Shanidar Cave: Adventure Through Time

Today, I took a temporal journey into prehistoric times.

It was 11:30 in the morning on a Friday. We could have waited for hours for an empty cab, but we were saved this eternal wait by a large, old, boxy-looking white van that pulled over off the highway to offer us helpless highway loiterers a ride. The first thing I noticed about the driver was that he had these amazing cerulean blue eyes that contrasted strangely with his dark hair.

“Could you give us a ride to the Masif garage?”

Of course he would!

“Could you give us a ride all the way to Shanidar Cave?”

We didn't really believe he would actually say yes, after all, the cave was more than one hour away, driving at the normal speed of 120 km/hour. I mean, didn't he have a job, a family, or something to take care of? But say yes he did! Perhaps all he had was his rickety old white van. Perhaps we underestimated his curiosity, as well as the irresistibly curious appearance of 4 Westerners loitering along the highways of Kurdistan. Clearly, an adventure was forthcoming, if only he stopped and seized the opportunity. Carpe diem- and what an amazing day it turned out to be, for this was no ordinary van, but a time machine that would take us eons and eons into the past.

Before journeying into the past, we stopped by the nearby town of Shaqlawa to buy some of their famous sweets. I tried this glutinous roll covered with green flakes. It tasted so familiar! After a minute of thoughtful chewing, I figured out that the familiar taste was cardamom. Imagine me being able to identify cardamom! Before my tea brewing days, I couldn't have told you cardamom from my own mom. Now I can tell you that one is flat, oval, and greenish with a bitter aroma, while the other...is flat in a way, but definitely not oval, greenish, nor bitter-smelling.

Anyway...onward to Shanidar Cave! It was in this cave that archaeologist Ralph Solecki discovered 9 Neanderthal skeletons in the 1950's, showing intriguing evidence that they ritually buried their dead, and that they healed their sick rather than heartlessly ditching them. Neanderthals, like grieving elephants, were much more “human” (by this, they mean “compassionate”) than was previously thought. Besides the adult remains, the remains of a baby Neanderthal were also dug up from the layers.

The discovery of the Neanderthals inspired an entire fictional book series called “The Clan of the Cave Bears”. It's fun to imagine that hundreds of thousands of years later, our own bones might be dug up by futuristic archaeologists, and fictional accounts written about our own lives by futuristic authors. No matter the dramatic stories they may weave about us, though, I wonder how much of the actual complexity they would be able to capture from a bunch of old bones. Only time will tell. What an awesome coincidence it was that this landmark cave happened to be just an hour or two away from where we were working and living for the year!

Soon, we were driving deep within the mountains of Kurdistan, occasionally sprinkled with red poppies, and that's when I began to get this eery feeling that this was no ordinary van we'd piled into so eagerly, but rather a time machine set to take us back eons and eons into the millennia before the dawn of man. I couldn't stop gaping, like the caves that yawned here and there from the mountainsides, out the dirty window at the sheer enormity of the stone-embedded mountains and endless green valleys, interrupted by absolutely no human establishment for miles and miles and miles, so pristine, so untouched, so very prehistoric. Any second now, a dinosaur was going to pop out from behind one of the gigantic slopes, rawrrrr, I was sure of it!

Eventually, though, we began to see marks of civilization- the occasional shepherd herding his mangy-haired sheep along the mountainside, a women in black flowing robe and veil treading heavily over the uneven, stony fields, a bridge, and Bedouin tents! They come from the south, ND informed us, and it was the northern side's turn to play host to these vagabond travelers, its lush green mountains feeding their grazing animals and providing an open, unoccupied space to pitch their large, elaborate, dark brown tents. A cloudy looking river ran swiftly through the valley- the same river that fed the waterfalls of Gali Ali Beig. Near the cave, we made a stop in a tiny convenience store, where J found “Iraqi dinar rubbers”. “Say what?!” I cried. And then I remembered she was British and that they call erasers “rubbers”. We piled back into the time machine and soon, we'd arrived at the stairs leading to the legendary cave.

It looked pretty average-sized from the bottom of the stairs- like all the other caves we'd seen from the car during our various road trips through the mountains. Everywhere we'd read about it, it was said that the steps leading to the cave numbered over 400. What a major exaggeration. It took like 25 minutes to reach the cave, and that was with my camera in tow, which meant I was making long pauses to take loads of pictures of the same thing at different angles in order to capture the best one. I avoided straying too close to our driver, and politely allowed him to move on ahead every time he came back for me. By now, he had already shamelessly proposed that I marry him and take him with me to America.

The stairway was lined with tall, wild weeds and grasses and those ubiquitous red poppies, and there were these huge beetle/grasshopper-like insects (cicadas) hopping around everywhere, ew. I kept pausing and turning around to gape at the incredible mountainous vista behind me. The two mountains in the foreground formed a V-shape as they came together, like Jesus and the disciple in the Last Supper painting. The author Dan Brown would have seen more than just a natural, geographic formation there. Behind those two foreground mountains, several more faded away into the mist. Eventually, my camera and I made it to the mouth of the cave.

WoOW. It was huge. Looking into the triangular-shaped entrance was like staring into the jaws of a T-Rex right before it clamped down on you for lunch. I heard my friends inside already, disembodied voices echoing from some hideout within this huge cave. T was pretending to be the voice of the Barzanis' ancestors. They crawled on all fours out of a hole deep within the cave, close to the inner wall, but even when 6.5-foot T was standing, he looked absolutely miniscule against the sheer height of the cave. It must have been at least 50 feet high, and three times as wide, three times as deep. The white limestone inside walls were streaked beautifully with shiny black, I guess from all the fires burned from the time of the Neanderthals hundreds of thousands of years ago (when was fire discovered?) up until the present day. In the rear was a space encircled by a low stone wall- a corral, maybe for their sheep, goats, and cows? I'd read that this cave was still in use by present-day Kurds who came back every cold season and went away again in the spring. The floor was covered with light gray sand-like dirt.

At the entrance to the hole that the others had just climbed out of, I crouched down and made my own way in. It was so dark and felt slightly damp, and I hoped that there weren't any creepy-crawlies in here as I stepped forward awkwardly on my haunches like a primate. I took a picture with flash and saw that the tunnel opened up into a larger open space that was perhaps tall enough to stand straight up. The ceiling was spiky with limestone frozen in the act of dripping down. I didn't stay in there long though. It was slightly creepy and I couldn't see what sort of things lurked in the dark, if anything. I made my way step-by-step on my haunches back out of the hole. By now, my clothes were a lost cause- good thing I wore my old jeans today.

Outside of the tunnel, the enormous entrance to the cave was lit so brightly by the sun as if with divine light. There were a few other tourists visiting, standing silhouetted against this unearthly light. I meandered around, taking pictures of the streaked inner walls, the cobwebs strung across the shiny, blackened ceiling, old cow poop, and a rock pillar that looked at first glance like a man-made statue of a woman. Facing the entrance from the inside, the left-hand wall of the front of the cave looked steep but climbable. So I climbed it all the way to the top- about a dozen feet high-, where there was a window-like hole that gave an amazing view of the miles and miles of mountains and valleys below and beyond the cave.

This trek to the cave was about the coolest thing I've done in Iraq so far, I thought as I sat cradled within the frame of the natural window. It was so cool to think that I had stood where pre-human Neanderthals had stood tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago, making fires and tending to their animals, scratching their heads, burying their dead. I had breathed the same air that Neanderthal lungs had breathed, seen what Neanderthal eyes had seen. I wondered if so many thousands of years ago, a Neanderthal had marveled as I marveled now at the geography of the landscape. Were their brains complex enough yet to be able to appreciate beautiful things?

Soon, it was time to go. It was a bit more precarious on the way down because I couldn't see the footholds, so I ended up just sliding down basically. By the time I left the cave, I was covered in ancient dust and dirt from Shanidar Cave. As we were about to leave, a big family of Kurds were wandering in and stood around exploring the rear of the cave. I took a picture of these modern humans whose ancestors had inhabited the cave, whose cousins continued to come back every winter season. The Kurds were a timeless people, half of them living the same sort of lifestyle lived by their ancestors, except maybe with a satellite dish in their home.

On the way back, we stopped at the river and made our way down to it. The murky, gray-brown water rushed madly by. There was the tiniest patch of dark, wet sand at the shore. This would be as close as we would ever get to a beach in Kurdistan. It stunk of cow manure and buzzed with flies.

“Oh my god!” said ND with that characteristic angry passion in her voice, her eyebrows knitted fiercely together over her huge, intense eyes. “All this cow poop just smells so good!” She stood angrily with her hands on her hips, enjoying the smell of her youth. I doubled over in laughter. “Good” was not the adjective I was expecting to hear. She had spent her childhood in a poor village in Duhok, north of Erbil, a world away from her present home in San Diego. The smell of cow poop was a source of nostalgia for her. Her wild, curly hair was positively electric with passion as she wandered barefoot along the muddy shore among the flies, determine to stay much longer than the rest of us wanted to stay.

We ended up climbing back up pretty soon though, and having tea with the Kurdish family that lived in what looked like a single-room shack- large for a shack, but small for a family with so many people. One of the older women was quite a lively character. She was dressed in the flowing dark robes of Islam, but sat with her legs spread out, chattering animatedly with J despite the language barrier. Her face looked weathered and was starting to sag, but she still wore her hair in long youthful curls that hung carelessly out of her scarf. There were five girls in the family, all very sweet and quiet while we were there at least, their serious gazes and cheap old clothes setting them so far apart from the kids we taught at the school. They sat in one row on the ledge and let me take a picture of them, one of them blushing adorably and hiding her smile with her hands when I said something to her. We left after two cups of tea. The flies were unbearable and I felt filthy from my spelunking adventure.

On the way back to the present, I stuck my earphones in my ears and watched the prehistoric landscape roll by to music from my 21st century ipod nano. Sometimes, a lone Kurdish man in the traditional baggy jumpsuit with cummerbund, or a lone woman in flowing black robes would be ambling through the plains, looking so small against the backdrop of the enormous, green, rollercoaster-ing mounds. These lone figures suddenly appeared to me to be so beautiful for their timelessness. They ambled through the plains as their ancestors ambled, wearing the same clothes their ancestors wore, living the same way of life their mothers and mothers' mothers lived- which is to say, they lived to survive and nothing more. In less than two hours, we had arrived back in the 21st century. I was back in my 21st century apartment taking a long, hot shower with running water, screaming and killing spiders with my electric vacuum, and clicking through the photos of our journey through time on my digital camera, while music streamed from my ipod into my ears. Those Bedouins have no idea what their missing out on. After the toilet, the ipod has got to be the greatest invention in human/pre-human history.