The cause was pneumonia, his son William said.
Starting in the mid-1950s, leading teams from Columbia University, Solecki discovered the fossilized skeletons of eight adult and two infant Neanderthals who had lived tens of thousands of years ago in what is now northern Iraq.
Solecki, who was also a Smithsonian Institution anthropologist at the time, said physical evidence at Shanidar Cave, where the skeletons were found, suggested that Neanderthals tended to the weak and wounded, and also that they buried their dead with flowers, which were placed ornamentally and possibly selected for their therapeutic benefits.
The exhumed bones of a man, named Shanidar 3, who was blind in one eye and missing his right arm but survived for years after he was hurt, indicated that fellow Neanderthals had helped provide him with sustenance and other support.
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“Although the body was archaic, the spirit was modern,” Solecki wrote in the magazine Science in 1975.
Large amounts of pollen found in the soil at a grave site suggested that bodies might have been ceremonially entombed with bluebonnet, hollyhock, grape hyacinth and other flowers — a theory that is still being explored and amplified. (Some researchers hypothesized that the pollen might have been carried by rodents or bees, but Solecki’s theory has become widely accepted.)
“The association of flowers with Neanderthals adds a whole new dimension to our knowledge of his humanness, indicating he had a ‘soul,’” Solecki wrote.
In addition, he told the New York Academy of Sciences in 1976, if the flowers were confirmed to have been selected for their medicinal value, the discovery would indicate that “the Neanderthals possessed a mutually comprehensive communication system, in short a spoken language.”
The very title of Solecki’s first book, published in 1971, made his rehabilitative effort clear. It was called “Shanidar: The First Flower People.”
He also wrote “Shanidar: The Humanity of Neanderthal Man” (1972) and, with his wife and fellow archaeologist, Rose L. Solecki, and Anagnostis P. Agelarakis, “The Proto-Neolithic Cemetery in Shanidar Cave” (2004).
Scientists remain awed by what Solecki discovered and, armed with the latest technology, are still interpreting precisely what the physical evidence of the skeletons and the multiple burials implies.
“What is clear is that the cluster of bodies at the ‘flower burial’ came to rest in a very restricted area, but not quite at the same geologic level, and therefore likely not quite at the same time,” archaeologist Christopher Hunt was quoted as saying in Science this year. “So that might point to some form of intentionality and group memory as Neanderthals returned to the same spot over generations.”
Novelist Jean M. Auel was inspired by Solecki’s research to write “The Clan of the Cave Bear” (1980), the first in her “Earth’s Children” series of narratives on the evolution of humankind. Auel said Shanidar 3 was the inspiration for the character Creb.
In the early 1950s, Solecki was a Columbia graduate student on another excavation in the mountainous Kurdish region of Iraq. Seeking a potentially fruitful dig site, he was directed by locals to the rugged Great Zab River valley and Shanidar Cave, in the Zagros Mountains.
The cave’s portal, 2,500 feet above sea level, opened onto a cavernous 3,000-square-foot interior with 20-foot-high ceilings, where his discovery of remains and artifacts would make it a singular Neanderthal site in Western Asia.
In 1955, Solecki married Rose M. Lilien and returned with her to Iraq, where the couple lived in a stone police barracks without running water or toilets.
Their quarters were barely better than the natural cave that Solecki estimated had been home to some 3,000 generations. It provided researchers with what he described as “a consecutive, slow-motion picture” of humanity’s evolution.
“Rarely do archaeologists have a chance to see so clear a succession of man’s development over so long a period,” he told Scientific American in 1957.
He unearthed the bones in a stratum between 16 feet beneath the surface of the cave and 45 feet below, where the bedrock began.
The first skeleton Solecki found was of a man who had probably been asleep in the cave when he was struck and killed by limestone rocks loosened by an earthquake.
Another man appeared to have been buried by fellow Neanderthals. A third, excavated in 1957, lived between 35,000 and 45,000 years ago. He was almost 50 years old and, with signs of a deep cut in his left rib from a pointed stone or blade, might have been the oldest known murder victim. (He is now at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History.)
When Solecki and his wife returned again in 1960, they found a fourth skeleton, with evidence of funerary flowers or pollen from herbs possibly used as medicine.
“Someone in the last ice age must have ranged the mountainside in the mournful task of collecting flowers for the dead,” Solecki wrote. “It seems logical to us today that pretty things like flowers should be placed with the cherished dead, but to find flowers in a Neanderthal burial that took place about 60,000 years ago is another matter.”
The Neanderthals survived until roughly 28,000 years ago, when the more adaptable Cro-Magnon population of Homo sapiens began to predominate.
Stefan Rafael Solecki was born on Oct. 15, 1917, in Brooklyn to Polish immigrants. His father, Casimir, sold insurance. His mother, Mary (Tarnowska) Solecki, was a homemaker.
When he was about 10, his interest in archaeology was piqued by newspaper reports of treasures being unearthed from King Tutankhamen’s tomb in Egypt. He began his own excavations after his father bought a house in Cutchogue, New York, on Long Island’s North Fork. After spring plowing, he and his friends would search for Native American arrowheads and other artifacts.
After graduating from Newtown High School in Elmhurst, Queens, he received a Bachelor of Science in geology from City College of New York in 1942.
During World War II he served in the Army in Europe, where he was wounded. He received a master’s degree from Columbia University; his thesis was on the 17th-century Fort Corchaug, near the family’s Long Island home, which was later designated a National Historic Landmark.
In 1951, as an associate curator at the Smithsonian Institution (his archaeologist’s trowel is now part of the collection), Solecki surveyed historic sites in Iraq. He returned on three expeditions, one on a Fulbright fellowship. He received a doctorate in anthropology from Columbia in 1958.
Solecki, who was also renowned for his excavations in Sudan and Alaska and led Columbia expeditions in he Middle East and Africa, was the Smithsonian’s curator of archaeology from 1958 to 1959. He taught at Columbia from 1959 to 1988. In 1990, he and his wife, who also has a doctorate in archaeology, joined the faculty of Texas A&M; University.
They moved to New Jersey in 2000 to be closer to their sons.
In addition to his wife and his son William, a geographer, professor at Hunter College and founder and director emeritus of the City University of New York Institute for Sustainable Cities, Solecki is survived by another son, John, a U.N. refugee official who was kidnapped and held for two months in Pakistan in 2009; and two grandchildren.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.