Shanidar, the First Flower People

Ralph Solecki was born Stefan Rafael Solecki in Brooklyn, New York on October 15, 1917. He received a bachelor's degree in geology from City College of New York in 1942. During World War II, he served in the Army in Europe and was wounded. After the war, he received a master's degree and a doctorate in anthropology from Columbia University. He was the Smithsonian's curator of archaeology from 1958 to 1959. He taught at Columbia from 1959 to 1988 and at Texas A&M University in the 1990s. Starting in the mid-1950s, leading teams from Columbia University, Solecki discovered the fossilized skeletons of eight adult and two infant Neanderthals at Shanidar Cave in northern Iraq. He found physical evidence suggesting that Neanderthals had tended to the weak and the wounded and that they buried their dead with flowers. His first book, Shanidar: The First Flower People, was published in 1971. His other books included Shanidar: The Humanity of Neanderthal Man and The Proto-Neolithic Cemetery in Shanidar Cave written with Rose L. Solecki, and Anagnostis P. Agelarakis. He died from pneumonia on March 20, 2019 at the age of 101.