Although it is possible that early humans buried their dead for purely hygienic reasons or to discourage scavengers, many anthropologists view intentional burial as a kind of symbolic behavior. Some have even suggested that it represents the earliest evidence of religion. Therefore, it is understandable that the subject of Neandertal burials is a controversial one.
Neandertals made their appearance midway through the 19th century, at a critical moment in intellectual history, when old but comfortable ideas about the human past were beginning to fall apart and new but shocking ideas (such as evolution) were coming in. The old ideas did not explain Neandertals. The new ones, which could, were generally
Neandertal sites are found throughout most of Europe, in Western Asia, and in parts of Central Asia. In the early and mid-1900s, anthropologists Franz Weidenreich and Ales Hrdlieka proposed that all modern humans went through a Neandertal stage of evolution. Under this model, all Middle Pleistocene hominid fossils that were morphologically intermediate between Homo erectus