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Shanidar Cave

a Pleiades place resource

Creators: Jeffrey Becker Copyright © The Contributors. Sharing and remixing permitted under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (cc-by).

Last modified Sep 20, 2025 09:56 AM — History

Shanidar Cave is a cave located in the Zagros Mountains, within the Erbil Governorate of the Kurdistan Region in northern Iraq. The cave was the site of hominin activity beginning some 65,000 years ago. Following the first archaeological investigation of the cave in 1951, fieldwork has continued and, among other finds, has documented the remains of a dozen Neanderthals. There was proto-Neolithic activity in the cave, dated ca. 10,500 BCE and related to the Natufian culture. Some 35 individuals of this phase were buried in the cave.

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Canonical URI for this page:
https://pleiades.stoa.org/places/493567306

Representative Point (Latitude, Longitude):
36.8348085, 44.2191486

Locations:

Representative Locations:
- OSM location of Shanadar cave (unspecified date range) accuracy: +/- 20 meters.

Names:

Geographic Names:
- Shanidar Cave (English, AD 1900 - AD 2099)

Shanidar Cave makes connections with:

None

Shanidar Cave receives connections from:

None

Place type:
cave, archaeological site

References:

See Further:

Related:

Wikidata Shanidar Cave (Q909799)

Initial Provenance:
Pleiades

Details:

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Suggested citation:
Jeffrey Becker, 'Shanidar Cave: a Pleiades place resource', Pleiades: A Gazetteer of Past Places, 2025 <https://pleiades.stoa.org/places/493567306> [accessed: 13 May 2026]

Cite this resource in Wikipedia:

            {{cite web |url=https://pleiades.stoa.org/places/493567306 |title=Places: 493567306 (Shanidar Cave) |author=Becker, J. |accessdate=May 13, 2026 12:38 pm |publisher=Pleiades}}

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Shanidar Cave