PEOPLING × BELIEFS

The Herto Skulls, Carried and Kept

~160,000 to 154,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Middle Stone Age · Saalian glacial

Three crania from Herto, in Ethiopia's Afar rift, put faces on our species some 160,000 years ago: two adults and a child, morphologically between older African fossils and the modern humans who came later. All three carry fine cut marks and polish made after death; the child's skull seems to have been repeatedly handled. The people who kept these skulls also butchered hippopotamus carcasses by the ancient lake shore, leaving both Acheulean and Middle Stone Age tools.

Why it matters

Something was already being done with the dead beyond simply leaving them. Defleshing skulls and keeping them is not burial, and no one knows what it meant, but it is deliberate, repeated treatment of the dead, tens of millennia before the oldest known graves. The record of human ritual may open here, with three polished skulls carried around an Ethiopian lake.

Dating & uncertainty

Argon dating brackets the fossils between 160,000 and 154,000 years ago. A 2022 re-examination of Ethiopian ash layers broke the tephra correlation that had tied Herto's minimum age to a distant site, but the direct argon dates on the site's own layers still stand.

Sources

1. White et al. (2003), Nature · Pleistocene Homo sapiens from Middle Awash, Ethiopiadoi:10.1038/nature01669
2. Clark et al. (2003), Nature · Stratigraphic, chronological and behavioural contexts of Pleistocene Homo sapiens from Middle Awash, Ethiopiadoi:10.1038/nature01670
3. Rightmire (2009), PNAS · Middle and later Pleistocene hominins in Africa and Southwest Asiadoi:10.1073/pnas.0903930106

Our species’ history as one day

12:02:1711 h 58 min before midnight

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