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The Sun disappears from the horizon near the equator in just a few minutes. The forest is engulfed in darkness. At the foot of an African mountain, shadows of people were visible on the natural stone overhang. This was nearly 10,000 years old.
The fires are lit from a fierce flame that has been burning for many hours. It can be seen by people even miles away. Winds carry the burning smell. The fire’s memory will last for many generations, and it is likely to be recorded in archaeological records for much longer.
Our team is made up of bioarchaeologists who are also archaeologists. We have recently found the first evidence in Africa of cremation, the burning of the flesh of the body to produce bone fragments, ashes, and other remains. This was the earliest adult cremation ever discovered in the history of the planet.
A giant boulder was discovered under the pyre near Mount Hora. On the map, the site is located in Malawi. It is shown in black in the Zambezian Forest (colored green).
Jessica Thompson Natural Earth
The task of creating, maintaining and building a fire powerful enough to burn the human body completely is not easy. The earliest cremation on record dates back to around 40,000 years in Australia. However, the body wasn’t completely burned.
Pyres are a much more efficient way to burn a body. They’re a structure made of fuel that can be ignited. The first pyres were found in archaeological records only 11,500 years before now. One of the oldest examples was a child cremated under the floor of a home in Alaska.
The bones, ash, and other remains from cremation can help archaeologists reconstruct past burial rituals. In a scientific article published in Science Advances we describe a dramatic event which occurred in Malawi, south-central Africa about 9,500 ago. This shatters long-held beliefs about the treatment of dead hunter-gatherers.
At the Hora 1 site, in Northern Malawi, excavators are standing on the depth of a pyre.
Jessica Thompson
Discovering the truth
It started as a small amount of ash and then grew. The ash expanded outward and downward, getting thicker and more solid. Under trowels, pockets of black earth appeared briefly and then disappeared. The excavators pointed out a tiny bone near the bottom of the 1 1/2 foot (0.5 meter) archeological ash wall that was revealed beneath a natural stone overhang on the Hora 1 site, in northern Malawi.
It was actually the fractured end of an humerus from the upper arms of people. The radius, which is the opposite end of the arm’s lower part, was clinging on to its very tip. This was an elbow joint of a man, burnt and broken, that had been preserved by the debris of daily life of hunter-gatherers in Stone Age.
This structure is extremely rare.
The excavators found a large ash layer about two feet (0.60 meters) below the surface of today’s rock shelter.
Jessica Thompson
It also appeared impossible to find a person cremated from the Stone Age, because African foragers of any age do not practice cremation. Around 7,500 years old, the earliest burned remains of humans from Africa were found. However, this body had been incompletely burnt and no evidence was left of a burning pyre.
Early pastoralists of eastern Africa performed the first cremations around 3300 years ago. Overall, however, the practice is rare. It’s associated more with societies that produce food than hunter-gatherers.
The ash was the size of a queen-sized bed. We also found more human remains charred in small groups. It must have been a huge fire.
We were again shocked when we received the first radiocarbon date after returning from our fieldwork: It was about 9,500 ago.
Putting the puzzle together
Our team was made up of experts who were able to reconstruct what happened. We used forensics and bioarchaeology techniques to confirm that the skeletons belonged only to one person, who had been cremated soon after she died.
It was probably a female adult of about 5’1″ (1,5 meters). She was physically fit, had a powerful upper body and a healed infection of the bone on her left arm. The development of her bones and the onset of arthritis indicated that she had probably been in middle age when she passed away.
A stone tool was used to inscribe marks on the radius of the armbone. As the bone burned, it turned gray. On the right, the area of the box to the left has been enlarged.
Jessica Thompson
The patterns of cracking, warping and discoloration from fire damage revealed that her body had been burned, with some skin still attached, at a temperature exceeding 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. We could see small incisions on her arm and leg muscle connections under the microscope, which revealed that the people who tended the pyre had used stone tools to remove flesh.
The pyre contained tiny pointed tools, made of local stone. The tools were made probably at the time of burning.
Justin Pargeter
We found small, pointed stones in the pyre’s ash that indicated people added fire tools as the fire burned.
The way that the bones were arranged inside the large fire indicated to me it was not cannibalism, but some kind of ritual.
We found nothing of her head, which was a surprise. The dense nature of skull bones and teeth makes them very well preserved in cremations. The absence of her skull and teeth suggests that she may have had the head removed either before or after the cremation, as part of a funeral ritual.
A communal spectacle
The pyre was built by several people, who actively participated in this event. In the new excavations we conducted the year after, more fragments of the ancient woman’s bones were found, but they had been rearranged and were colored in a different way. The additional remains indicate that the corpse was handled, moved and attended to during cremation.
The ash from the entire pyre was analyzed at a microscopic level. It revealed blackened fungus and reddened termite soil structures as well as microscopic remains of plants. This helped us to estimate that the deadwood collected was at least 70 pounds (30 kg). The fire would have been stoked for several hours or days.
It was also revealed that it wasn’t the first nor the last fire on the Hora 1 Site. What appeared to us as a massive pile of ash during the fieldwork was actually a series of layers of fires. The radiocarbon dates of the ash showed that fires were lit on this spot around 10,240 years before. Several hundred years after the original cremation pyre was built, it was constructed at the same spot. The pyre was smoldering and new fires ignited on it. This resulted in fused ashes in micron-sized layers.
The pyre is lit repeatedly as the loose, sandy soil and very thin layers of ash are mixed together.
Flora Schilt
In a matter of a few centuries, rekindled blazes were built at the same location. There is no proof that any other people were cremated during the fires that followed, but the fact that so many people returned there for the purpose of doing this suggests that the significance of the site remained in the community’s memory.
Ancient cremation: a new perspective
What can we learn from all this about the ancient hunter-gatherers of the area?
It shows, for one thing, that whole communities participated in an extraordinary mortuary show. It can take a whole day and a lot of fuel for an open pyre to completely reduce a corpse. During this time, the smells and sights of burning wood are difficult to conceal.
It is surprising to see the scale of this effort. In the African record, complex multigenerational mortuary rituals tied to specific places are generally not associated with a hunting-and-gathering way of life.
It was impossible to conceal the pyre, which required a lot of community effort.
Anders Blomqvist/Stone by Getty Images
The different treatment of people in death suggests that social roles may have been more complex in the past. The site of Hora 1 has been a burial ground for men, women and even children since 16,000 BC. These other graves provided evidence of ancient DNA that they belonged to a local long-term group. These burials and those that followed a few centuries after the pyre were not interred in this elaborate spectacle.
Was there anything about her that was unique? She was a loved family member, or an outsider. This treatment was it because she had done something in her life, or did this have to do with a particular hope of the afterlife. We may be able to better understand the reasons for this cremation and its significance in this region by combining additional data and excavations from around the area.
The death of this woman was significant not only to those who built and maintained the pyre but to future generations as well.
