Word: shanidar
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...world's oldest cold cases. Sometime between 50,000 and 75,000 years ago, a Neanderthal male known to scientists as Shanidar 3 received a wound to his torso, limped back to his cave in what is now Iraq and died several weeks later. When his skeleton was pieced together in the late 1950s and early '60s, scientists were stumped by a rib wound that almost surely killed him, hypothesizing that it could have been caused by a hunting accident or even a fellow Neanderthal. New research suggests that Shanidar 3 may have had a more familiar killer: a human...
...dietary deficiency of vitamin D. This deficiency was aggravated by the diminished sunlight of the ice age, and eventually caused rickets. Now, the most detailed and sympathetic picture yet of Neanderthal man comes from extensive diggings by an American-led expedition in a mountain cave near the village of Shanidar in Iraqi Kurdistan...
...article in the current Smithsonian magazine, and in a forthcoming book, Shanidar: The First Flower People (Knopf; $8.95), the expedition's chief archaeologist, Dr. Ralph S. Solecki, reports that at least one of the nine Neanderthal skeletons uncovered in the Shanidar cave was buried with flowers. Another skeleton was that of a man about 40 (equivalent to an age of 80 by modern life-spans) who had been born with a withered right arm. The limb had apparently been amputated above the elbow by a Neanderthal "surgeon." The man's age and physical condition indicated to the scientists...
...less elegant spot, Ralph Solecki of the Smithsonian Institution was digging into an even more distant past. Shanidar Cave in northern Iraq is still inhabited during the winter months by about 40 Kurds and their flocks and herds. Last year Solecki became interested in the debris on the cave's floor. Back at Shanidar early this year, financed by a Fulbright grant and surrounded by fascinated Kurds, Archaeologist Solecki carefully dug a square shaft in the promising deposit. The top layers were modern. Just below, he found tools and fragments of pottery from the "historic period" when Shanidar belonged...