RITUALISM
Even before the emergence of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals used to collect stones and bones that attracted them because of their shape or colour. In the corner of the floor of a Mousterian basement of a hut excavated in the Negev Desert, a group of small stones with peculiar shapes was found.
The stones had been collected, transported and placed there by a human being. Nearby there were flint implements that may have had some functional use but these strange stones without any trace of retouch or use did not seem to have had a functional purpose. A small treasure of peculiar objects appears as a sort of reliquary collected by someone, 100,000 years ago. What may have been the motivation for that behaviour? What did this being think when he collected such items and brought them into his hut? No doubt this being was posing questions to himself and, likely, tried to supply answers to his questions. The tendency to “collectionism” became widespread in the Upper Palaeolithic (Anati 2001; Mailland 2007).In numerous cases, in Middle Palaeolithic levels in Africa, the Middle East and Europe, peculiar objects came to light. Bones and teeth of animals, nodules of red ochre, and other stones having unusual shapes had been intentionally collected by these beings (Anati 2007a).
One of the oldest proofs of ritual behaviour concerns the attitude towards death. Already 300,000 years ago there is evidence of special care of the dead by hominids, which used a specific location as burial ground. Such patterns become systematic with Neanderthal people, some 100,000 years ago. They selected rock shelters and small caves as burial grounds. Usually such places were not used as occupational sites by the living, but they were the “living places of the dead” (Anati 2003).