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title from https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00229-4

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Or for educational value..

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Or to improve acoustics for playing music like horse skulls were used in Scandinavia and Ireland.

Unga Bunga stab here “Points to eye hole in skull*

Or it was a Predator's cave.

No, Ug, you don’t need all these. Why are you such a hoarder?

The first Predator's visit.....

The multistage preparation they note doesn't necessitate any real special behavior. Rendering a kill is itself multi-stage process that leaves you with the remnants of the animal.

Keeping a skull around doesn't mean the skulls have any deeper meaning beyond a trophy of a successful hunt. though it could be used as a teaching tool.

Pretty hard to get a clean kill (efficient, minimized duration of suffering, near instant death) targeting an eye.

edit: with a spear

Are you saying songs get stuck in these animal's heads too? Even after they're dead?

I'm guessing "we will rock you" was a Stone age crowd pleaser... >You got mud on your face, you big disgrace Kicking your can all over the place, singin'

Oh, that educational value

I’ll have to refrain from teaching any more Neanderthal children to hunt it.

Not sure what I’ll do with my free time now Frank. WHY WOULD YOU TAKE THIS FROM ME FRANK!!!!!! YOU MONSTER!!!!!!!!!

Why can’t they have just been saving them for crafting supplies?

Frank sometimes does things like that. You have to know him.

Little from column A, little from column B.

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Neanderthals were predators.

Given their tech, i reckon their oral transmission was a tad more sophisticated than that. Assuming of course, that no extra terrestrial monoliths were involved.

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Also, skulls look cool.

As a kid I also collected animal skulls i found. It may have just been fun.

When these types of studies refer to symbolic or ritualistic behavior, they generally just mean, we don't know exactly what these were being collected for, but there most likely was a good reason.

However, they note that the rest of the practice was done elsewhere and the bones do show that teeth and other things were extracted before being brought into the caves.

"The scarcity of post-cranial elements, teeth, mandibles and maxillae, along with evidence of anthropogenic modification of the crania (cut and percussion marks), indicates that the carcasses of the corresponding animals were initially processed outside the cave, and the crania were later brought inside. A second round of processing then took place, possibly related to the removal of the brain. The continued presence of crania throughout Level 3 indicates that this behaviour was recurrent during this level’s formation. This behaviour seems to have no subsistence-related purpose but to be more symbolic in its intent."

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