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- A specially designated place where human remains are at rest by way of burial, entombment, interment, inurnment, or scattering.
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May 5, 2021 · The 2-and-a-half to 3-year-old toddler now dubbed Mtoto (‘child’ in Swahili) was found in a specially dug grave now recognized as the oldest known human burial in Africa.
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If the claims are true, the behavior by Homo naledi—a baffling, small-brained member of the human family tree—would pre-date the earliest known burials by at least 100,000 years.
An Homo naledi group carry one of their dead into Rising Star cave in this artist's depiction. New evidence that these small-brained hominins may have practiced deliberate burial throws a curve into current thinking on human evolution.
An extinct human species that lived hundreds of thousands of years ago may have deliberately buried its dead and carved meaningful symbols deep in a South African cave—advanced behaviors generally deemed unique to Neanderthals and modern Homo sapiens. If confirmed, the burials would be the earliest yet known by at least 100,000 years.
The claims, made today in two research papers uploaded to the preprint server bioRxiv, were also announced by paleoanthropologist Lee Berger at a conference at Stony Brook University in New York.
The publications come eight years after Berger first reported the discovery of a new hominin species inside the Rising Star cave system 25 miles northwest of Johannesburg. Named Homo naledi, the species is characterized by its small size—including a brain roughly a third the size of today’s humans—and a baffling mix of very old and relatively modern anatomical features.
The skeletal remains discovered in the cave are concentrated in a single, hard-to-reach subsystem and are dated to between 335,000 and 241,000 years ago—a period when modern humans were just beginning to emerge in Africa.
Arguments around deliberate interment of the dead often hinge on differences between what scientists call mortuary behavior and funerary behavior, says André Gonçalves, who studies how animals interact with the dead. Chimps and elephants, for example, display mortuary behavior when they keep watch over a dead body or physically interact with it expecting it to come back to life.
Funerary behavior, by contrast, involves intentional social acts by beings capable of complex thought who understand themselves to be separate from the natural world and who recognize the significance of the deceased. Until now, the earliest recorded evidence for funerary behavior and intentional burial among hominin species—including both modern humans and Neanderthals—was at least 100,000 years after Homo naledi.
“Humans are really peculiar as a primate because we bury our dead,” Gonçalves says. “No other primate seems to do it.”
External experts who reviewed the papers for National Geographic raised a variety of concerns around the evidence for deliberate burial. Some still maintain that water could have washed the bone fragments into natural depressions in the cave floor, which then filled with sediment over the years.
But, says anthropologist John Hawks, a Rising Star team member and co-author of the papers, “The strongest evidence we have is that the burials disrupt the existing stratigraphy in the cave.”
Another critique involves the state of the bones, most of which are dispersed and disconnected. “Most of the displacements can’t be explained by the natural course of decomposition,” says paleoanthropologist María Martinón-Torres, who studied the oldest-known human burial in Africa.
In a second paper, researchers describe another new discovery: abstract shapes and patterns etched into the cave walls near the presumed burials. The inscribed surfaces appear to have been prepared with a substance and smoothed, and some of the markings seem to have been erased and engraved over, indicating that they were made over a period of time.
The nature of the cave’s dolomitic limestone walls make dating very difficult, and researchers concede that it will be “challenging to assess whether the engravings are contemporary with the Homo naledi burial evidence from only a few meters away.”
Archaeologist Curtis Marean notes that the particular cross-hatch designs that appear on the cave walls are “very similar” to designs found in later Homo sapiens sites in the region, as well as indigenous Khoi-San imagery.
While the researchers caution that further study is needed to identify and analyze all the engravings, they point out that the production of designs—whether painted, etched, or engraved—on cave walls or other surfaces is recognized “as a major cognitive step in human evolution.”
Left: A series of engravings and etchings of geometric figures such as squares, ladders, triangles, and crosses were discovered on the cave walls in 2022. Whether they're related to nearby burials has yet to be determined.
Photograph by Berger et al., 2023b
The research team’s decision to go public with their extraordinary claims without first publishing in a peer-reviewed journal is a source of frustration for some paleoanthropologists, but Berger defends the decision. The papers will eventually appear in the online journal eLife, alongside reviews and an editorial summary, making the process “transparent,” he says.
“Your readers will be able to watch as the authors—our large team—interact with reviewers and editors as part of the open access policy,” Berger explains. The authors then have the choice to keep the papers as they are, or to incorporate comments from reviewers and other scientists. “Effectively, we're letting people in to watch the review process and the way peer review works.”
Experts who reviewed the papers agree that paleoanthropology is entering a new era with a growing awareness that there are other human species who have behaviors that until quite recently we thought were uniquely “modern human.”
With it come expectations of more discoveries of how Homo naledi lived, and how they’re related to us—or not. “If this species was adapted to living in caves and going deep into caves, which is the implication in Rising Star, then there must be more evidence of it in many other sites in South Africa,” notes Stringer.
May 5, 2021 · The earliest known human burial in Africa, that of a young child, is dated to around 78,000 years ago. The origin and evolution of hominin mortuary practices are topics of intense interest and ...
- María Martinón-Torres, Francesco d'Errico, Francesco d'Errico, Elena Santos, Elena Santos, Ana Álvar...
- 2021
- The Levant Caves. Age: 55,000-120,000 years. Country: The Levant. Graves: Unknown. photo source: Wikimedia Commons. The oldest known graves in the world are in Levant Caves.
- Panga ya Saidi Site. Age: 78,000 years. Country: Kenya. Graves: 1. photo source: Smithsonian. This cave in Kenya, Africa dates to the Stone Age and was only excavated in 2013.
- Raqefet Cave. Age: 11,700-13,700 years. Country: Israel. Graves: 20+ photo source: Wikimedia Commons. At least 450 skeletons have been excavated from Natufian burial sites, dating back more than 11,000 years.
- Tanana River House. Age: 11,500 years. Country: America (Alaska) Graves: 1. photo source: CBC. While not technically a grave in the traditional sense, the remains of a house near the Tanana River in Alaska yielded a fascinating discovery: the nearly 12,000-year-old ashes of a young child.
May 5, 2021 · The discovery of the burial of a small child in a cave in Kenya is providing new insights into the development of funerary practices of modern humans. Dating to roughly 78,000 years old, the grave is the oldest human burial discovered in Africa to date.
Natural burial is the interment of the body of a dead person in the soil in a manner that does not inhibit decomposition but allows the body to be naturally recycled. It is an alternative to typical contemporary Western burial methods and modern funerary customs.
May 5, 2021 · Child’s grave is the oldest human burial found in Africa. This skull, dated to around 78,000 years ago, was among the remains of an early human found buried in a cave in Kenya. After months...
