that might be useful in the afterlife. Nothing of this kind is found 
in Neanderthal graves, in which any found objects are invariably 
the kind of thing found lying naturally on cave floors and that could 
well have been kicked in accidentally (Stringer and Gamble, 1993). 
In one intriguing case, at Iraq’s Shanidar cave, a Neanderthal grave 
was found to be unusually rich in the pollen of spring flowers (Ler- 
oi-Gourhan, 1968). Perhaps the deceased was laid to rest on a bed 
of flowers; but there are, equally, other ways in which the pollen 
could have found its way into the grave. More suggestive at Shan- 
idar was the skeleton of an aged individual who had suffered, maybe 
since birth, from a withered arm. This individual must have enjoyed 
the consistent support of his group over his long lifetime, for he 
could not have survived on his own (Trinkaus, 1983). In this ob- 
servation there are, surely, strong echoes of human sensibility. 
In the Levant we find evidence for anatomically modern people 
at almost 100 kyr ago, and Neanderthal remains at a mere 40 kyr 
ago. Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens thus shared this re- 
gion in some way for at least 60 kyr. How they did so is uncertain, 
although very interestingly the two species shared a virtually iden- 
tical stoneworking technology (see Bar-Yosef, 1993). Functionally, 
at least, we have little reason to suspect any cognitive difference 
between them in this period. It is surely significant, though, that the 
last recorded Neanderthal occurrence in this region comes only a 
few millennia after the appearance (Marks, 1983) of an “Upper 
Paleolithic” stoneworking technology similar to (although distinct 
from) that of the earliest Homo sapiens who invaded Europe at about 
40 kyr ago. These hominids were the Cro-Magnons (fig. 15), the 
people who, in not much more than 10 millennia, entirely eliminated 
the Neanderthals from the vast area they had inhabited—whether by 
conflict or by competition is not known. These invading moderns 
brought with them (from where, exactly, is uncertain) abundant ev- 
idence of the entire cognitive panoply that characterizes humans 
worldwide today. Not only did these new people make tools—in a 
dazzling variety—out of new materials such as bone and antler, in 
addition to stone, but from the very beginning they showed abundant 
evidence of symbolic behavior. 
The record of the Cro-Magnons is truly extraordinary (see review 
2 
