BELIEFS

Panga ya Saidi: Africa's Oldest Burial

~78,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Middle Stone Age · Last glacial

In a Kenyan cave, a child of about three was laid in a dug pit about 78,000 years ago: the oldest known human burial in Africa.

Panga ya Saidi is a cave in the coastal uplands of Kenya where the oldest known human burial in Africa was brought to light, published in 2021 and dated to about 78,000 years. It contained a child of two and a half to three years, designated Mtoto, placed on its side in a dug pit, legs flexed, the head perhaps supported, and then covered with sediment from the cave floor. The micromorphology of the sediments and the maintenance of anatomical connections establish the intentional character of the deposit: a body abandoned at the surface is disarticulated by scavengers and weather, so that joints remaining in place imply decomposition under cover.

Why it matters

The burial documents a treatment of the dead founded on a relationship maintained after death rather than on a technique. Set beside the Levantine burials of Qafzeh and the ornamented infant of Border Cave, it attests the practice of deliberate interment from southern Africa to the Near East, several tens of millennia before sedentism.

Dating & uncertainty

The burial is dated to 78,300 ± 4,100 years. The argument is taphonomic: a pit dug into the cave floor, the child flexed on its side, joints in connection, decomposition having occurred beneath the covering sediment. Other early African interments are documented, including the Border Cave infant, associated with a perforated shell around 74,000 years ago, and a child at Taramsa, in Egypt, dated by optical luminescence to between 80,400 and 49,800 years, with a mean value of 55,000 years.

Our species’ history as one day

18:03:255 h 57 min before midnight

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