By Josh Davis
First published 5 May 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.
When and where modern humans first started displaying behaviours that we see as central to our own sense of identity has been long debated.
A lot of these aspects, such as language and belief systems, leave little to no archaeological evidence. But the treatment of the dead does leave some tantalising clues as to the behaviours of our early ancestors.
While anatomically modern humans originated in Africa around 200,000 years ago, the excavation of a child’s remains buried at the mouth of a cave on the coast of Kenya 78,000 years ago is teaching scientists how Middle Stone Age populations interacted with their dead.
Ideal reconstruction of Mtoto’s original position at the moment of its discovery at the site. (Photo credit: Martinón-Torres, et al., 2021)
(CN) Archeologists have discovered the oldest human burial in Africa, revealing important information about the origin and development of mortuary practices on the continent where our species originated.
While anatomically modern humans originated in Africa around 200,000 years ago, the excavation of a child’s remains buried at the mouth of the Panga ya Saidi cave site in the tropical upland coast of Kenya 78,000 years ago has a story to tell about how people in the Middle Stone Age interacted with their dead.
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IMAGE: General view of the cave site of Panga ya Saidi. Note trench excavation where burial was unearthed view more
Credit: Mohammad Javad Shoaee
Despite being home to the earliest signs of modern human behaviour, early evidence of burials in Africa are scarce and often ambiguous. Therefore, little is known about the origin and development of mortuary practices in the continent of our species birth. A child buried at the mouth of the Panga ya Saidi cave site 78,000 years ago is changing that, revealing how Middle Stone Age populations interacted with the dead.
Panga ya Saidi has been an important site for human origins research since excavations began in 2010 as part of a long-term partnership between archaeologists from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (Jena, Germany) and the National Museums of Kenya (Nairobi).
The oldest human burial in Africa was a toddler laid to rest with a pillow
elisfkc2 / Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0
A toddler laid to rest with their head on a pillow in a cave in eastern Kenya is thought to be the oldest human burial ever found in Africa.
The remains of the child, who was between 2 ½ and 3 years old, date back 78,000 years and were found buried at the mouth of the Panga ya Saidi cave, according to new research published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Analysis of the cave sediment and the bones suggested that the burial was intentional and perhaps involved the child’s wider community in funeral rites, the authors of the study said, demonstrating that humans at that time were capable of symbolic thought and complex social behavior.