Evidence Of Earliest Human Burial

[Anonymous]

From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2885663.stm

Evidence of earliest human burial

By Paul Rincon


Scientists claim they have found the oldest evidence of human creativity: a 350,000-year-old pink stone axe.

The handaxe, which was discovered at an archaeological site in northern Spain, may represent the first funeral rite by human beings.
It suggests humans were capable of symbolic thought at a far earlier date than previously thought.
Spanish researchers found the axe among the fossilised bones of 27 ancient humans that were clumped together at the bottom of a 14-metre- (45 feet) deep pit inside a network of limestone caves at Atapuerca, near Burgos.
It is the only man-made implement found in the pit.
It may confirm the team's belief that other humans deposited bodies in the pit deliberately.

Professor Eudald Carbonell, of the Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain, and a key member of the team that unearthed the axe, was jubilant about the find.
"It's a great discovery. This is an interpretation, but in my opinion and the opinion of my team, the axe could be the first evidence of ritual behaviour and symbolism in a human species," Professor Carbonell said.

"We conclude it could be from a funeral rite," he added.

The axe is skilfully crafted from quartzite rock, which is abundant in the region.

Handaxes of this type are usually used for butchering animal carcasses for their meat. But the researchers claim the striking colour is crucial to its importance.
"It's a very special colour," said Juan Luis Arsuaga, director of the Atapuerca excavation. "They would have needed to search it out. I think this colour had some significance for [these humans]," he added.

The human remains belong to the species Homo heidelbergensis, which dominated Europe around 600,000-200,000 years ago and is thought to have given rise to both the Neanderthals and modern humans (Homo sapiens).

But some researchers, such as Peter Andrews, of the Natural History Museum in London, have proposed that the skeletons were lying elsewhere in the caves and sludged into the pit by a mudflow.


"I'm cautious about its significance," said Professor Chris Stringer, also of the Natural History Museum. "The association of the handaxe and the skeletons in this pit of bones is a very interesting one," adding that it was possible there was some sort of symbolic association.

"But one has to put some caution into [this announcement] because it has been suggested that this is a secondary deposit and therefore could be accidental," he noted.
But Arsuaga thinks it unlikely that so many human remains could have appeared in the pit in the absence of bones from other animals.

Previously, the earliest funeral rituals were thought to be associated with Neanderthal remains dated 100,000 years ago. But some researchers dispute the significance of these sites, preferring to believe that abstract thinking began around 50,000 years ago in modern humans.

Arsuaga and his colleagues found the handaxe in 1998, but decided to search for other stone tools in the pit before announcing the find. They have found none so far.
The research is published in the French journal L'Anthropologie.

 

[Anonymous]

So they have decided that Homo heidelbergensis could have been burying their dead, and chucking pink hand axes into the pit...
I have been waiting for some revelations from Atapuerca cave, the largest collection of hominid skeletons in Europe.
In England, try to get to Kent's Cavern (in Torquay) if you can, some of the evidence of human occupation there seems to date back to this era.
These people were here two ice ages ago, and they can only have had a very limited technology...

very early for symbolic behavior (if true).

 

[EnolaGaia]

The oldest known deliberate Homo sapiens burial in Africa has added to our understanding about interment practices among H. sapiens and related species in the context of human evolution and dispersal.

Oldest deliberate burial of a human in Africa discovered

About 78,000 years ago, deep inside a cave near the coast of what is now Kenya, the body of a small child was carefully laid to rest in a tiny grave. Now, an international group of researchers has used advanced scientific techniques to peer into the past, revealing for the first time details of the ancient interment — finding that it is the oldest deliberate burial of a Homo sapiens individual in Africa.

The child was only about 3 years old when they died. Their body was curled up on their side, as if to sleep or to keep warm, and the child's head seems to have been delicately placed on a rest or cushion. The scientists have named the remains "Mtoto," which is Swahili for "child." ...

Older Homo sapiens burials have been found in Europe and the Middle East, some dating to about 120,000 years ago. ...

But the remains of Mtoto, from about 78,000 years ago, are the oldest evidence of a deliberate burial found in Africa to date, said anthropologist Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena. ...

Petraglia said that the 40,000-year gap between the oldest-known Homo sapiens burials and Mtoto's burial probably reflected the fact that paleolithic archaeology was relatively recent in Africa compared to Europe and Asia, although Africa is the original home of our species and could have burials that are even older.

Some features of the Mtoto burial are similar to earlier burials by both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) ...

FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/oldest-human-burial-africa-discovered.html

 

[EnolaGaia]

This ScienceAlert version of the story adds some additional tidbits about the relations between Mtoto's interment and human history ...

Oldest Known Deliberate Human Burial Uncovered in African Cave

Signs of ancient deliberate burials have been found in other parts of the world, spanning 800,000 years, but most of those have been other species of the Homo genus, such as Homo antecessor, Homo naledi, and Homo neanderthalis.

This discovery is significant because it helps us understand how early Homo sapiens treated their dead - practices that have links to social organization, spiritual and symbolic beliefs and behaviors, technology, and community priorities.

For example, another burial of a Homo sapiens child 74,000 years ago in South Africa's Border Cave might suggest that the deaths of young children were events over which special care was taken - although with a sample size of just two burials, it's impossible to know for sure. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/the-oldest-known-deliberate-human-burial-has-been-uncovered-in-africa

 

[EnolaGaia]

Here are the bibliographic details and abstract of the published research report.

Martinón-Torres, M., d’Errico, F., Santos, E. et al.
Earliest known human burial in Africa.
Nature 593, 95–100 (2021).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03457-8

Abstract
The origin and evolution of hominin mortuary practices are topics of intense interest and debate. Human burials dated to the Middle Stone Age (MSA) are exceedingly rare in Africa and unknown in East Africa. Here we describe the partial skeleton of a roughly 2.5- to 3.0-year-old child dating to 78.3 ± 4.1 thousand years ago, which was recovered in the MSA layers of Panga ya Saidi (PYS), a cave site in the tropical upland coast of Kenya. Recent excavations have revealed a pit feature containing a child in a flexed position. Geochemical, granulometric and micromorphological analyses of the burial pit content and encasing archaeological layers indicate that the pit was deliberately excavated. Taphonomical evidence, such as the strict articulation or good anatomical association of the skeletal elements and histological evidence of putrefaction, support the in-place decomposition of the fresh body. The presence of little or no displacement of the unstable joints during decomposition points to an interment in a filled space (grave earth), making the PYS finding the oldest known human burial in Africa. The morphological assessment of the partial skeleton is consistent with its assignment to Homo sapiens, although the preservation of some primitive features in the dentition supports increasing evidence for non-gradual assembly of modern traits during the emergence of our species. The PYS burial sheds light on how MSA populations interacted with the dead.

SOURCE: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03457-8#citeas

 

[ramonmercado]

More on possible homo naledi burial rites.

A child’s partial skull found in a remote section of a South African cave system has fueled suspicion that an ancient hominid known as Homo naledi deliberately disposed of its dead in caves.

An international team led by paleoanthropologist Lee Berger of University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg pieced together 28 skull fragments and six teeth from a child’s skull discovered in a narrow opening located about 12 meters from an underground chamber where cave explorers first found H. naledi fossils (SN: 9/10/15). Features of the child’s skull qualify it as H. naledi, a species with an orange-sized brain and skeletal characteristics of both present-day people and Homo species from around 2 million years ago.

“The case is building for deliberate, ritualized body disposal in caves by Homo naledi,” Berger said at a November 4 news conference held in Johannesburg. While that argument is controversial, there is no evidence that the child’s skull was washed into the tiny space or dragged there by predators or scavengers (SN: 4/19/16).

Berger’s group describes the find in two papers published November 4 in PaleoAnthropology. In one, Juliet Brophy, a paleoanthropologist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and colleagues describe the youngster’s skull. In the other, paleoanthropologist Marina Elliott of Canada’s Simon Fraser University in Burnaby and colleagues detail new explorations in South Africa’s Rising Star cave system. ...

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/homo-naledi-child-skull-hominid-cave-discovery

 

[kamalktk]

More on Homo naledi burials, and there is also evidence they carved symbols on cave walls.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/05/world/homo-naledi-burials-carvings-scn/index.html
---------------------------------------
Now, the research team has discovered the remains of Homo naledi adults and children that were laid to rest in the fetal position within cave depressions and covered with soil. The burials are older than any known Homo sapiens burials by at least 100,000 years.

During the work to identify the cave burials, the scientists also found a number of symbols engraved on the cave walls, which are estimated to be between 241,000 and 335,000 years old, but they want to continue their testing for more precise dating.

The symbols include deeply carved hashtag-like cross-hatchings and other geometric shapes. Similar symbols found in other caves were carved by early Homo sapiens 80,000 years ago and Neanderthals 60,000 years ago and were thought to have been used as a way to record and share information.

“These recent findings suggest intentional burials, the use of symbols, and meaning-making activities by Homo naledi. It seems an inevitable conclusion that in combination they indicate that this small-brained species of ancient human relatives was performing complex practices related to death,” said Berger, lead author on two of the studies and coauthor on the third, in a statement. “That would mean not only are humans not unique in the development of symbolic practices, but may not have even invented such behaviors.”

 

[kamalktk]

An additional article on the findings, with video of the crazily tight spaces the researchers had to crawl through, and additional photos of the markings.

https://arstechnica.com/science/202...at-homo-naledi-buried-their-dead-used-symbols

"An even more exciting discovery awaited. On July 28, 2022, Berger and his team found etchings engraved in a crosshatch pattern on Panel B in the Hill Antechamber. The patterns include geometric figures like squares, ladders, triangles, crosses, and X's. More crosshatch etchings were found on a second Panel A, which also showed evidence of earlier etchings behind it, obscured (perhaps deliberately) by covering the surface with cave dirt. Some of the engravings appeared to fluoresce slightly, suggesting that some substance had been applied, similar to the 78,000-year-old carved ochre art found in Blombos Cave. The surface also showed signs of having been prepared by hammerstones prior to the engraving."

 

[ramonmercado]

More on possible homo naledi burial rites.

A child’s partial skull found in a remote section of a South African cave system has fueled suspicion that an ancient hominid known as Homo naledi deliberately disposed of its dead in caves.

An international team led by paleoanthropologist Lee Berger of University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg pieced together 28 skull fragments and six teeth from a child’s skull discovered in a narrow opening located about 12 meters from an underground chamber where cave explorers first found H. naledi fossils (SN: 9/10/15). Features of the child’s skull qualify it as H. naledi, a species with an orange-sized brain and skeletal characteristics of both present-day people and Homo species from around 2 million years ago.

“The case is building for deliberate, ritualized body disposal in caves by Homo naledi,” Berger said at a November 4 news conference held in Johannesburg. While that argument is controversial, there is no evidence that the child’s skull was washed into the tiny space or dragged there by predators or scavengers (SN: 4/19/16).

Berger’s group describes the find in two papers published November 4 in PaleoAnthropology. In one, Juliet Brophy, a paleoanthropologist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and colleagues describe the youngster’s skull. In the other, paleoanthropologist Marina Elliott of Canada’s Simon Fraser University in Burnaby and colleagues detail new explorations in South Africa’s Rising Star cave system. ...

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/homo-naledi-child-skull-hominid-cave-discovery

Netflix series.

Paleoanthropologist Lee Berger and his team have discovered a cave in Africa riddled with the bones of an extinct species, Homo naledi, a small hominin ape that lived 250,000 years ago, about when our own species, Homo sapien, was emerging.

Finding such a rich despository of bones of this species was a hugely significant find. But what Berger and his team found on full exploration of the cave system was startling. There was evidence that this small-brained creature (with a brain about the third the size of ours, and about the size of a chimpanzee's) used fire to explore the caves, ritually buried their dead there, and carved (primitive) art in the cave walls.

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The implications for our understanding of our own evolution, and the evolution of brains, intelligence, culture, and religion are fascinating.

A new documentary, Cave of Bones, about Berger's team's findings will be released on July 17 on Netflix, and this trailer was posted on Wednesday.

In South Africa's Cradle of Humankind, Paleoanthropologist Lee Berger has found the world's oldest graveyard – and it's not human. If Lee and his team can prove that this ancient, small brained, ape-like creature practiced complex burial rituals – it will change everything we know about hominid evolution and the origins of belief.

https://boingboing.net/2023/07/12/t...l-brained-ape-ritually-buried-their-dead.html