BELIEFS

The Oldest Burials

~92,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Middle Stone Age · Last glacial

In the caves of Qafzeh and Skhul, in the Levant, early members of our species dug graves and laid their dead in them, sometimes together, an adult with a child, around 92,000 years ago and perhaps earlier. The Qafzeh layers that hold the graves also hold hearths, lumps of red ochre, and complete seashells carried from a shore thirty-five kilometres away, several bearing traces of stringing and ochre stains.

Why it matters

A grave is an act addressed to no living audience. Whatever these people believed, they spent effort on individuals who could no longer return it, and surrounded death with objects and pigment. These are the oldest known burials by anyone, made by people using the same Mousterian toolkit as Neanderthals: the gesture came before any difference in technology.

Dating & uncertainty

Burnt flints from the Qafzeh burial layers date to 100,000 to 90,000 years by thermoluminescence; the related Skhul burials fall between 135,000 and 100,000 years. Which single grave is oldest cannot be said; the cluster as a whole is the earliest known.

Sources

1. Valladas et al. (1988), Nature · Thermoluminescence dating of Mousterian "Proto-Cro-Magnon" remains from Israel and the origin of modern mandoi:10.1038/331614a0
2. Grün et al. (2005), Journal of Human Evolution · U-series and ESR analyses of bones and teeth relating to the human burials from Skhuldoi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2005.04.006
3. Bar-Yosef Mayer et al. (2009), Journal of Human Evolution · Shells and ochre in Middle Paleolithic Qafzeh Cave, Israel: indications for modern behaviordoi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2008.10.005

Our species’ history as one day

16:59:257 h 1 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day