Oldest human burial in Africa unearthed
Discovery sheds light on the evolution of modern human behaviour.
About 78,000 years ago, at the mouth of a cave complex in modern-day Kenya, someone placed the body of a three-year-old child on its side in a purpose-dug grave and covered it with earth from the cave floor.
This intentional act – described in a paper in Nature – is the oldest human burial ever uncovered in Africa.
“It’s a first,” says Alison Crowther, co-author and archaeologist from the University of Queensland. “Africa is the cradle of our species, Homo
sapiens, but we don’t really have much evidence of early burial practices from anywhere on the continent, and practically none from eastern Africa.”
This discovery, she says, “gives us this extraordinary, unprecedented glimpse into how our species evolved, both culturally and anatomically”.
The child – nicknamed Mtoto, meaning ‘child’ in Swahili – was found in Panga ya Saidi cave, on the Kenyan coast about 400 kilometres from today’s capital, Nairobi.
The body was placed in a flexed position, lying on its side with knees drawn towards the chest, suggesting it may have been tightly shrouded. The pattern of collapse of the head and neck also suggest that a perishable material was placed underneath the head for support.
“It clearly demonstrates intentional burial and treatment of the dead at 78,000 years ago,” says co-author Patrick Faulkner from the University of Sydney. “These are complex behaviours linked to complex emotions. We do see complex behaviour through things like personal ornamentation and symbolism, but this burial adds quite a lot to our understanding of symbolic and conceptual complexity in human populations.”
Intentional burials of modern humans and Neanderthals dating back 120,000 years have been discovered in Eurasia. In Australia, the famous Mungo Man and Mungo Lady – a burial and cremation respectively – were uncovered in western New South Wales in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Dated to around 40,000 years ago, their discovery rewrote our understanding of Australian history.
But only a handful of early human burials have been found in Africa, despite evidence that it is the birthplace of modern humans. This could be explained by differences in mortuary practices, or even a lack of research fieldwork in large portions of the continent.
Germany’s Max Planck Institute, in partnership with the National Museums of Kenya (Nairobi) and archaeologists from around the world were excavating the archaeologically rich cave to study trade in the Indian Ocean from several thousand years ago. As they dug deeper they found evidence of early symbolic behaviour, such as ochre use and beads over 60,000 years old.
Then in 2013 the child was unearthed, and in 2017 a plaster cast of the bones was taken to the National Research Center on Human Evolution (CENIEH) in Burgos, Spain, for study.
Crowther thinks that as fieldwork in Africa continues, even older burial sites will be found. “We know that humans have the capacity for symbolic thought that goes much earlier,” she says.