A 7,700-Year-Old Case of Death During Childbirth in Siberia

If childbirth is still today one of the most dangerous things a woman can do, imagine how dangerous it was 7,700 years ago, before modern medicine. The remains of a Stone Age Siberian mother and her newborn twins, one still in utero, found in a Paleolithic graveyard near Lake Baikal, constitutes the earliest grave found of a mother who died in the midst of childbirth.

An archaeologist examining the remains in early 2015 found that the mother had just given birth to twins, not just one baby as was previously believed. She found tiny duplicate bones and knew the babies were twins, said a LiveScience article.

The family and community may not have known the mother was pregnant with twins because one of the fetuses apparently had not exited the body yet.

The graveyard, with 101 bodies found so far, is near the city of Irkutsk to the north of the southern end of Lake Baikal. The cemetery is called Lokomotiv because workers found it while digging out the side of a hill to build the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1897.

A Cambridge University map shows the Stone Age grave Lokomotiv north of Russia’s Lake Baikal, the deepest freshwater body of water in the world.