Africa is often referred to as the cradle of humankind – the birthplace of our species,
Homo sapiens. There is evidence of the development of early symbolic behaviours such as pigment use and perforated shell ornaments in Africa, but so far most of what we know about the development of complex social behaviours such as burial and mourning has come from Eurasia.
However, the remains of a child buried almost 80,000 years ago under an overhang at Panga ya Saidi cave in Kenya is providing important new details.
Working with a team of researchers from Kenya, Germany, Spain, France, Australia, Canada, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States, we studied the burial. Our results, published in Nature today, reveal valuable insights into human cultural evolution, including how Middle Stone Age populations interacted with the dead.
May 5, 2021 at 11:00 am
A child whose lifeless body was carefully placed in an East African cave around 78,300 years ago has made a grand return.
Researchers who unearthed the ancient youngster’s remains say that they’ve found the oldest known intentional human burial in Africa. The investigators, who report the discovery in the May 6
Nature, have named the ancient youngster Mtoto, a Swahili word that means “child.”
“Mtoto was buried in a sheltered part of a cave that was repeatedly occupied by people over a span of nearly 80,000 years, up to about 500 years ago,” said archaeologist Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, at a May 3 news conference. Local people still visit this spot to worship and conduct rituals.
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Finding the Child Grave in the Cave Wasn’t a Straightforward Process
A Nature press release states that María Martinón-Torres of CENIEH (National Research Center on Human Evolution), in Burgos, Spain and her colleagues analyzed the remains of the child which came from Panga ya Saidi, a cave site on the Kenyan coast.
General view of the cave site of Panga ya Saidi. Note trench excavation where the earliest human burial in Africa was unearthed.
(Mohammad Javad Shoaee/
)
Archaeologists from the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for the Science of Human History (Jena, Germany) and the National Museums of Kenya (Nairobi) began their excavations at Panga ya Saidi in 2010. Professor Nicole Boivin, principal investigator of that project and director of the Department of Archaeology at the MPI for the Science of Human History, explained how special the site is to the discovery of complex social behaviors in early modern humans. According to a CENIEH press release, Professor B