The oldest deliberate cremation in the world was 9,500 years ago

A cremation of this type is “very unusual” in African archaeological records and contributes to “growing evidence of complex social worldviews among tropical African hunter-gatherers,” indicates a study led by the University of Oklahoma (USA) published in Science Advances.

Traces of deliberate cremations are rare among hunter-gatherers before the mid-Holocene and the oldest, confirmed by the presence of a pyre, along with other indicators, dated back to about 3,300 years in the Pastoral Neolithic.

The study now published analyzes the remains of the “oldest cremation in Africa and the oldest funeral pyre of an adult in the world,” the first signatory of the article, Jessica Cerezo-Román, told EFE.

That was a meticulously planned event, whose remains were found in a site at the base of Mount Hora (Malawi)and the group that made them returned to the place later to light another large bonfire.

The research revealed a complex mortuary ritual that had never been documented in this way among hunter-gatherers, which “reflects ancestral connections with the land and with ideas of memory and commemoration,” the researcher added.

The team used archaeological, geospatial, forensic and bioarchaeological methods to reconstruct the sequence of events in great detail.

The cremation, the study indicates, began with the collection of at least 30 kilos of dead wood and grass to create a large pyre, “which required considerable community effort.”write the authors.

Participants actively altered the fire during burning and continually added fuel to maintain high temperatures, which could have exceeded 500 degrees, analysis of ash sediments and bone fragments suggests.

The discovery of stone tools inside the pyre suggests that they were added to or embedded in the burning remains, perhaps as funerary objects.

The analysis of the 170 human bone fragments excavated from the pyre indicates that the person cremated was an adult woman between 18 and 60 years old and just under five feet tall.

The body was cremated before decomposition, probably within a few days of death, and cut marks on several limb bones suggest that parts of the body were excised or removed.

Although the fragmentation of the remains makes it difficult to reconstruct the position of the body, “the distribution of the elements, which are almost entirely long bones, suggests that the arms and legs were flexed or in a boxer’s position,” the article indicates.

The ritual is “very different” from the other burials at the archaeological site and They don’t know “why this woman was burned on such a large and spectacular pyre.”; However, it seems that, in life or death, “she had a significant role in the society that treated her that way at the time of death,” Cerezo-Román highlighted.

Furthermore, the skull was not found, which could have been removed before cremation, “possibly, as part of a funeral ritual in which bone elements such as ‘token’ were removed, associated with commemoration and memory practices,” said the researcher.

The team considered implausible alternative explanations such as predation or the meticulous anthropogenic collection of the burned cranial remains, which “would probably have been numerous and fragmentary if they had been subjected to the pyre,” the study notes.

Spatial reconstructions of the site revealed that that group returned to the same place, where they lit another very large bonfire, although no human remains were found associated with this new fire.

This hunter-gatherer society had “a more complex funerary and commemoration pattern than we thought”highlighted Cerezo-Román.

The remains show – the article notes – that the group not only invested in community funeral rituals, but also maintained a longer tradition based on their shared memory of the event.

Not only did they bury, but they also cremated their dead and, in addition, “they returned to the place and interacted with their environment in a way that created a ‘natural monument'”, that is, the spaces “also had meaning and created ancestral connections and a ritual sense”, according to the researcher.

These practices, he added, “highlight complex funerary and ritual activities whose origins predate the advent of food production, and question traditional hypotheses about community-scale cooperation and memory creation in tropical hunter-gatherer societies.”