NO OTHER animal buries its dead. It is a peculiarly human thing to do, and we’ve been doing it for a long time. Last year, it emerged that our ancestors may have laid their dead to rest as far back as 3 million years ago. This raises intriguing questions about the evolution of the human mind. To understand the idea of death, you need empathy and intuition. To feel your own mortality and to create rituals that recognise the mortality of others, you must be capable of symbolic thinking – which also underpins language, art and religion. What’s more, burials reflect the cultural concerns and practices of the people who created them. Graves, therefore, hold clues about human curiosity, the dawning of spirituality, ancestor cults, global domination, trade, technological ingenuity and more. In search of these, we’ve unearthed 10 of the most significant gravesites:
2-3 million years ago
The first burials?
The ancient remains discovered deep inside the Rising Star cave in South Africa were in a place so inaccessible that petite climbers had to be hired to get them out. Last year, the bones were identified as belonging to a previously unknown species of human, Homo naledi, dating from between 2 and 3 million years ago. But how and why they ended up in such an inaccessible cave system remains a mystery. One idea is that they were laid there after death. If so, the first burials were much earlier than we thought.
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Until Rising Star, the best contender for the oldest gravesite was the Sima de los Huesos, or “pit of bones”, in Spain. It lies at the end of a steep 13-metre shaft in a system of caves in the Atapuerca Mountains. It contains a treasure trove of remains of members of the human family – hominins – dating from between 450,000 and 400,000 year ago, which . The presence of some 30 individuals suggests they didn’t get there by accident. made of red quartzite, found alongside the fossils, which has been interpreted as a graveside offering.
Even the idea that our ancestors were burying their dead 400,000 years ago is contentious. It is not only a sign of early intelligence but of a capacity to think symbolically. And it implies an awareness of the self that separates our ancestors from other animals. We’ll probably never know for sure when these giant cognitive leaps occurred – but if Sima del los Huesos and Rising Star cave are gravesites, that would make them among the most exciting ever discovered.
160,000 years ago
Curious skulls
Three skulls unearthed in Herto Bouri, Ethiopia, in 1997 . The skulls, from two adults and a 7-year-old child, belong to a subspecies of Homo sapiens that lived nearly 160,000 years ago. There are no other hominin fossils nearby, suggesting that they were carried there from some distance. And they were manipulated before burial. Both adult skulls have a series of scratches etched into them. Whoever did this probably worked with a razor-sharp obsidian flake, using it to separate skin and tissue from bone. The child’s skull appears to have received special attention: it has deep incisions at its base that don’t appear on the adult bones; portions of the cranium were polished with great care; and the lower jaw has been removed.
Cut marks and polishing on bones are hallmarks of cannibalism, which was surprisingly common among various populations of our ancestors. Had this been the fate of the Herto three, however, their skulls would have been smashed open, not handled with such care. The transportation, precise defleshing, carving and polishing suggest that whoever was responsible attached a sense of meaning or symbolism to their actions. If nothing else, the state of the remains indicates that our ancestors, even before they were fully human, had an innate curiosity about the dead.
120,000 years ago
Red is for ritual
Humans living in what is now Israel up to 120,000 years ago may not have had language, but they were no strangers to symbolism. Graves found at Skhul, near Lower Galilee, contained 10 individuals, some with their arms folded across their chests and legs bent. Others were buried with grave goods including seashells fashioned into beads. One man lay on his back with the mandible of a wild boar wrapped in his arms. Another clutched the skull of a bovid.
A nearby gravesite at Qafzeh, on the slopes of Mount Carmel, also contains strong evidence for the emergence of symbolic thought. Here, 90,000 years ago, a small boy was buried with the antlers of a fallow deer resting across his neck and his hand propped up on the deer’s skull by his side. Another grave contained a young adult, thought to be female, with an infant lying across her legs. Archaeologists excavating the graves at Qafzeh have found 71 pieces of red ochre – a clay pigment associated with a variety of Palaeolithic ritualistic practices. The Skhul graves also contain ochre, some of which seems to have been heated to obtain a specific red hue.
The careful arrangement of remains suggests intentional burial, but cannot by itself be interpreted as signifying symbolic thought, says Erella Hovers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who was involved in the Qafzeh and Skhul excavations. “But the presence of grave goods would definitely support this view.” Add the red ochre, with its ritualistic connotations, and this indicates that, for these people, .
43,000 years ago
A stack of bones
A century ago, a team of iron ore miners blasted a 20-metre-long tunnel into a hillside in Murcia, Spain, and came across a complex cavern now called Sima de las Palomas. They didn’t know it, but they may have been the first people there in 43,000 years. The site, although extensively damaged, has since yielded , including three entire skeletons stacked one on top of the other and covered in rocks, which appear to have been placed deliberately. Two of them, a woman and a child, had their arms bent so that their hands rested against their foreheads.
Michael Walker of the University of Murcia, who is part of the excavation team, thinks the cadavers were placed in the cave for protection. He suggests it may have been a practical decision. Perhaps whoever put them there was worried the bodies would attract predators, or was simply put off by the smell of decay, he says. “It may have just been good housekeeping.”
However, others see the burials as evidence that Neanderthals, like early humans, were capable of symbolic thinking. Near the bodies were flake tools and artefacts made of limestone, quartzite and rock crystal, some of which must have been fashioned 25 kilometres away. There are also several severed panther paws. If the paws and other Palaeolithic artefacts held a special meaning for those Neanderthals, it seems unlikely that they were simply tidying up their dead.
15,000 years ago
Getting spiritual
For most of prehistory, our ancestors were foraging nomads. We don’t know why they made the transition to become homesteading farmers, but we do know that it first occurred in a fertile area east of the Mediterranean. The Natufian people were among the pioneers. One of their burials, dating from between 15,000 and 11,500 years ago, holds clues about how they coped with the dramatic shift.
“The grave, containing 50 tortoise shells and an extra human foot, looks like a shaman burial“
Once humans adopted a sedentary lifestyle, the practice of burying the dead seems to have flourished. This particular grave, found in the Hilazon Tachtit cave site in northern Israel, exhibits several characteristics that would later become common behaviour in funerary practices worldwide. An elderly woman was buried with a basalt bowl, which suggests there was a graveside ritual, and turtle bones found nearby look like the remains of a funeral feast. But other grave goods indicate something more extraordinary. There are 50 tortoise shells, bones from various animals including a cow, a leopard and an eagle – and an extra human foot.
“We interpret it as a shaman burial,” says Leore Grosman at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who excavated the Hilazon cave. “[If so] it means that by this point in time the Natufian needed a spiritual leader to help them deal with the kinds of cultural stresses they were going through.”
12,600 years ago
An all-American boy
Exactly when and how humans colonised the Americas is hotly contested. The pioneers were probably Stone Age explorers who migrated from Asia about 16,000 years ago. Some went on to develop the Clovis culture renowned for its sophisticated tools, which have been found all over the western US. All that is known about Clovis burial practices can be traced to a single grave discovered in an underground cavern in Montana in 1968. It dates from around 12,600 years ago and contained the remains of a 3-year-old boy and an enormous cache of goods, including various flint and bone tools, covered in red ochre.
“What the Clovis people left behind here were things that would have been important to them in terms of ritualistic significance and for their survival,” says Michael Waters of Texas A&M University in College Station. Most intriguing is an heirloom bone tool approximately 150 years old when it was buried, which he interprets as an “offering”.
The size and significance of the cache suggest the Clovis boy was the son of someone special. “Whoever his parents were, their genetic material lives on,” Waters says. In 2014, the child became the earliest ancient American to have his genome sequenced. This showed that genes he carried are now found in most tribes in Central and South America and probably the US too. Nobody had expected one grave to reveal so much about the legacy of the Clovis people. “They’re the direct ancestors of basically everyone living south of Montana,” says Waters. “It’s an incredible thing to wrap your head around.”
9000 years ago
Sleeping with the dead
Would you sleep soundly knowing that the remains of your loved ones lay just inches below your bed? That’s what the residents of Çatalhöyük did 9000 years ago. Occupants of what may have been the world’s first city, situated in modern Turkey, would place dead family members inside raised-earth platforms or in pits dug into the floor of their homes. Once tucked into their holes in a fetal position, a clay cap or reed mat was placed over the grave, which was then used as a bed. Sometimes, graves were reopened and additional bodies squeezed in. When the family moved house, they dug up the remains and took them too.
Not all bodies were buried at home, though. Archaeologists have also found what look like shrines – one holding more than 60 skeletons in its floor. These buildings were often embellished with sculptures, murals and animal horns, and would have required significant upkeep. Caring for the dead, and keeping them close, seems to have been a central tenet of life and culture in Çatalhöyük. So much so, that .
5500 years ago
Cultural smelting pot
A mysterious group of cattle herders, living on the Eurasian steppe some 5500 years ago, has recently emerged as one of the founders of Western civilisation. The Yamnaya spoke Proto-Indo-European – from which most modern European languages originate – rode horses, used wheels and traded widely. These were innovative people and their graves contain clues about their ingenuity.
One burial mound at Utyevka in Russia is 100 metres long. Status weapons including a copper dagger and a cast copper shaft-hole axe signify it was the tomb of an elite warrior. The grave also contained a pestle, probably used for grinding food or pigments, and a pair of gold earrings. Yamnaya graves rarely contain gold and the earrings are particularly significant because the gold is made using an advanced technique called granulation.
“These were innovative people and their graves contain clues about their ingenuity“
“These objects are indicators of foreign trade, long-distance communication with the Aegean civilisations of the era in the Middle East,” says David Anthony at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York. The metalwork also shows the Yamnaya’s desire to innovate. “It’s very early in the evolution of metallurgy and they’re doing these weird experiments putting copper and iron together long before other people worked out how to,” he says.
The past 1000 years
Germ warfare
If a grave can tell us a lot, what might we learn from a thousand-year-old cemetery? Monks began burying people in the Badia Pozzeveri churchyard in Altopascio, Italy, in the 11th century, and these human remains, together with records of climate and socio-economic conditions, provide a remarkable timeline of human health and disease.
Of particular interest are the mass graves dating from the 1300s and 1800s, when the Black Death and then cholera struck the region. Along with human remains, researchers are finding microscopic remnants of the bacteria that caused these diseases. A team is now looking for DNA from the pathogens, which they will use to find out , when they acquired resistance to drug treatments and which modern strains they most closely resemble. If the work is a success, these disease organisms may turn out to be more valuable than even the most precious grave goods. They will provide crucial information to help us fight future epidemics.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Dead giveaway”
