Stone Age mourners 'placed flowers on graves'
PLACING flowers on the graves of loved ones seems to be as old as mankind, a new study suggests.
Remains of fossilised pollen were found on the decorative tomb of a Stone Age woman known as the Red Lady found in the El Mirón cave at Cantabria, Spain.
The reddish colour of the bones and the sediment in which they lie point to the use of ochre as part of the interment while engravings suggest a ritual burial.
Archaeologists found the remains date back more than 16 000 years ago and come from a period when the Ice Age was retreating and the climate was improving.
The flowers would have been colourful in an otherwise drab environment and their appearance in the cave did not seem natural.
University of the Basque Country’s Maria Jose Iriarte said: “They put whole flowers on the tomb, but it has not been possible to say whether the aim of placing plants was to do with a ritual offering for the dead person, or whether El Mirón cave was inhabited between the Middle Palaeolithic and the Bronze Age and therefore contains a significant archaeological deposit.”
However she ruled out these plants may have been used for food or therapeutic purposes and added “the most plausible hypothesis is that complete flowers were placed on the tomb”.
The Red Lady was discovered in 2010 and is a unique burial site, because there are hardly any Palaeolithic tombs like this one, which is intact and which has not been contaminated.
The researchers found a high concentration of pollen of plants of a single family, the so-called chenopodiaceae. However, they concluded that the plants did not appear naturally.
The study was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. – The Telegraph