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 lower layers at Qafzeh also held hearths, lumps of red ochre and complete seashells carried from a shore thirty-five kilometres away. Several of the shells bear traces of having been strung and a few are stained with ochre; most come from levels a little older than the graves.

Why it matters

A grave is effort spent on someone who can no longer return it. Whatever these people believed, they gave that effort, and surrounded death with objects and pigment. These are the oldest symbolic burials known for any human species, left 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 Skhul burials nearby fall between 135,000 and 100,000 years, if they were made within a short span. No single grave can be called the oldest; 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