The first deliberate burials

The story

A cave near Nazareth

The hills of Galilee, in northern Israel, hide many caves. One, not far from the town of Nazareth, is called Qafzeh. In the 1930s the French archaeologist René Neuville, a consul in Palestine and a scholar of prehistory, dug there for two seasons and found human skeletons buried in the floor of the cave. Other campaigns, between 1965 and 1979, found more. In all, the remains of some fifteen people have been counted, or of almost thirty by other counts, of all ages, and several burials. They are about 100,000 years old, perhaps a little more.

The skeletons belong to Homo sapiens, but to a very ancient group, with an almost modern face and a skull that was still sturdy. They were not Neanderthals, even though they lived in a region where, at other times, Neanderthals lived too. This is one piece of evidence that the first sapiens left Africa much earlier than was thought, and that the Near East was a land where species met.

The boy with the deer antlers

The most famous grave is that of a boy or girl of twelve or thirteen, called by archaeologists Qafzeh 11. The body was laid in a pit dug on purpose in the ground. On the chest, between the arms, rested the antlers of a big deer, whole and carefully arranged. Another burial shows a young woman with a small child placed at her feet. In some parts of the cave pieces of red ochre, a coloured mineral, had been left, and perforated sea shells that had come from the Mediterranean coast, dozens of kilometres away.

Why are they important? A dug pit, a body carefully arranged, objects beside it: these are actions that only make sense if someone thinks the dead person deserves attention. Archaeologists call them “intentional burials”. We cannot know whether those people believed in another life or simply wanted to say goodbye in a certain way to the one who was leaving. But we can see that there was a ritual.

Skhul and Mount Carmel

About forty kilometres away, on Mount Carmel, near the city of Haifa, there is another cave, Skhul. There, between 1931 and 1932, the American Theodore McCown, who was working with the British archaeologist Dorothy Garrod, found the remains of about ten people. They are roughly the same age, although the dating is a little uncertain and ranges from 120,000 to 80,000 years ago. A male skeleton, called Skhul V, had in his arms the jaw of a wild boar: perhaps an offering, perhaps a symbol of hunting.

The Neanderthals too

We should not think that this was an invention of ours alone. The Neanderthals also buried their dead, at least in some places: the graves at La Chapelle-aux-Saints in France, and at Kebara, also in Israel, about 60,000 years old, show it. The line between the two species, in this, is blurred.

In Africa, the oldest known burial is in Kenya, in Panga ya Saidi cave, near the coast: in 2021 a group of researchers showed that a child of about three, called Mtoto (“child” in Swahili), was laid in a small pit 78,000 years ago, with the body curled up and the head resting on a pillow of perishable material, which has vanished with time but was reconstructed from the position of the bones. One idea is causing debate: in some very recent studies it has been argued that an even older species, Homo naledi, buried its dead in South Africa, but most experts for now are waiting for more evidence.

How to recognise a burial

Archaeologists follow some clues: a pit that was dug and then filled in, a whole skeleton with the bones still in the right places (if a body is left in the open, animals scatter it), a particular position, objects nearby. Even so, doubts are possible, because a body can end up in a hole through natural causes. For this reason every new case is discussed at length.