"Gay caveman probably not gay or a caveman"

So says Adam McDowell of the National Post in one of the few reasonable pieces of reporting on the sensational discovery of a "gay caveman" (click here for the full article). The media frenzy was generated over the discovery of a male skeleton which was buried in what was the typical burial pattern for women in the region. There are so many frustrating aspects to this discovery and it's handling in the media that I don't even know how to begin discussing it. 


I think that in all of the ridiculous comments and assertions that the numerous news articles are riddled with, the ones which focus on the "first gay caveman" as evidence for homosexuality being "natural" make me the most angry. These reporters are the ones who attempt to put a "positive spin" on this "discovery", yet their insistence that homosexuals need historical evidence to legitimize who we are is simply insulting. 

(Thanks The Skeptical Mother!!) Sir Ian McKellen
pretty much sums things up. Even assuming the remains
are male and he was gay, what does it matter!?

Furthermore, I think that throughout this course there is one fact that has made itself apparent time and time again in every aspect of funerary practices that we have studied. This one constant is that the orientation and location of burials, monuments or markers placed with the dead, clothing in which a person is buried, and grave goods all tell us more about the people who did the burying than the individual who was buried. This means that regardless of what the anthropologists and reporters who have commented on this case may believe, the fact that this apparently male individual was buried in the style characteristic of female burials says much more about those who survived him. As many of my classmates have pointed out there may be dozens of alternative explanations (Alysha Zawaduk does a great job of discussing this), ranging from a misclassification of the remains as male to the desire of the buriers to bring shame on this individual in the afterlife. Whatever the true story may be, branding unusual discoveries with blatantly wrong and sensationalized names like "the first gay caveman" does nothing to encourage openminded investigation into the past.