SLEEP TIGHT, MTOTO

Inside the Panga ya Saidi cave in the coastal highlands of Kenya, archæologists have made a touching find some three metres (10ft) below the cave floor – the thoughtful burial of a toddler who they have named Mtoto (Swahili for child). It was a tender burial. It seems the small body had been wrapped tightly before being laid into a carefully dug, shallow and circular pit. The child was curled up on its side, as if to sleep or to keep warm, with its tiny head delicately placed on a support of some kind. The special interest concerning this find is that it is 78,000 years old, representing the earliest deliberate burial of a modern human yet found in Africa. “Only humans treat the dead with this respect, this care, this tenderness,” said palæoanthropologist Maria Martinón-Torres, director of the National Centre for Research on Human Evolution (CENIAH) in Burgos, Spain, who led the team that first discovered the ancient burial. “This is some of the earliest evidence that we have in Africa about humans living in the physical and also in the symbolic world.”

The Panga ya Saidi cave is still revered as a sacred place by local Kenyans, and is also a key archæological site containing remains covering a vast time period and so has been subject to archæological enquiry for a number of years. Fragments of Mtoto’s bones were first found during excavations in 2013, but it wasn’t until 2017 that the small pit containing the bones was fully revealed. “At this point, we weren’t sure what we had found. The bones were just too delicate to study in the field,” says Dr Emmanuel Ndiema of the National Museums of Kenya. In fact, the bones were finally excavated from the cave in a block of stabilised sediment and flown to the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany, and ultimately to CENIAH for detailed technical analysis. Because the finds were too old for carbon dating, a technique called optically stimulated luminescence was used which measures when rock or sediment last saw sunlight. This placed the grave soil at around 78,000 years old.

The clearly loved Mtoto may only have had a brief life, but she is now causing a bit of a fuss these long ages after her death. LiveScience, 5 May; Ars Technica, 5 May 2021.

BIRD BRAIN-TEASER

The skeleton of a girl discovered in 1967/68 by archæologist Waldemar Chmielewski in the Tunel Wielki Cave, southern Poland (below), has only now been given a detailed analysis. New radiocarbon dating shows the find to be about 300 years old, that the girl was 10-12 years old when she died, and her DNA indicates that she came from northern Europe, perhaps Finland or western Russia. From 1655 to 1657, the area was occupied by troops led by Charles X Gustav of Sweden, including soldiers from Finland and Karelia, stationed at Ojców Castle near a forest where the burial cave was situated. These soldiers often travelled with their families. However, Europeans stopped burying their dead in caves during the Middle Ages, making the burial of this girl highly unusual, said the researchers.

Even more unusual was that she had the skull of a finch in her mouth, along with a second bird skull deposited alongside the remains.

“Among many cultures, the souls of children have been conceived in the form of small birds,” the researchers wrote. “Nevertheless, in the period in question, birds were never deposited in graves, let alone being placed in the mouth of the deceased.” The girl’s bones showed signs of arrested growth in later years, possibly the result of a metabolic disease. There was no evidence of trauma, nor any clues about how she died. No grave goods, aside from the bird heads, were found. Praehistorische Zeitschrift, 29 May 2021.

DARN IT

Sometimes it is the small things uncovered by archæological investigation that speak volumes about peoples of the past. For example, in caves and rock shelters in Kermanshah province, western Iran, archæologists led by Saman HeydariGuran have found clues dating back to late Palaeolithic times indicating that the Neanderthals there knew at least the basics of sewing. Clues include a bone needle in the context of what seems to be the preparation of a wolf skin fabric. “The effect of incision caused by hitting a stone tool on a wolf bone is very rare in ancient Palæolithic sites, and such incision on the phalanx bone is linked with the process of preparing animal skin based on previous cases discovered across the world,” explains Heydari-Guran.

If confirmed with further research, this would appear to be another step in the intellectual ‘rehabilitation’ of the Neanderthals from being considered as grunting near-apes to being more advanced creatures. Evidence accumulates of their ability to speak simple language (even to sing!), for instance, and to be able to make symbolic markings and actions. Tehran Times, 8 May 2021.

“The helplessness of a human infant outlasts the suckling period of a wolf.” – Fort, Books, p689

Fort (himself childless) was here amassing cases of feral children lupinely suckled. Such tales, of course, go back to Romulus and Remus. If Fort had read Livy, he’d surely have chuckled over the rival version in which the maternal she-wolf was actually a local tart, lupa being a Roman slang term for prostitutes (cf. lupanar = brothel)

In an uncharacteristically tender moment, Juvenal ( Satires 14, v47) urged maxima debetur puero reverentia, Englished without attribution by Samuel Johnson ( Rambler 4, 1750) as “the highest degree of reverence should be paid to youth,” a filching unnoticed by (e.g.) David Wormersley’s annotated Penguin.

Now, it is possible to find such reverence, for example, on tombstones cf. Richmond Lattimore’s Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs (1962, pp187-97), or in Pliny’s touching tribute ( Letters, bk5 no16) to a friend’s daughter who died just before

13 – with typical Roman precision, her age is inscriptionally given ( ILS, no1030) as 12 years, 11 months, 7 days: she was already engaged, with wedding day fixed – Step Forward, Jerry Lee Lewis.

Musing over the Charlie Gard case, classicist Peter Jones ( Spectator, 22 July 2017) contrasted modern compassion with the (allegedly) harsher Roman attitude, observing that only a handful of 55,000 epitaphs record deaths under six months, quoting Cicero’s deprecation of undue grief over infant deaths, even claiming there was no word for baby in Latin.

This semantic claim exaggerates. Fetus

demonstrably can mean this, and there was also Infans. And Cicero is balanced by (of all people) Nero, “as immoderate in grief as in joy” (Tacitus, Annals, bk15 ch23) over the death of his four-month-old baby ( infans)

daughter.

Horror stories begin early, in literature and myth: Hector’s baby son flung from the walls of Troy; Medea slaughtering their children (albeit for different reasons, Joseph and Magda Goebbels come to mind) to punish Jason for playing away (she incinerated the girlfriend with a poisoned wedding-dress); Oedipus with his ankles pierced (hence his name) and exposed.

Sparta exposed babies judged sickly by government officials on Mt Taygetus. A wife in Terence’s play The Self-Tormentor

(vv626-8) was told by hubby to dispose of a new child, if female. An absent Egyptian wrote ( Oxyrhyncus Papyrus 744) to his expectant wife: “If the child is male, rear it; if a girl, expose it” – newspapers frequently report such atrocities from rural China and elsewhere.

The frequently doubted belief that Carthaginians sacrificed young children to Baal has been vindicated by Oxford classicist Josephine Quinn ( Antiquity 87, 2013, 1199-1207 – see online digest). Mass baby cemeteries found (e.g.) at Hamilton (1912) and Ashkelon (Israel, 2014) point the same way, being judged healthy by modern medicos. One here thinks of the baby-burnings by Teutonic Knights in Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, taken from mediæval Russian chronicles.

Horace ( Epode 8) describes the cognate crime of notorious witches Canada and Sagana ritually killing a young boy in Rome in pre-Satanist style.

Ultimate horror: the barbecuing of a royal baby (and mother) by Alexander’s mother, Olympias – despite this, she features as an Albanian heroine in the communist-produced Fjalori Enciklopedik Shqiptar (1985, p773): Pausanias, Description of Greece, bk8 ch7 para7).

Disgruntled Thracian mercenaries massacred the schoolchildren at their desks in the village of Mykalessos (Thucydides, bk7 ch29).

In siege-starved cities, babies were first on the menu. At Numantia (Spain, 133 BC), dead women were found clutching halfeaten infants: Petronius, Satyricon, ch141 para11). Josephus ( Jewish War, bk6 ch207) reports a certain Mary who killed, roasted, and ate half her baby, offering the rest to hungry soldiers, saying: “If you disapprove, leave it for me” – they did.

It was normal to liquidate highborn children deemed to pose a political threat. Thus, Octavian-Augustus with Cæsarion (son of Cæsar and Cleopatra); Nero had his stepson drowned in the Tiber while fishing. The assassins of Caligula (Suetonius, ch59) dashed his infant daughter’s brains out against a wall.

Byzantine empress Irene, though, went well beyond the extra mile by having her son blinded in order to usurp him – Not a Good Night, Irene...

Disconcertingly common were births of horribly deformed children. Late Roman author Julius Obsequens in his Book of Prodigies (extracted from Livy) provides the following grim catalogue: Boy with four hands and feet; a girl without hands; children with four hands and feet; boy with four hands, four feet, four eyes, four ears, double genitals; boy with exposed intestines and sealed anus (“He gave a cry and died”); boy with three hands and feet; girl with two heads, four hands and feet, double genitals; boy “with no opening in his private parts where liquid is excreted.”

Young children were subject to sexual abuse. Trimalchio (Petronius, ch75 para2) recalls at 14 being the plaything of both master and mistress. In the same novel, a young boy is seduced and violated, and a seven-year-old slave-girl ritually deflowered. In real life, emperor Commodus was besotted with an eightyear-old lad, his constant bed-companion.

(Pæderasty was ubiquitously legal in Greece and Rome. This odious activity cannot be avoided. I space-savingly direct readers to Athenæus ( Deipnosophists, bk13) and Strato ( Greek Anthology, bk12) for unblushing catalogues of practitioners and their nonce-sensical pleasures)

Outdoing even Jimmy Savile was Tiberius, said by a disgusted (and disbelieving) Suetonius to have trained newborn babies to fellate him in his swimming pool. He also (Tacitus, Annals, bk6 ch1) “defiled freeborn children,” having them abducted by force to his den of vice on Capri.

An unpromising theme for an upbeat ending to this ghastly litany. However, one may be had from an old dictionary definition of Sellarium, coined along with Spintria (Sphincter) to denote these Tiberian activities: “Lewdness Practised On A Settle” – how many curious dictionary-grubbing schoolboys looking this up would be any the wiser?