Signs of a soul
From Michael Scott Rohan Sir: Christopher Howse, in speculating whether Flores man had a soul (`Do little people go to heaven?', 6 November), chooses to dismiss Neanderthal men because they 'did not have the spark of reason'. But whether or
not they were closely related to us something still fiercely debated — Neanderthalers were not nearly as far from our own humanity as people tend to think.
Their coarse appearance was not an indication that they were primitive, but that they had adapted to the bitterly harsh conditions they lived in, at the margins of the great glaciers — rather like the mammoth and the woolly rhino. Their brains, however, were at least as large as ours, sometimes larger. Their flint tools were as sophisticated as those of our more definite ancestors. They could no more develop a substantial material culture than the Inuit today; but nevertheless there is evidence of artistic or at least decorative appreciation. Above all, the reason we know so much about them is that they often buried their dead with reverence, in prepared graves. One such grave has been found that was touchingly filled with armfuls of bright cornflowers, perhaps an image of spring and rebirth. If there are any qualifications for a soul, surely that should count.
Michael Scott Rohan
Little Shelford, Cambridge
Previous page
