it to the Baghdad Museum. Shanidar 8 was an adult with partial fragmentary skeleton. Shanidar 6 and 7 were skull, teeth and partial skeleton, all fragmentary. Shanidar 1, 2, 3, 5, and 7 were found as individual burials while the other remains were found in a single compressed block. Overall these excavations found the remains of seven adult and two infants Neanderthals, dating from around 65,000–35,000 years ago. These individuals were uncovered amongst a Mousterian layer (layer D), overlaid by a Baradostian culture layer (layer C), a Mesolithic Zarzian layer (layer B) and a Holocene Neolithic layer (layer A), accompanied by various stone tools and animal remains. The cave also contains two later proto-Neolithic cemeteries, one of which dates back about 10,600 years and contains 35 individuals, and is considered by Solecki to belong to the Natufian culture. Recent work Investigations were conducted in 2014-2015 under the auspices of the Kurdistan Directorate of Antiquities. The remains found in the Shanidar cave are being reexamined to analyze the mortuary activity of the Neanderthal people who inhabited this area. There are various signs of activity with the remains after death being that the position of the skull and mandible of Shanidar 1 were not natural. Examinations of other sites will be integral in understanding and analyzing the activity of the remains after death of those found in the Shanidar cave. Additional work is being conducted on the faunal remains found in Layer D at the University of Chicago to analyze butchery activity. Many remains found had cut marks that where caused by flint items which correlates to butchery practices. Neanderthal remains The ten Neanderthals at the site were found within a Mousterian layer which also contained hundreds of stone tools including points, side-scrapers, and flakes and bones from animals including wild goats and spur-thighed tortoises. The first nine (Shanidar 1–9) were unearthed between 1957 and 1961 by Ralph Solecki and a team from Columbia University. The skeleton of Shanidar 3 is held at the Smithsonian Institution. The others (Shanidar 1, 2, and 4–8) were kept in Iraq and may have been lost during the 2003 invasion, although casts remain at the Smithsonian. In 2006, while sorting a collection of faunal bones from the site at the Smithsonian, Melinda Zeder discovered leg and foot bones from a tenth Neanderthal, now known as Shanidar 10. Shanidar 1 Shanidar 1 was an elderly Neanderthal male