A 78,000-year-old fossil found on Kenya’s coast suggests that our ancestors interred the deceased with care.
Traveling across Europe in 2018, anthropologist María Martinón-Torres cradled her luggage like a newborn. It held Stone Age cave dirt, cast in plaster and swaddled with packing foam. The bundle had left Kenya for a conference in Germany, and was accompanying Martinón-Torres to Burgos. “I didn’t know at that time I was literally carrying a child in my arms,” she says.
To expose the powdery remains, her team used the microcomputed tomography system at Spain’s National Research Center on Human Evolution, where Martinón-Torres is director. Over a year, they applied instruments like dental tools to remove soil without disturbing bone dust. This allowed for crisper CT scans.
An exciting finding indicates that human ancestors may have placed pillows and animal hide in graves. Meanwhile, our forebears remained in Africa and developed modern innovations like ornamental beads and advanced weapons. Yet, scant evidence exists for funerary rituals during Africa’s Middle Stone Age, 30,000 to 320,000 years ago. Two suspected burials — from a 74,000-year-old South African cave and a 69,000-year-old Egyptian quarry — were excavated decades ago, before state-of-the-art methods arrived.
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