SHANIDAR

The First Flower People

Knopf: NY, 1971 FIRST EDITION. Illustratedd with numerous photos, diagrams and 3 maps. 280 pages, w/biblio, index.

A fascinating tale of a great cave in the Southern Kurdistan (in Iraq) where it is believed that the first ritualized burial of a Neanderthal took place. Paleobotanists discovered enormous quantities of pollen about the excavated bodies, leading them to believe that the corpses were left with flowers, and purposely buried with a care previously unseen in fossilized human remains.