inquiries span across cultures and epochs. Western thought held the Aristotelian belief that the soul and mind began developing at "quickening," the moment a fetus first moved in the womb, a concept now understood as the initial fetal movements, which modern science associates with the development of neural and motor pathways in the second trimester. This general idea was carried through the centuries, echoed by Thomas Aquinas, and incorporated into the British legal system until recently.

Although not cited directly by Aristotle regarding the formation of the soul, Ancient Greek civilization owes much of its foundational knowledge to the Ancient Egyptians, for whom prenatal life was of central importance. During royal processions, the pharaoh’s placenta was wrapped in a bundle and treated with reverence.

Across the world, traditions exist for the care of the embryo and the developing fetus, suggesting the existence of a mind in utero. Creation mythology with images of eggs, wombs, bags (the amniotic sac, as in the North American creation myth “A Bag Hung in Space”), serpents (the umbilical cord—see Hopi myth, the caduceus symbol, etc.), and young heroes signifying the fetal journey to birth or ancestral rebirth.

The theme of the fetal mind also exists in Asia. According to Chinese and Japanese tradition, the newborn is one year old at birth. In Indonesia and India, customs involving care for the embryonic soul reflect our natural tendency to mind the emotional state and environmental quality of the mother for the sake of the developing fetus. The practice of “navel-gazing,” according to Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar, is a “contemplation of that which separates the individual’s consciousness from its universal roots,” i.e., the mysterious and powerful placenta. Various rituals involving the particular storage or burial of the placenta around the world would be considered primitive by modern standards, but are remnants of reverence for this cosmic connection in the womb.

It wasn’t until humanity emerged from the tumult of the Industrial Revolution that we saw the question of the beginning of mental life revitalized through the prism of psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud, the dominant mind in this new specialized discipline, was adamantly opposed to the idea of a mind before birth, the implications of which could threaten his early childhood developmental theories that were growing in prominence. When his constituent Otto Rank suggested it in his 1924 book The Trauma of Birth, he was ousted from the psychoanalytic school by Freud, leading to his marginalization and suppressing interest in prenatal psychology for decades.

Western society has progressed significantly from the days when birthing women were sedated with ether and chloroform. However, it is worth noting that until the 1980s, infants were not given anesthesia for surgical procedures due to the belief that they lacked a developed nervous system capable of feeling pain or forming memories.

Ten years after Freud’s death and a quarter century after Rank’s work went out of print, the field was revived, still under relative obscurity, by Nandor Fodor in his 1949 book The Search for the Beloved: A Clinical Investigation of the Trauma of Birth and Prenatal Condition. Fodor expanded on Rank’s insights, exploring the psychological imprints of the prenatal period and its influence on personality; however, both agreed that “the physical environment within the womb is perfect,” demonstrating a fundamental disconnect from obstetric realities. We’ve evolved from this era thanks to advancements in neuroscience and ultrasound technology, but unconscious psychological imprints of the prenatal stage remain relatively unexplored in the modern zeitgeist.

Since Fodor, only a handful of psychologists, mostly psychoanalysts, have explored this area. Stanislav Grof conducted regression research among patients with LSD, positing the significance of the birth experience based on his patients’ tendency to relive it in therapy. Lloyd deMause founded an offshoot discipline called “psychohistory” in which he applied the intricacies of the “fetal drama” to wider societal and cultural phenomena, arguing with empirical evidence that humans collectively mimic the prenatal experience in expressions of group fantasies, whether they be innovative, depressed, manic, or violent. Others—albeit few—have dedicated their careers to fetal psychology and produced works of interest. However, the only psychologist to cite the ancient world as more than surface-level evidence with a disclaimer of superstition was Francis J. Mott, a disciple of Nandor Fodor.

Francis J. Mott and the Science of Myth

In exploring mythological and religious texts to inform his obstetric and psychological research, Mott was keenly aware that advancement does not necessarily occur on a line. Knowledge, expressed metaphorically in myth, encompasses insights into natural processes and human experience. These include understanding life cycles, cosmic patterns, and the interconnectedness of existence, aspects of reality that earlier cultures intuited but are often overlooked today. Prenatal and perinatal researchers contemporaneous with Mott may refer to the existence of birth imagery in mythology, but only to illustrate its longevity or fundamentality as a subject of interest. Jungians (followers of the psychoanalytic theories of Carl Jung), for example, would claim that mythological birth imagery comes from dreams: surface manifestations of unconscious memories that man may have instinctively cherished but never intellectually understood.

“In modern times, both physiological and psychological authority has become vested in the medical profession, but the doctor’s familiarity with the biological functions of the organs tends to inhibit him from looking more deeply into their psychological function. However, the simpler minds of old knew, intuited or suspected that the placenta and the umbilical cord had a mysterious value which transcended their physical function. This is clear from the importance attached to the preservation and even the sanctification of placental and umbilical organs.”

Here, Mott not only recognizes ancient man but also alludes to the potential superiority of his “simpleness.” From this perspective, Mott would endeavor to create a repository of material rich with novel ideas about the psychological effects of the fetal experience on the individual, building on his predecessors, but also pulling repeatedly from mythological sources, emphasizing their hidden sophistication.

To summarize in Mott’s words, “the root of all psychological feeling is that primary physical feeling generated or stimulated by the touch of the fetal body upon its uterine surround.” Therefore, aspects of development such as emotional devices of infancy can be seen as efforts to restore its lost connection. The root of sexuality can be seen as the giving and receiving rhythm between the fetus and the placenta. Our gravitational connection to the earth can be felt psychologically as a replacement for our initial connection to the placenta, and so on.

The three primary parts of the womb make up the archetypes that Mott believed occurred widely in myth: the fetus, the placenta, and the umbilical cord that connects them. Mott calls the placenta “an instrument of inheritance [which] transmits a deep organic knowledge stored in the blood.” In mythology, it takes many forms, such as the twin, the tree, the cauldron/grail, the foe (poisoner, parasite), and the nurturer/teacher. The umbilical cord, through which blood is transmitted back and forth between the fetus and placenta, often appears as the serpent (especially twined, as the cord is made up of two veins and an artery), the bough, or the dragon. In Western myth, dragons are perceived as greedy, deadly, and malevolent, while in the East, they are seen as benevolent guardians; both reflect qualities of the cord. It transmits the building blocks of life from the placenta, removes waste from the fetus, but also becomes less efficient as the fetus grows, eventually becoming the mortal threat that must be slayed to finalize the birthing process.

The central character of the archetypal “hero’s journey” would then be the fetus, defined by Mott as youthful, shining heroes like Apollo, Baldr (‘shining one’), Zeus (‘to shine’), Christ (‘light of the world’), reflected biologically by the sensory intake of the fetus in utero, which comes from small hairs coating the body, all which have nerve endings. The fetus, therefore, feels in all directions an image of one who “shines.”

The essence of Mott’s psychology is essentially pagan, predicated on the interconnectedness of all things, where the primary experience of the fetus in utero is not excluded from its later psychological makeup. This idea of “inheritance” also echoes the primordial religious belief in reincarnation. The placenta, a carrier of ancestral information through DNA, defines the “new” lineal incarnation. Its mysterious grandeur remains relevant today in questions of epigenetics, stem cell research, placentophagia, and its unique intricacies as an organ.

Were ancient people ignorant in canonizing the fetal drama as a mythological archetype, or humbly reverent and curious in the face of creation? Today, the medical designation for the placenta is “clinical waste.” Perhaps there is inherent value in intertwining spiritual and scientific thought.

Mott’s interest in the “universal design of creation” centered around the womb as a microcosm guided him towards a unique epistemology synthesizing psychoanalysis, dream and myth interpretation, and obstetric theory. If fetal psychology is an obscure niche, Mott is obscure-squared, but both deserve more attention and perhaps will find it in years to come.

Relevance to Neanderthal Paganism

The purpose of this blog is ultimately to demonstrate how the worldview of indigenous Eurasian cultures stems from their common Stone Age ancestor, the Neanderthal. In doing so, the sophistication of mythology, ritual, and the so-called “primitive” mind that developed them will be argued for.

The defining quality of this worldview is the belief in reincarnation. Myth and ritual are how rebirth occurs in the mind: they are the vessels in which knowledge was transmitted by our ancestors and, unconsciously, by us. Information is like a specimen preserved in amber, or a dormant gene waiting to be activated. Its power is revealed in our repetition of stories; we feel compelled to continue traditions and carry out bizarre practices year after year, dragging trees into our homes and leaving money under pillows for fallen baby teeth. All these things point to an unknown history of the mind worth exploring.

For Neanderthals and their various descendants, a subject of particular interest was the unseen: what occurs in the soil, in the body, in stars and cells, that turns the wheel of life? What patterns do they share? There is an emphasis on the microcosm in ancient science: if one understands oneself, i.e., the human body, one will understand the universe. This is where the question of creation enters, and where fetal psychologists refer to the womb as early man once did.

“The scientific study of the depths of the mind must open the way to a quintessential discipline, one which overflows the boundaries of the camps of religion and science.”

1-2) The Bear and the Cave

“The mills of time have scattered the records of those ceremonies, but indirect evidence for the bear’s role in the birth of human consciousness is found in archaeological relics, in the residue of belief today in tribal cultures, and in the structure of the language we use.”—Barry Sanders

In the dense forests of prehistory, where survival was a daily wager, the bear loomed large in the imagination of early humans. To the ancient mind, this creature was more than mere prey or predator. It was a mystery—a beast that could stand upright like a man, that seemed to lumber through the woods with an almost friendly face and demeanor, yet possessed strength and speed that no spear could easily conquer. It vanished into the dark recesses of caves, the wombs of the earth, to hibernate, only to reemerge with new cubs in spring—a mimicry of death and rebirth where the mother bear is the bridge between the two. The bear was not merely an animal; it was a symbol, perhaps even a spirit, deserving of reverence.

According to Joseph Campbell, the worship of bears is one of the early signs and evidence of mythological thinking and experience. It could indeed be the earliest, with archaeological examples from Drachenloch, Le Regourdou, and others across Europe repeating similar symbolic themes. Most importantly, it’s persisted throughout the ages in varied forms: mythological archetypes, as the etymological root of place and character names, and the subject of rituals and worship across various cultures of the northern hemisphere.

One might assume “bear worship” is unfamiliar as a concept, relevant perhaps to the anthropology of Neanderthals but not to us—until they consider the ogre, the witch, the giant, the beast. These archetypes often share poor eyesight but an advanced sense of smell. They’re fat and lumbering with a taste for the young who dare to enter their den (the mother bear is tasked with staving off male bears who are prone to infanticide). They come from early man’s relationship with the bear.

The linguistic legacy of the bear underscores its importance. Across cultures, words related to bears often carry connotations of strength, protection, and parenthood. Often not addressed by its “real name” out of reverence, there are hundreds of nicknames across later cultures for the bear, most often associated with the idea of the parent-creator. Names like Arthur, Artio, Artemis, and Atlas—derived from words for "bear", as well as the verb “to bear”—reveal its role as a mythic figure representing the capability to navigate, withstand, transform, and support the weight of the world. Some examples are obvious, such as the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear, which is called such by cultures with no historical contact. Others, like “Arctic” which is derived from the Greek word for “north,” literally “the bear’s place,” are less known, but examples abound.

For Neanderthals, evidence of bear skulls and femurs specifically are arranged and ornamented in ways that suggest they were not mere trophies: like the Chugach Eskimos of Alaska, Neanderthals likely believed the soul of a bear resides in its head, hence the skull’s prevalence in ritualistic cave displays. But the parallels are endless: Finns, Celts, Norse, Chinese, Korean, Ainu, various Native American tribes, and all other cultures that share lineage with Neanderthals also share evidence of bear worship.

“I believe we have good grounds for considering that [Celtic] bear worship, in particular, traces an unbroken line of descent from the altars of bear skulls, which Neanderthal built a hundred thousand years earlier.”—Stan Gooch

The connection between the bear’s symbolic death and its rebirth aligns with the Neanderthal understanding of the cave as a sacred space—both tomb and temple. The cave, as both a refuge and a place of ritual, became a sacred womb in its own right—a site where the mysteries of life and death converged. Eventually, the opening of the cave would be reflected in dolmens, burial mounds, and pillared temples. In the ancient mind, the bear emerged as a timeless metaphor for humanity’s belief in renewal and the eternal cycles of existence.

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3) The Skull

Symbolic fixation on the skull has centuries of cultural overlap from Neanderthals to modern Eurasians, where it has been an emblem of mortality and memory. While conquering Gaul (modern-day France), the Romans labeled it ‘head-hunting’ among Gallic Celts, estimating it to be a manifestation of their passion for war – a way to collect their defeated enemies (like the notion that bear skulls in Neanderthal caves are hunting trophies). Today the ‘head-hunting’ label is still used to explain missing skulls in ancient burial sites, which was more likely an expression of ancestor worship. As Johannes Maringer reports in The Gods of Prehistoric Man, dispelling the misconceptualized connection of head-hunting to cannibalism:

“The practice of mounting skulls can in all likelihood be regarded as a form of skull cult, by means of which the memory of the departed was cherished and their help and protection sought for the tribe. The artificial enlarging of the foramen magnum, which has been established in so many cases and is usually taken as proof of cannibalism, can be satisfactorily explained in terms of a practice connected with the two-stage burial rite familiar to anthropologists. After decomposition of the soft tissues in the earth, or by exposure of the corpse on a tree or trestle, it only remained, usually, to remove the brain, which decayed more slowly, and the simplest way to do this was to enlarge the opening at the base of the skull.”

But why the skull? If we look back to the belief that the soul of a bear was contained in its skull, we could assume that the soul of man resides in his. Encasing the body’s most powerful and important organ, it is where memories are made and stored, where the senses are gathered, where man’s thoughts, and indeed soul, reside. Thus it is a natural symbol for the man’s soul and memory to live on.

Romans had their own symbolic application for the skull related to remembrance, namely the concept of memento mori—“remember death.” In its stark reminder of human mortality, the skull becomes a gateway to reflection on life’s meaning and the mysteries of existence, a perspective that their Gallic foes shared, and that both likely inherited from a common ancestor.

4) The Femur

Less is speculated about the femur – however Neanderthal and early modern sites suggest they are an equally important symbol. Being the longest and strongest bone in the human body, and the most supportive to the weight of the body, the femur was perhaps a symbol for what carries man through life – his life force. The femur is also the heaviest carrier and most easily accessed receptacle of red marrow, which produces the stem cells essential to the production of blood. To pair it with the skull would be to combine the life force and the mind: simultaneously symbolizing power, balance, mind, memory, and the necessity of their interconnectedness for life to exist.

One of the more famous cultural Neanderthal artifacts is the Divje Babe flute, known as the Neanderthal flute, which is constructed out of the femur of a bear and dated to 50-60,000 years ago, making it humanity’s oldest musical instrument. As Plato said, “Music gives soul to the universe and wings to the mind,” emphasizing the life force quality of the femur and reminding us of the omnipresence of the bear in Neanderthal culture.

For the Ancient Egyptians, whose culture is part of the Neanderthal legacy, the uas-scepter was a ceremonial tool shaped like a femur and associated with the Big Dipper constellation. The Big Dipper is known cross-culturally as the “wagon” or “plough,” i.e. something that holds or carries similarly to the femur—and of course belongs to Ursa Major (Great Bear), the largest constellation in the Northern Hemisphere, known as such also across various cultures that share no historical connection, but do share the Neanderthal as ancestor.

Together, the skull and femurs are a separately recognizable symbol – the “skull and crossbones.” Its exact origin is not known. It is present in and before the Middle Ages in Europe, likely tied to the Roman “memento mori” adage. It resembles the Egyptian crook and flail, which cross-diagonally framed the face on the coffin of Tutankhamun. It has been employed on European military uniforms from Russia to Greece, including the German Totenkopf (‘skull’) symbol adopted by Frederick the Great’s military in the 18th century and a division of the Waffen-SS. Its association with death and injury is now used to label bottles containing toxic substances, but has origins in the burial rites of Neanderthals as an integration of mind and body.

5-6) Burial and Red Ochre

The Neanderthals’ burial practices reflect a profound spiritual understanding of life, death, and renewal. Gravesites offer a wealth of symbolic elements that hint at the belief in reincarnation. Bodies were often interred in fetal position, echoing the posture of the unborn, symbolizing death not as an end but as a return to the womb—a preparation for rebirth. Similarly, cave burials show an intentional alignment with the rising sun, orienting the feet of the dead eastward, also suggesting a belief in the cyclical nature of life, as the sun rises each day, symbolizing renewal and continuity.

Cave burials were central to Neanderthal rituals, with caves functioning as both tombs and temples—a sacred space where life and death converged. These sites, such as those at La Ferrassie and Shanidar, were more than practical shelters; they were places of deep symbolic resonance, embodying the threshold between the earthly and the otherworldly as mentioned alongside the bear symbol.

Grave goods, including tools, animal bones, and ornaments, were often placed alongside the deceased, echoed throughout prehistory and the story of civilization. At Des-Cubierta Cave in Spain, the burial of a child was adorned with antlers and small fires. Le Regourdou is again a telling example, featuring twenty stone boxes surrounding the burial that contained bear bones. These adornments suggest the possibility of ritual, perhaps initiatory, at the caves and sites of burials—an extension of the belief that death is not an end but a transformation.

Red ochre, a mineral pigment ranging from pale yellow to deep red, holds a particularly symbolic role in these burials. Found in numerous Neanderthal graves across Europe and the Middle East, its use has long been interpreted as a substitute for blood, symbolizing life and vitality. At sites like La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Le Moustier, ochre was sprinkled over bodies or arranged around significant grave items. The “Red Lady” of Paviland and the “Fox Lady” of Dolni Vestonice are later examples of this practice, echoing Neanderthal traditions.

The color red, deeply tied to the symbolism of blood, connects the earthly body to the cosmic cycle of birth and rebirth. The application of red ochre in burials transforms these sites into spaces of ritualized renewal, tying the individual’s fate to the rhythms of the natural world. Together with the fetal positioning and solar alignments, ochre affirms the Neanderthal belief in life as a cycle—a sacred journey from one state of existence to the next.

From these symbols, which may seem banal at first glance, the archetypes that make up myth and tradition have grown like limbs off a tree. The bear is the sleeping giant, the ogre, and the witch who feasts on the young. The skull is the cauldron of rebirth, the grail, the music, the memory and wisdom gained from magic talismans. The cave is the otherworld, the underworld, the mysterious, liminal space from which life reincarnates. It is also the dolmen, the tomb, the temple, the place that represents a threshold between this world and another. The sun, the femur, the blood (ochre) all manifest in myriad shapes and sizes in the tales that underpin our collective psyche. There is a sacred continuity that defies the realm of the known—in the depths of the Stone Age, Neanderthals built a castle of the mind that has stood the ultimate test of time.

We know only fragments of what Neanderthals left behind: ochre-stained bones, burials with symbolic arrangements, cave art, and enigmatic bear remains in secluded recesses of their dwellings. But their symbols resonate with themes that ripple through the myths and rituals of humanity's later civilizations. The cave, often aligned with the sun's rising light, became a womb-like space of transformation and renewal. The bear, feared and revered, performed a pantomime of death and rebirth, disappearing into its den only to emerge with the thaw alongside newborn cubs. The sun itself set the stage on its annual journey for the hero’s journey. These symbols would echo through time, carrying forward the unspoken questions of continuity and the meaning of life’s cycles.

The once unknown but speculated common ancestor of Northern cultures, who could explain the unmistakable overlap in myths and traditions including those surrounding the winter solstice, might be right under our noses in the form of the Neanderthal. The solstice solar alignment in the monuments of Ireland and Egypt, the Great Bear name shared cross-continentally, and the divine child and wise old man archetypes, all share one definite prehistoric trait: Neanderthal ancestry.

Caves, the Rising Sun, and the First Temples

Neanderthal caves, often carefully chosen for their position relative to the sun, hint at an awareness of light and its symbolic power. Some caves seem oriented to catch the first rays of the solstice sunrise as if to capture the birth of light from the womb of darkness. Millennia later, humans built temples with similar intentions—Stonehenge, Newgrange, Karnak. But where temples stand as deliberate constructions, the caves of the Neanderthals were sanctuaries shaped by nature, imbued with meaning by observation and use.

The archetype of the cave as both tomb and womb took hold in the human psyche. Later myths carried this duality: the hero descending into darkness only to emerge transformed, the child born in a hidden place destined to bring salvation. The cave became a universal stage for the human drama of death and rebirth, and the bear its main influence, whether in the myth of Orpheus or Christ’s resurrection:

"Orpheus’ descent into the underworld and his eventual successful return represents a model borrowed and adapted from prehistoric bear ceremonies...In Christianity, Christ’s descent into hell mimics Orpheus and thus the bear.”1

The Bear as a Symbol of Rebirth

Among the symbols that survive from Neanderthal life, the bear looms large. Excavations at sites like Drachenloch and Le Regourdou have revealed bear remains carefully arranged, as if in reverence. This veneration is echoed in later myths across the cultures of the Northern Hemisphere.

Tales that fall under the Bear’s Son myth archetype share a theme: a bear deity descends from the stars to the earth and mates with a human woman, much like the sun’s rays shining through a cave opening on the solstice, or the angel visiting Mary at night with the news of immaculate conception. The woman gives birth to a heroic, divine or semi-divine child who elevates humanity’s understanding of the world.2 Over time, the Bear’s Son was replaced in mythologies by human images, such as Artemis and Arthur (both names derived from “bear”), yet the archetype’s essence persists.

It is striking to consider how this myth echoes across time, even finding resonance in the story of Jesus. Like the Bear’s Son, Jesus’ divine conception, birth in humble circumstances (specifically in a cave according to early Christian tradition), role as a teacher and savior, and sacrificial death carry forward these themes of celestial origin and earthly transformation. The bear’s connection to the solstice—the time of the sun’s rebirth—reflects an ancient understanding of cyclical time, of the interconnection between light, darkness, and the rhythms of nature.

The Divine Child: Light Born in Darkness

From the womb of the cave and the hibernation of the bear emerges another archetype: the sacred child that, like the sun, is born at the time of the winter solstice. This figure appears across cultures, from Horus in Egypt to Mithras in Rome, from Apollo in Greece to Christ in Bethlehem. Always, the child represents the spark of life amid darkness. In this narrative, the winter solstice becomes not just an astronomical event but a symbolic affirmation of resilience in rebirth.

These divine children often share a similar fate. Born in humble or hidden circumstances, they rise to prominence, embodying vitality and hope, only to meet a tragic end that secures their place in the cosmic order. Christ, Osiris, Tammuz, Orpheus, Baldr—each is a figure who shines brightly in life before succumbing to death, their stories bound to cycles of decay and regeneration. They are the strong young gods, often referred to as Shining Ones, who represent, in part, the reborn sun. Their skin or clothes are described as bright and glowing, their features fair, and often their names etymologically are tied to one of these adjectives as well. Their deaths are not final; they herald renewal, the continuation of life, the youthful manifestation of the ancestors or gods, the triumph of light over darkness.

The symbolism of the Shining One reflects humanity's deep psychological response to the mystery of creation and the divinity of nature’s cycles. Just as the sun is reborn at the solstice, so too is the divine child a metaphor for the ever-returning light. This archetype may find its earliest expressions in the observations and rituals of the Neanderthals, whose survival depended on understanding these cycles and committing their knowledge to collective memory. The firelit cave—a sanctuary against the cold—may have been the first cradle of this idea outside of the sun itself. The fetus—whose skin in the mother’s womb is covered with nerve endings—similarly “shines” in all directions: both images of the interplay of light and darkness, both giving rise to the stories we still tell and rituals we still participate in.

Symbols Without Memory

Today, we celebrate these ancient ideas without fully understanding them. We bring trees into our homes and place them near chimneys, adorning them with lights and gifts. We wrap presents and exchange them, honoring traditions whose origins we attribute to Christianity or commercial invention—but which stretch much further back. The Christmas tree, the Yule log, the act of gift-giving—these symbols carry echoes of the solstice rituals of our ancestors, yet their meanings have become opaque.

“At Christmas we may express our inner feeling for the mythological birth of a semi-divine child, even though we may not believe in the doctrine of the virgin birth of Christ or have any kind of conscious religious faith. Unknowingly, we have fallen in with the symbolism of rebirth. This is a relic of an immensely older solstice festival, which carries the hope that the fading winter landscape of the northern hemisphere will be renewed. For all our sophistication we find satisfaction in this symbolic festival.”3

Why do we cling to these symbols, even when their original purpose has been forgotten? Perhaps it is because they speak to something primal within us. They remind us, even unconsciously, of our place in a world governed by cycles of light and darkness, death and rebirth. They connect us to a lineage that stretches back not just to the first civilizations but to the caves of the Neanderthals, where the flickering firelight first transformed darkness into meaning.

In carrying forward these rituals, we perform a uniquely human act. Other animals alter their behaviors in tune with the winter solstice, but only humans mark it with ceremony and symbolism. Only we carry forward traditions whose meanings we no longer fully understand, connection through the act of remembrance. This is both a strength and a mystery—a reminder that we are creatures of the earth and yet something more.

To search for the origins of the winter solstice festival is to search for ourselves. It is to peer into the shadows of deep time, where Neanderthals lit fires against the dark, perhaps wondering, as we do, about the sun’s return. It is to ask what it means to be human, to carry symbols whose roots stretch beyond memory. And it is to marvel at the persistence of light—in the darkness of winter, in the depths of prehistory, and in the caves of our minds, where the ancient fire still flickers.

“The richness and complexity of the religious ideology of hunting peoples must never be underestimated.” –Mircea Eliade

The origins of religion do not lie solely in the temples of Sumer or the scrolls of Sinai. They whisper to us from deeper shadows, from the caves of Europe where the Neanderthals first observed the cycles of death and rebirth in themselves and nature. Their legacy may hold the key to understanding the earliest stirrings of human spirituality—not as abstract beliefs, but as practical, lived systems that intertwined survival with the sacred.

The Cave as Sacred Space

For Neanderthals, the cave was a liminal space that bridged the material and the spiritual. Its dark, hidden recesses symbolized the underworld, a realm of transformation where life and death converged. The cave’s opening, by contrast, represented a threshold—a portal between the earth and the mysteries below. This symbolic function laid the groundwork for later human constructions, such as dolmens and temples, which echoed the cave’s dual nature as both womb and tomb.

Within these natural sanctuaries, bears retreated with the death of the foliage to hibernate, only to re-emerge in spring with their new cubs. This cyclical imagery may have been seen as a resurrection, a testament to the cave’s role as a vessel for rebirth. The bear’s journey into and out of the earth mirrored the broader rhythms of nature, reinforcing the cave’s sacred status as a site where life renewed itself.

Later cultures inherited this symbolism, crafting dolmens, barrows, and temples to recreate the quiet sanctity of the cave. These structures, like their natural predecessors, served as thresholds between worlds, places where humans could commune with the divine and seek meaning in the cycles of existence. For the Neanderthals, the cave became a spiritual concept, grounding their understanding of life, death, and rebirth within the earth’s enduring rhythms.

The Bear as Sacred Icon

The Neanderthal "Bear Cult" was first suggested by Emil Bächler after his excavations at Drachenloch in Switzerland, as well as Wildenmannisloch and Wildkirchli Caves, where he reported arrangements of bear bones “belong[ing] entirely within the framework of primitive hunting and sacrificial cults, as we’ve seen in prehistoric periods and among today’s primitive hunters.”1 At Le Regourdou in France, a Neanderthal burial site contained the remains of a bear laid to rest alongside a human. Was this coincidence, or an early echo of later bear cults among northern peoples?

In the Stone Age, bears were not only respected as fierce competitors and threats, but their annual hibernation and reemergence mirrored the renewal of life after the dormancy of winter, making them possibly the first venerated religious symbol for the bridge between the worlds of life and death.

Later traditions of bear veneration, from the Ainu of Japan to the Saami of Scandinavia, or the shared names of the Great and Little Bear constellations across cultures, may not merely parallel these ancient practices but inherit them.

Most importantly, that foundational religious impulse, rebirth of the sun, the ancestor, or the Christ, is represented perfectly by this unique beast that emerged literally and symbolically from the cave opening, bearing new life every spring.

Bone and Burial

Neanderthals were not casual in their treatment of the dead. Burial sites reveal care and intention: the positioning of bodies, the use of red ochre as a blood symbol, and the placement of grave goods. At Shanidar Cave in Iraq, Ralph Solecki’s groundbreaking work uncovered pollen grains suggesting flowers placed around a buried body in what might be the earliest floral tribute.

These practices suggest an understanding of the sacred. Death is not the end; it is a threshold, and the Neanderthals marked it with gestures that resonate with later human rituals. The act of burial itself—especially in the fetal position or in alignment with the East-to-West course of the sun—implies "an intention to connect the fate of the soul with the sun, hence the hope of a rebirth."2

Just as the natural world transformed through cycles, so too might the soul or essence of the deceased. This understanding laid the groundwork for later human traditions, where death and renewal were intricately linked.

Initiation and Transformation

Life in the Pleistocene was brutal, but it was also rich with meaning. Coming of age likely involved trials that tested the body and spirit. The caves—dark, mysterious, and often adorned with art—may have served as liminal spaces where initiations occurred. Crawling through narrow passages, emerging into painted chambers, a young Neanderthal might have encountered symbols that spoke to their role within the tribe and the cosmos.

These rites likely cast the initiate as a reborn ancestor, uniting past and future within the cyclical rhythm of life. To become an adult was not merely to survive; it was to embody the continuity of the tribe, to carry forward the wisdom of those who came before. Initiation is both practical and spiritual—a way to transmit knowledge, forge bonds, and ensure survival across generations.

Considering the significance of the bear as a symbol and the more primal tangibility of spiritual rites in the Stone Age, it’s possible that initiation involved the bear and the cave, or that the concept of initiation itself is a recreation of the separation of the cub from the bear mother. It is likely that many monstrous mythological archetypes, like the ogre, the witch, and the giant, are versions of the bear (note their near-sightedness, slow-moving nature, sleepiness, and taste for children). Perhaps they were foes to overcome during initiation.3 Certainly the image of a successful initiate emerging from the cave suggests a completed rebirth.

Why Does it Matter?

Beyond the argument that Neanderthals buried their dead, there’s been little speculation as to why particular symbols were repeatedly included in the process outside of the “Bear Cult” theory, and it’s often dismissed as unimportant or the result of natural phenomena. From our perspective, knowing the cognitive capacity of Neanderthals and their place in our lineage, these elements should instead be mined for insights into their sensibilities and compared with the cultures that followed in their footsteps.

Because Neanderthals remain hampered by their reputation and the lack of a physical record relative to subsequent cultures, any suggestions of a Neanderthal culture assumed that it would either be too simplistic to garner popular interest or wouldn’t be recognizable to modern people. The image of cavemen venerating bears and skulls seems foreign on its surface and would fail to inspire imagination or deep empathy. This is why the evidence has not been given the privilege of deep comparative analysis with later cultural traditions.

Neanderthals were not merely a footnote in our evolutionary story. To a large extent, they are us, and their contributions to the great drama of human consciousness are embedded in our daily and annual traditions. Their religion—if we dare to call it that—was not codified but lived, expressed in cycles and symbols, bones, burial, and song. It shaped the northern cultures that followed, leaving a legacy that lingers in our myths, dreams, customs, and religions.

To understand Neanderthal spirituality is to glimpse the dawn of our own. In their rituals, we find the roots of the sacred—a reminder that before temples and texts, humanity sought meaning in the deep places of the earth, guided by the rhythms of life itself.

Le Regourdou is a Neanderthal burial site that is rarely cited by scholars. I can only assume that since, like Drachenloch, where the Neanderthal “Bear Cult” theory was first proposed by Emil Bächler in 1917, its primary significance lies in its cultural implications, the site tends to be overlooked in favor of less controversial sites.

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Like Drachenloch, the cultural implications are strong. Bächler reported evidence of religious ritualism among Neanderthals who used bear bones as symbols in burial or initiation rites, thus viewing the bear as a sacred symbol connecting death and rebirth through the cave. Le Regourdou contained not only supporting evidence for Bächler’s once heavily criticized theory, but also the first discovery of its kind – a Neanderthal tomb.

In 1954, Le Regourdou was discovered by chance about a quarter of a mile away from Lascaux, the famous Upper Paleolithic cave art site, in France. Landowner Roger Constant had stumbled upon a sinkhole and took it upon himself to explore it, figuring it might be connected to Lascaux. When he came across part of a human skull, he brought it to the attention of local authorities who quickly deployed archaeologists to the scene.

After a brief spat between Constant, who felt inclined to continue excavations independently, and the university archaeologists, who insisted their expertise should take precedence, the two parties agreed (following the threat of arrest) to allow for shared responsibilities. The professionals would continue exploring where Constant found the skull. Constant could explore elsewhere.

1957 saw the excavation of a near-complete 90,000 year old Neanderthal skeleton which remains the oldest most complete skeleton found to date (La Ferrassie 1 is more complete, but Le Regourdou is at least 30,000 years older). This alone makes it an exceptionally rare and important site, but we’ll focus on its ritualistic aspects.

Missing parts of the skeleton include the jawbone, femurs and tibias. While Bonifay and excavating partner Georges Laplace didn’t speculate on the reason for their absence initially, it could have been assumed according to the Bear Cult theory that ritual was involved, since in the place of the missing Neanderthal femurs were those of brown bears — a curious arrangement that had been discovered at previous sites. But Bächler’s theory wouldn’t have been their first consideration.

The skeleton was buried, head facing west, feet facing east, resting on top of a flat stone floor in fetal position. On the chest of the corpse rested part of a bear’s humerus and various flint tools. On either side of the body, two small parallel walls had been built, upon which rested a large limestone slab weighing nearly 800 kg (2,000 lbs). Described as “a real funerary monument” by Bonifay, the structure of Le Regourdou would be evoked by the dolmens of Europe thousands of years later. The construction of the tomb serves the purpose of a cave – symbolically they echo the same sentiment. Instead of a cave’s opening, the Regourdou tomb is accessed underground through an apparently naturally occurring portal that’s been named “Constant’s Chimney.”

“Many stones [including tools], bear bones and a deer antler were then stacked together to form a small mound above the grave, then a fireplace covered the entire grave,” leading Bonifay to conclude the intentionality of the construction and burial. Similarly to Drachenloch, the entombment was impressively flanked by “about twenty stone boxes which contained the bones of [brown] bears.” Observations made with the assistance of Bernard Vandsermeersch further confirm anthropogenic origin of the structure based on “arrangement of equipment, stone paving, internal formwork protecting a bear skull…[and] stones brought from the outside.”

The most conspicuously arranged bear remains were that of a small female bear which were placed along the sides of the tomb with “the two shoulder blades crossed at the south end, [and] the skull rested between three stones forming a small protective formwork [to the north].” The others, studied by Marie-Françoise Bonifay, are noticeably separated between the thoracic skeleton, which were found outside the tomb area, and the skulls and femurs found inside.

The exact context of bears in the whole of Le Regourdou is debated. Throughout the site’s multiple layers, bear remains make up over two thirds of all faunal material, but questions surround the extent of man’s role in the entirety of their presence. Striations on bones and “differential spatial distribution” (namely the placement of skulls and femurs inside the structure) are the main exhibits for the case for human involvement. Bone markings could be the result of hunting, skinning, or marrow extraction as in the case of reindeer bones, ten percent of which are marked strongly by man-made fractures. It’s been suggested based on the wide diversity of herbivorous and carnivorous animal remains that perhaps the natural sinkhole was set up as some kind of hunting trap.

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It’s also possible that bear mortality, since the vast majority of remains are of juvenile, occurred during hibernation. However, the prominence of juvenile bears will be later recalled during excavations in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, where archaeologist Cristian Lascu suggested that young bears could have been hunted during an initiation rite for young Neanderthal hunters.

Bonifay concluded that most bear remains at Le Regourdou were placed by Neanderthals, but this has been reasonably contested by evidence pointing to bears having occupied the deposit independently. What’s not disputed is that Neanderthals interacted with and specifically arranged the faunal remains where the human burial is.

When all the evidence from is taken into account, the anthropogenic nature of treatment of remains is wholly apparent. Even the critical paper cited by Wikipedia as proof of “natural taphonomic phenomena” repeatedly confirms not only human involvement, but the likelihood of ritualism which at least partially confirms Bächler’s supposedly null Bear Cult theory. Bonifay, who was brought onto the site as an authority to the dismay of self-proclaimed “free-prehistorian” Roger Constant, aligned his opinion on Le Regourdou publicly with Bächler’s ideas in 2008, long after they all but faded into obscurity:

“Neanderthals made these deposits of bear bones to celebrate the death of one of their own…The bear was a powerful symbol closely associated with death. It may have evoked the idea of rebirth for Neanderthals by the fact that it hibernates in winter and reappears in spring, at the same time as the renewal of the entire natural environment, as if it ‘resurrected’ after its temporary disappearance.”

In the scientific community, as in Nadia Cavanhié’s 2011 paper “The Bear Who Saw the Man?: Archaeozoological and taphonomic study of the Middle Paleolithic site of Regourdou,” the term ‘symbolic’ is deemed too vague a label for evidence that doesn’t appear to have practical purpose.

While isolated to Mousterian culture, the term ‘symbolic’ definitely falls short of understanding Neanderthal culture. However if considered alongside the fact that Neanderthals are a progenitor species to many modern humans, the themes of their symbolic practices could be investigated as a worldview with the same foundational principles as the indigenous cultures of the northern hemisphere, aspects of which could remain in our customs today. Especially since they are repeated in multiple sites, ‘symbolic’ is a term that is now used with full utility.

While none of the sites immediately sparked theories about the exact significance of the skull, femur or bear, it had become obvious that they were ritualistic in nature. Le Regourdou echoes Bächler’s reports from Drachenloch thirty years prior, as well as elements from Veternica and Salzofen caves, and others. While not uniform in their similarities, the details of the grave sites are consistent enough to suggest a comprehensive culture dealing with the cyclical nature of life and death, symbolized by the cave (or tomb) and the bear. After all, some of the sites are dated tens of thousands of years apart from each other. Still, the prominence of the skull and femur, the particular arrangements of bear bones, and various other aspects are shockingly unwavering from 90,000 to 40,000 years ago.

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"Little flower — but if I could understand

What you are, root and all, and all in all,

I should know what God and man is."

From a young age, Ralph Solecki independently traversed his home state of New York for remnants from the lands’ original tribal inhabitants. After serving America in Europe during World War II from 1942 to 1945, he pursued anthropology at Columbia University. Along with his wife and fellow archaeologist Rose, he traveled to the Levant in 1953 to find more clues to bygone eras of humanity. At Shanidar Cave in the Zagros Mountains of Northern Iraq, they uncovered a series of Neanderthal skeletons that would strengthen, and in some cases establish, the bond between us and our Paleolithic ancestors. Solecki’s analysis, culminating in the 1971 book The First Flower People, was the first of its kind – a book on Neanderthal archaeology marketed towards a popular audience. Because of his ability to capitalize on public consciousness, his legacy is solidified for daring to attribute a new level of intelligence, soul, and empathy to Neanderthals.

The decades following the war affected every aspect of Western society. An economic boom gave birth to a forward-thinking generation that set new trajectories in technology, academia, the arts, and science. As new perspectives emerged across the disciplinary landscape, Solecki detailed his seven-year-long excavation of Shanidar Cave. He saw parallels between Neanderthals and the hippie movement, which captured the imagination of young people in America.

The publishing of The First Flower People conveniently aligned with the solidification of hippiedom in the popular zeitgeist. Hippies were initially known primarily for ‘dropping out’ from the expectations of their conservative, industrious upbringing to embrace down-to-earth communal living. The early Californian hippies (who spawned from young immigrants from Germany, where the first Neanderthal was discovered a hundred years earlier) were referred to as “flower children” for their free-flowing, naturalistic attitude and appearance. One of the most famous images from the era’s peace demonstrations shows a young woman placing a flower inside the barrel of a policeman’s rifle.

The goal of the original hippies was a return to nature – cultivating simpler lives as an alternative to the fast-paced civilization of the post-war metropolis and emerging suburbs. By the late 1960’s, hippiedom had become a widespread trend, and the combination of openness to new ideas and the desire to get back to the land was a stylish approach to life.

What could be more ‘hippie,’ Solecki figured, than Stone Age man? His tribal existence and handiness with natural materials could be compared to the ideal hippie commune. Neanderthals could be repositioned into a positive light for presentation to a new generation. Their lack of a physical legacy, which until that point was considered evidence for a lack of intelligence, could now be called the manifestation of a collective ‘leave-no-trace’ philosophy – the ultimate sustainable approach to man’s life on Earth. With evidence for altruism and sensitive, creative behavior, the generation that prided itself on open-mindedness would be the perfect audience for the soulful Neanderthal pitch. Along with paleobotanist Arlette Leroi-Gourhan (wife of André Leroi-Gourhan, who was skeptical of Neanderthal intelligence), Solecki ventured to counteract Marcellin Boule’s speculative depiction of the knuckle-dragging Neanderthal that had dominated the public and academic consciousness for a century.

“It was originally a Frenchman, Boule, who is credited with the bestial characterization of the Neanderthals. And it was a Frenchwoman, Mme. Leroi-Gourhan, who gave us the soft touch. The observation has been made that the Neanderthal has been ridiculed and rejected, but despite this, according to all the proofs that can be mustered, he is still our ancestor.”1

Regardless of the various discoveries made in the first half of the twentieth century, they all lead to Solecki’s book that captured the publics’ imagination by being the right discovery and message at the right time. Considering the philosophical reform that defined the period, Neanderthal perception was due for a shift in trajectory – and Solecki was the one to initiate it.

Major Findings and Analysis

The remains of five different individuals were uncovered during Solecki’s tenure at the Shanidar – the most notable of which are Shanidar 1 and Shanidar 4 – both dated to approximately 40,000 years ago, with the oldest skeleton dated to 60,000 years ago. 

Analysis of Shanidar 1 reveals an individual who suffered physically throughout his life, but whose life-threatening injuries ultimately healed before his death. Hypotheses surrounding the specifics of his injuries have varied, but what’s certain is that the individual suffered severe head trauma and damage to the body. He would have required assistance to survive in a primitive setting. These circumstances point to two possibilities that are not mutually exclusive but are equally novel at this point in Neanderthal research – healthcare and charity.

Discovered in 1960 during the fourth wave of excavations, Shanidar 4 brought fame to the site and become the focal point of Solecki’s life’s work. Soil samples from the grave submitted to Mme. Leroi-Gourhan showed clusters of as much as 100 pollen grains from 7 species of flowers, giving birth to the theory that Neanderthals had adorned the dead body with freshly picked flowers of a small and brightly-colored variety, known as the “flower burial theory.” Leroi-Gourhan concluded that bunches of complete flowers had been introduced into the cave by men, noting that their placement in relation to the entrance of the cave suggests that “neither birds, nor rodents, nor the presence of mammalian coprolites can explain [their] presence.” Solecki echoed: “Animals could [not] have carried flowers in such a manner in the first place, and the second, they could not have deposited them with a burial.” 

“One species of flower, the hollyhock, a very large, pretty flower, grows in separate, individual stands. Therefore [Leroi-Gourhan] concluded that someone in the last Ice Age had ranged the mountainside in the mournful task of collecting flowers. The soils from the area immediately bordering the grave did not yield any evidence of flowers. This provided an additional check on the finds.”2

Leroi-Gourhan also noted small pieces of wood added to the grave for some purpose other than fire, and the wing of a butterfly that had perhaps been ornamentally placed along with the flower bunches, all of which had been preserved over the millennia thanks to the stone enclosure around the grave. In contrast to other soil samples that show various isolated pollen grains, the highlighted samples stood out in their cluster formation in such a way that suggest anthropogenic origin.3 

Interestingly, flowers including bachelor’s-button, hollyhock, yellow-flowering groundsel, and yarrow, all found among the burial clusters, are known for their medicinal properties, pointing to a possible utilization of herbal remedies, perhaps for cases like Shanidar 1. Solecki himself didn’t fully endorse this possibility, writing that “it would be asking too much to believe that the Neanderthals were cognizant of the medicinal properties of flowers.” Grape hyacinth, also found in clusters around the burial, is purely ornamental.

Later discoveries revived this aspect of the Shanidar findings. In the 2010’s, Karen Hardy of the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in Spain and Stephen Buckley of the University of York in the United Kingdom chemically analyzed microorganisms found in the teeth, respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts of Neanderthals from El Sidrón cave in Spain and Spy cave in Belgium, proving that Neanderthals consumed medicinal plants including yarrow and chamomile forty to fifty thousand years ago,4 within the timeframe of when the Shanidar Neanderthals existed:

“One of the most surprising finds was in a Neanderthal from El Sidrón, who suffered from a dental abscess visible on the jawbone. The plaque showed that he also had an intestinal parasite that causes acute diarrhea, so clearly he was quite sick. He was eating poplar, which contains the pain killer salicylic acid (the active ingredient of aspirin), and we could also detect a natural antibiotic mold (Penicillium).

‘Identifying now the bacteria which caused his dental abscess and stomach pains confirm the results we obtained in our study. There is no doubt that the Neanderthals used plants to treat illnesses, and it also demonstrates once again that they had detailed knowledge of their surroundings and the ability to use plants in a variety of ways.’

‘Apparently, Neanderthals possessed a good knowledge of medicinal plants and their various anti-inflammatory and pain-relieving properties, and seem to be self-medicating. The use of antibiotics would be very surprising, as this is more than 40,000 years before we developed penicillin. Certainly our findings contrast markedly with the rather simplistic view of our ancient relatives in popular imagination.’”5

In 2016, a study was published in the National Library of Medicine documenting the litany of accumulated instances of similar discoveries. They amassed “61 different taxa from 26 different plant families found at 17 different archaeological sites” all pointing to nutritional, medicinal, and ritual use of plants.6 In 1982, the Hŭngsu Child was discovered on the Korean peninsula with traces of pollen and flowers underneath soil where it had been buried during the same era as Shanidar 4. Although classified as a Homo Sapien, it reaffirms the idea of humans being capable of a soulful tribute for the dead 40,000 years ago. The Red Lady of El Mirón, a skeleton from the Upper Paleolithic, had also been covered in flowers, and the origins of these flowers have not since been brought into question as Shanidar 4 eventually was.

Unlike the arrangement of bear skulls and femurs at Drachenloch and Le Regourdou, flowers on a grave are familiar to the modern mind, demonstrating empathy and appreciation for beauty that had until that point not been attributed to Neanderthals. Functionally speaking, the practice exists in the same vein as painting skeletons with red ochre, a blood symbol, or burying bodies in the fetal position – these are symbols expressed with rebirth in mind. Mme. Leroi-Gourhan figured that the Shanidar flowers would have been picked in late Spring around May, meaning they were freshly bloomed and at their peak of depicting the beauty and sensitivity of new life.

The flower burial theory has maintained notoriety since the publication of The First Flower People, overcoming the pitfalls of Arthur Keith’s proposed intelligent Neanderthal (“not in the gorilla stage”) and Emil Bächler’s bear cult theory which have contrastingly fallen into relative obscurity. Although 1971 didn't completely flip the script, Solecki’s work remains a beacon of hope that Neanderthals weren’t so stupid after all.

Criticism

The First Flower People echoed the idealism of the early 1960’s. When that idealism failed to become reality, the backlash left a lasting mark. Not only was a generation thrown into a tailspin of divorce, alienation, excess, and spiritual obscurity, but the supposedly unprejudiced basis on which many academics began their careers lacked the foundation of the establishment they were inheriting. Ironically their tenure became more assertive in its convictions, less open to new ideas, and has catalyzed a rift between academia and the public that is still growing.

For the Neanderthal question, this meant a return to conservative skepticism. In 1999, Jeffrey Sommer published “A Re-evaluation of Neanderthal Burial Ritual” in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, bringing the flower burial theory into question. Sommer’s claim is that rodents (specifically Meriones persicus, the Persian jird) piled the flowers in clusters instead of Neanderthals:

“Richard Redding excavated several burrows of the closely related species Meriones crassus, and found large numbers of flower heads, including members of the Compositae family, stored in the side tunnels of the burrows. The number of flower heads these rodents had saved was more than enough to account for the pollen found near Shanidar IV. Indeed, the habit of storing nesting material and/or food, including seeds, flower heads, leaves, and other vegetal material in their burrow is common within the genus Meriones.”

There is no specification, however, of the plants identified. Yarrow, for example, is often used as a repellent for rodent species within the Muridae family and was one of the more prominent flowers identified within the Shanidar IV burial. Would it be reasonable to expect that a rodent species with an aversion to pungent herbs to be burrowing it within its own nest?

In 2015, Marta Fiacconi and Chris Hunt published a study of the pollen taphonomy at Shanidar, taking account of Leroi-Gourhan’s work as well as Sommer’s. They suggest that bees could have been responsible for carrying in some of the pollen, especially toward the rear of the cave if they happened to reside there temporarily (although, why bees would be carrying significant amounts of pollen into a cave, I’m not sure). 

Less hardline than Sommer’s critique, the study grants the possibility of rodent involvement “account[ing] for some of the vegetal matter around Shanidar 4,”7 as well as that of Solecki and Leroi-Gourhan’s original theory, since the concentrations are significantly most heavy at the burial site. Plus, by 2015, Neanderthal intelligence had been more concretely established in a way that it wasn’t when Sommer published his argument. 

2016 Excavation and Shanidar Z

The Caucasus region to the Levant has become vital for Neanderthal archaeology outside of Europe, with southern Palestine and Northeast Iran in the Zagros region marking the far ends of the Neanderthal range to the south and east respectively. It is currently the only region where pure Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon remains have been found together, making the region likely where the first admixture between Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens took place approximately 40,000 years ago. Being in the middle of ongoing political unrest and military conflict, opportunities for excavations have been scarce and caused Solecki’s work in the region to be interrupted and ultimately cut short. 

In 2016, the latest wave of excavations at Shanidar revealed a skeleton called Shanidar Z. Its discovery “suggests there is still more funerary mystery left in the cave” according to Emma Pomeroy of the University of Cambridge who led excavations and wrote the 2020 study after initial analyses. She concluded “strong evidence that Shanidar Z was deliberately buried” considering its adjacency to Shanidar 4. What her team discovered was that the pit in which Shanidar 4 and Z were both found was likely dug on purpose – the main question that remained was whether the bodies were buried simultaneously, or if it was a spot that was continually returned to. In the study, Pomeroy notes a triangular-shaped rock by its “morphological and locational distinctiveness” that could have been positioned by Neanderthals to identify the burial site, most likely under the head of Shanidar 4. Shanidar Z was eventually dated as older than 70,000 years, making it significantly older than Shanidar 4, supporting the proposition that the site had been continually used for burial by multiple generations.8

By the time Shanidar Z made its mark throughout academia, even hesitant minds began to fold under the weight of evidence. Pomeroy said in 2020, “from initially being a skeptic based on many of the other published critiques of the flower-burial evidence, I am coming round to think this scenario is much more plausible.”9

Solecki’s Legacy

The back-and-forth of this debate is exemplary of the resistance to Neanderthal intelligence. Today, it is uncommon to see the flower burial theory mentioned without the caveat of it having been disproven, even following the 2016 Shanidar Z study and other evidence of symbolic culture. Persistently, since the earliest interpretations of Neanderthals, we’ve demonstrated the need to keep them in a degree of magnitude under us, seemingly unable to grant this “archaic species” the ability to be empathetic or sophisticated in any significant way. Although academia has come around somewhat, it remains persistent in its disbelief that modern people have anything to learn from this species that we’ve left behind on the evolutionary ladder.

However, The First Flower People does mark a turning point, after which the Neanderthal question began to shift away from being exclusively academic. Several novels were published during the eighties and nineties, using Solecki as a reference, in which authors offered creative interpretations of the origins and behaviors of Neanderthals versus Homo sapiens – specifically on the nature of the interactions between the two. 

Neanderthals came across as cognitively and culturally viable, albeit primitive, in works such as Elizabeth Marshal Thomas’s Reindeer Moon series (1987-90), Björn Kurtén’s Dance of the Tiger (1982), and most famously Jane Auel’s novel The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980), adapted as a popular feature film in 1987. In it, aspects of life we take for granted such as speech and the ability to cry are unique to Homo Sapiens. Although Neanderthals are depicted as having a culture, drawing upon research from Shanidar as well as the Aurignacian and Gravettian cultures, it is obviously less evolved.

So, while still perceived as the other, the veil nonetheless began to slip from the face of the Neanderthal post-Solecki, and certainly, these thought experiments that capture the mind can be more consequential than academic output like Solecki’s later critics. Remember, the most consequential depiction of Neanderthals perhaps in history was the brainchild of Marcellin Boule – a scientist who enlisted just even more creative liberty than the 20th century novelists to depict them as unintelligent brutes.

As Julie Drell writes in her 2000 essay Neanderthal: A History of Interpretation, “By the 1970s, a notion was firmly established that Neanderthals were just like us.” The question of Neanderthals being capable of ‘human’ intelligence had seemingly been overcome — with the undeniable assistance of Mme. Leroi-Gourhan and Ralph Solecki and their pioneering analysis of the Shanidar Neanderthals.

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