The flowers of Shanidar

His base was the local police post; his room had a bare concrete floor, a creaky chair, and a kerosene lantern.

A recent Netflix documentary, Secrets of the Neanderthals, has attracted a massive worldwide audience, and taken a major step forward in dealing with the widespread myth that Neanderthals were brutish and backward. As we now know from comparing their DNA and ours, we can count them among our remote ancestors. The Netflix programme followed the course of a re-excavation of Shanidar Cave in Kurdistan, where, over four seasons from 1953 to 1961, Ralph Solecki led excavations that recovered the remains of ten Neanderthals, the most famous of which is known as ‘the flower burial’ from the pollen identified in the vicinity of the skeleton. This new investigation is led by Graeme Barker from Cambridge University, and follows on from his re-examination of two other iconic cave sites – Niah in Borneo and the Haua Fteah in Libya – applying all the new analytical techniques to recovering and evaluating what he found.

It was as a result of watching the Netflix programme that my eyes alighted on a book in my library entitled Shanidar: the humanity of Neanderthal man, published in 1971. I must have bought it about then, for it only cost £3. I cannot recall reading it, but should have done, because it is a fascinating personal account by Ralph Solecki of how he found the cave, and his experiences when excavating there. And, remarkably, he lived to see Graeme Barker’s return to the site, before dying aged 101. The book provides fascinating insights into life among the Kurds in that remote, mountainous, and often forbidding region. It was tough going, particularly when starting the excavations assisted only by an inexperienced local workforce. We can share his horror when, deep down in the cavern, there was a deep rumbling and shaking as an earthquake struck. But he was also fascinated by the seasonal movements of the Kurdish goat herders, particularly when they came to live in the cave as he was digging there.