非洲最古老的人类埋葬

About 78,000 years ago, at the mouth of a yawning cave complex in today’s south-eastern Kenya, someone placed the body of a three-year-old child on its side in a purpose-dug grave and covered it with earth from the cave floor.

在这些时刻所说或所做的一切都会及时丢失，但是这种有意的行为 - 今天在纸在日记中Nature– is the oldest human burial ever uncovered in Africa and offers scientists a window into ancient burial practice.

昆士兰大学的合着者兼考古学家艾莉森·克劳瑟（Alison Crowther）说：“这是非洲的第一个。”“非洲是我们物种的摇篮，Homo sapiens，但是我们真的没有太多的证据表明从非洲各地的任何地方，几乎没有来自东非的任何早期葬礼。”

她解释说，这一发现是一个真正的突破，因为“它使我们对我们物种在文化和解剖学上如何发展的非凡，前所未有的瞥见”。

这个孩子 - 绰号mtoto，意为在斯瓦希里语中的“孩子” - 被放置在弯曲的位置，躺在侧面，膝盖朝向胸部，这表明它可能已被紧紧笼罩。头部和颈部塌陷的模式还表明，埋葬孩子的人可能在头部下方放置了可腐烂的材料，以供支撑。

所有这些实践都指向葬礼的一种形式。

Team member Patrick Faulkner, an archaeologist from the University of Sydney, says finding this oldest human burial in Africa is particularly significant in expanding our current understanding of early human behaviour: “We do see complex behaviour through things like personal ornamentation and symbolism, but this burial adds quite a lot to our understanding of symbolic and conceptual complexity in human populations.

“这清楚地显示有意为之burial and treatment of the dead at 78,000 years ago. These are complex behaviours linked to complex emotions.”

Intentional burials of early modern humans and Neanderthals have beendiscovered在欧亚大陆，可以追溯到12万年来。但是，在非洲只发现了少数早期的人类埋葬。给出Homo sapiensevolved in Africa before migrating out, it may seem surprising that earlier burials are found in Eurasia. This conspicuous absence in the archaeological record may be a result of different mortuary practices, or perhaps scientists simply haven’t yet looked in the right places.

非洲其他已知的早期葬礼通常是年轻人。

“This might indicate some kind of special treatment of the young, and potentially a process of mourning that is one of the hallmarks of modern behaviour,” Faulkner says – however, it’s important to note that absence of evidence does not always equate to evidence of absence.

The child was first found in 2013 during excavations of the archaeologically rich Panga ya Saidi cave by Germany’sMax Planck Institute, in partnership with the National Museums of Kenya (Nairobi) and archaeologists from around the world. The site was initially targeted as part of a project looking at trade in the Indian Ocean several thousand years ago, but as the team dug deeper they began finding evidence of early symbolic behaviour, such as ochre use and 68,000-year-old beads.

然后，在2013年，该孩子被发现到沟渠三米，尽管直到2017年才完全暴露出来。

西班牙布尔戈斯国家人类进化论（CENIEH）国家研究中心的首席作家兼主任玛丽亚·马丁托（MaríaMartinón-Torres）指出，“脊柱和肋骨的表达也被保存得惊人，甚至保存了胸腔笼子的弯曲，表明这是一个不受干扰的埋葬，身体的分解发生在发现骨头的坑中。”

由于骨头脆弱且高度分解，因此在现场服用了石膏铸件，然后在西班牙的Cenieh实验室进行了研究。这证实了骨头属于三岁的人类儿童两半。

The team also looked at the child’s teeth, which showed them that while it belonged to our species, it also had some primitive traits. Along with other archaeological evidence of modern humans around the same time period, it demonstrates that populations ofHomo sapiens在非洲周围看起来并不一样。

克劳瑟说：“这确实很重要，因为它表明我们的物种并非来自非洲一个地区的一个人口。”

她解释说，这是我们解剖学革命中区域主义的证据，甚至在我们的文化进化中，也许像其他年轻的葬礼所表现出不同的葬礼实践一样。

克劳特（Crowther）认为，随着非洲的实地调查，我们可能会发现甚至较旧的葬礼。

“We know that humans have the capacity for symbolic thought that goes much earlier,” she says. “It seems like only a small leap then for us to go from other symbolic thoughts and capacities to having this complex treatment of the dead.”

Australia, meanwhile, has its own deep record of symbolic human burials. Found in 1969 and 1974 respectively, the bodies of芒戈女士– one of the earliest cremations on the planet – and Mungo Man are some of the oldest anatomically modern human burials outside of Africa, dating to around 42,000 years ago.

The finds revolutionised the scientific understanding of the deep antiquity of occupation on this continent, and forced the establishment to acknowledge the long ancestry of local Paakantji, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngiyampaa people, who in 2017 reclaimed Mungo Man’s remains from the Australian National University – after decades of campaigning – and brought them back to country.

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