Respect for the dead
When a Cro-Magnon died the body was not simply abandoned and left to rot in the open. Even the Neanderthals seem to have had some concept that death was not the end and that care must be taken of the body.
The Cro-Magnons buried their dead in or near the caves and huts in which they lived. Clearly they were anticipating a new life in the world beyond this one, because they were buried in their beaded clothes, along with their tools, weapons, jewelry and favorite possessions. In many burials, red ochre has been found scattered over the corpse.
Possibly this was to give the deceased a more lifelike appearance, or else to represent birth blood, as the deceased was reborn, through Mother Earth, into eternal life.
Art in nature’s cathedrals
As the intellectual and spiritual side of life develops there was another dramatic development; people adapted the manual dexterity they had acquired while making tools, and became artists.
Their paintings – mostly hidden away in the darkest and most inaccessible areas of the caves – were possibly an integral part of some long – forgotten religious ritual, performed in hushed whispers in the depths of these natural cathedrals in the bowels of the earth.
The most spectacular examples of the Cro-Magnon peoples’ artistic impulses (and probably their religious belief, too) are to be found in the caves of south-west France and Northern Spain, where animals are painted on the walls and ceilings, sometimes in great profusion – as at Lascaux and Altamira. By contrast, there are relatively few human figures.
Cro-Magnon Culture
