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Near the equator, the Sun hurries below the horizon in a matter of minutes. Darkness seeps from the surrounding forest. Nearly 10,000 years ago, at the base of a mountain in Africa, people’s shadows stretch up the wall of a natural overhang of stone.
They’re lit by a ferocious fire that’s been burning for hours, visible even to people miles away. The wind carries the smell of burning. This fire will linger in community memory for generations − and in the archaeological record for far longer.
We are a team of bioarchaeologists, archaeologists and forensic anthropologists who, with our colleagues, recently discovered the earliest evidence of cremation – the transformation of a body from flesh to burned bone fragments and ashes – in Africa and the earliest example of an adult pyre cremation in the world.
The pyre was found under a giant boulder near the base of Mount Hora. The site is in Malawi, which is outlined in black within the Zambezian forest (colored green) on the map of Africa. Jessica Thompson and Natural Earth
It’s no easy task to produce, create and maintain an open fire strong enough to completely burn a human body. While the earliest cremation in the world dates to about 40,000 years ago in Australia, that body was not fully burned.
It is far more effective to use a pyre: an intentionally built structure of combustible fuel. Pyres appear in the archaeological record only about 11,500 years ago, with the earliest known example containing a cremated child under a house floor in Alaska.
Many cultures have practiced cremation, and the bones, ash and other residues from these events help archaeologists piece together past funeral rituals. Our scientific paper, published in the journal Science Advances, describes a spectacular event that happened about 9,500 years ago in Malawi in south-central Africa, challenging long-held notions about how hunter-gatherers treat their dead.
Excavators standing at the depth of the pyre at the Hora 1 site in northern Malawi. Jessica Thompson
The discovery
At first it was just a hint of ash, then more. It expanded downward and outward, becoming thicker and harder. Pockets of dark earth briefly appeared and disappeared under trowels and brushes until one of the excavators stopped. They pointed to a small bone at the base of a 1½-foot (0.5-meter) wall of archaeological ash revealed under a natural stone overhang at the Hora 1 archaeological site in northern Malawi.
The bone was the broken end of a humerus, from the upper arm of a person. And clinging to the very end of it was the matching end of the lower arm, the radius. Here was a human elbow joint, burned and fractured, preserved in sediments full of debris from the daily lives of Stone Age hunter-gatherers.
We wondered whether this could be a funeral pyre, but such structures are extremely rare in the archaeological record.
Excavators began finding a thick ash deposit about 2 feet (0.6 meters) under the modern-day surface of the rock shelter. Jessica Thompson
Finding a cremated person from the Stone Age also seemed impossible because cremation is not generally practiced by African foragers, either living or ancient. The earliest evidence of burned human remains from Africa date to around 7,500 years ago, but that body was incompletely burned, and there was no evidence of a pyre.
The first clear cases of cremation date to around 3,300 years ago, carried out by early pastoralists in eastern Africa. But overall the practice remained rare and is associated with food-producing societies and not hunter-gatherers.
We found more charred human remains in a small cluster, while the ash layer itself was as large as a queen bed. The blaze must have been enormous.
When we returned from fieldwork and received our first radiocarbon dates, we were shocked again: The event had happened about 9,500 years ago.
Piecing together the events
We built a team of specialists to piece together what had happened. By applying forensic and bioarchaeological techniques, we confirmed that all the bones belonged to a single person who was cremated shortly after her death.
This was a small adult, probably a woman, just under 5 feet (1.5 meters) in height. In life, she was physically active, with a strong upper body, but had evidence of a partially healed bone infection on her arm. Bone development and the beginnings of arthritis suggested she was probably middle-aged when she died.
Marks incised on the shaft of the lower arm bone (radius) were inflicted by a stone tool. The bone then turned gray as it burned. The area in the box on the left is enlarged on the right of the image. Jessica Thompson
Patterns of warping, cracks and discoloration caused by fire damage showed her body was burned with some flesh still on it, in a fire reaching at least 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit (540 degrees Celsius). Under the microscope we could see tiny incisions along her arms and at muscle connections on her legs, revealing that people tending the pyre used stone tools to help the process along by removing flesh.
Tiny pointed tools made from local stone were found within the pyre. They were probably made at the same time that it burned. Justin Pargeter
Within the pyre ash, we found many small pointed chips of stone that suggested people had added tools to the fire as it burned.
And the way the bones were clustered inside such a large fire showed that this was not a case of cannibalism: It was some other kind of ritual.
Perhaps most surprisingly, we found no evidence of her head. Skull bones and teeth usually preserve well in cremations because they are very dense. While we can’t know for sure, the absence of these body parts suggest her head may have been removed before or during the cremation as part of the funeral ritual.
A communal spectacle
We determined that the pyre must have been built and maintained by multiple people who were actively engaged in the event. During new excavations the following year, we found even more bone fragments from the same ancient woman, displaced and colored differently from in the main pyre. These additional remains suggest that the body was manipulated, attended and moved during the cremation.
Microscopic analysis of ash samples from across the pyre included blackened fungus, reddened soil from termite structures, and microscopic plant remains. These helped us estimate that people collected at least 70 pounds (30 kg) of deadwood to do the task and stoked the fire for hours to days.
We also learned that this was not the first fire at the Hora 1 site – nor its last. To our astonishment, what had seemed during fieldwork to be a single massive pile of ash was in fact a layered series of burning events. Radiocarbon dating of the ash samples showed that people began lighting fires on that spot by about 10,240 years ago. The same location was used to construct the cremation pyre several hundred years later. As the pyre smoldered, new fires were kindled on top of it, resulting in fused ashes in microscopic layers.
Loose, sandy, burned soil was mixed on top of very thin layers of ash, showing that the pyre was lit over and over again. Flora Schilt
Within a few hundred years of the main event, another large fire was built again at the exact same place. While there is no evidence that anyone else was cremated in the subsequent fires, the fact that people repeatedly returned to the spot for this purpose suggests its significance lived on in community memory.
A new view of ancient cremation
What does all of this tell us about ancient hunter-gatherers in the region?
For one, it shows that entire communities were engaged in a mortuary spectacle of extraordinary scale. An open pyre can take more than a day of constant tending and an enormous amount of fuel to fully reduce a body, and during this time the sights and smells of burning wood and other remains are impossible to hide.
This scale of mortuary effort is unexpected for this time and place. In the African record, complex multigenerational mortuary rituals tied to specific places are generally not associated with a hunting-and-gathering way of life.
The pyre event was a spectacle that required many hours of communal effort and would have been impossible to hide. Anders Blomqvist/Stone via Getty Images
It also shows that different people were treated in different ways in death, raising the possibility of more complex social roles in life. Other men, women and children were buried at the Hora 1 site beginning as early as 16,000 years ago. In fact, those other burials have provided ancient DNA evidence showing they were part of a long-term local group. But those burials, and others that came a few hundred years after the pyre, were interred without this labor-intensive spectacle.
What about this person was different? Was she a beloved family member or an outsider? Was this treatment because of something she did in life or a specific hope for the afterlife? Additional excavation and data from across the region may help us better understand why this person was cremated and what cremation meant to this group.
Whoever she was, her death had important meaning not just to the people who made and tended the pyre, but also to the generations that came after.
Jessica C. Thompson, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Yale University; Elizabeth Sawchuk, Curator of Human Evolution of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and Research Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York), and Jessica Cerezo-Román, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Oklahoma
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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