BELIEFS × SOCIETY × GENETICS
Sungir, the Richest Ice Age Burials
~34,000 years ago
Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial
Sungir is a site of the Upper Palaeolithic in the Vladimir region of Russia, where excavations led by O. N. Bader in 1964 and 1969 uncovered the grave of an adult man and a double grave holding two adolescents. The bodies had been strewn with ochre and carried more than ten thousand small beads of mammoth ivory, found in rows still in place along the body, around the waist, on the limbs and on the heads, which is read as the trace of decorated garments; spears of mammoth ivory and pierced fox teeth accompanied them. Direct radiocarbon dates on the skeletons long disagreed, from 19,160 to 28,800 radiocarbon years, because consolidants applied to the bones in the 1960s had contaminated their collagen; dating one amino acid of that collagen, hydroxyproline, removes the contaminant and gives all the burials the same age, about 30,000 radiocarbon years, or ~34,000 calendar years. In 2017 the genomes of four of the buried were sequenced.
Why it matters
The four Sungir genomes answer a question that bones alone cannot: who was buried with whom. The individuals were not close relatives, although they came from a population of small effective size, and they show no more inbreeding than living hunter-gatherers, whose small residential bands exchange partners within a much wider network. That structure was therefore already in place 34,000 years ago. The graves add a second lesson: not all the dead received the same treatment, and some differences appear to follow individual pathological abnormalities, an early sign of social distinction.
Dating & uncertainty
Direct radiocarbon dates on the Sungir skeletons ranged from 19,160 to 28,800 radiocarbon years, and later ultrafiltration dates of 26,000 to 27,000 years were still too young: consolidants applied to the bones after excavation had contaminated the collagen. Dates on hydroxyproline, an amino acid isolated from that collagen and free of the contaminant, agree for Sungir 1 to 4 at about 29,000 to 30,000 radiocarbon years; calibrated, they place the occupation between roughly 38,900 and 32,630 years and the burials at ~34,000 years, retained here with the bounds 35,000 and 33,000. Had the younger dates been right, the burials would lose some 4,000 years and their rank among the earliest elaborate burials of Eurasia.
Sources
- Sikora et al. (2017), Science · Ancient genomes show social and reproductive behavior of early Upper Paleolithic foragersdoi:10.1126/science.aao1807
- Nalawade-Chavan et al. (2014), PLoS ONE · New Hydroxyproline Radiocarbon Dates from Sungir, Russia, Confirm Early Mid Upper Palaeolithic Burials in Eurasiadoi:10.1371/journal.pone.0076896
- Khlopachev et al. (2024), Camera Praehistorica · Ivory beads of the Sungir Paleolithic site: shapes and features of their alternation in set decorationsdoi:10.31250/2658-3828-2024-1-24-47
- Trinkaus et al. (2018), Antiquity · Diversity and differential disposal of the dead at Sunghirdoi:10.15184/aqy.2017.223
Our species’ history as one day
21:24:342 h 35 min before midnight
if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day