Kenyan Cave Child Grave Declared Africa’s Earliest Human Burial!

78,000 years ago someone buried a young child in a cave. Now, researchers say that child’s grave in Kenya is the earliest known example of a deliberate human burial by modern humans in Africa. The discovery of the child’s grave sheds new light on formal burials and how people treated their dead during Africa’s Middle Stone Age period.

The new study on the earliest human burial in Africa appears in the journal Nature. In the paper, the researchers explain that there are many studies which have focused on the evolution of human behavior in the Middle Stone Age of Africa (which lasted from about 280,000 to 25,000 years ago), but few have explored human behavior in relation to formal burials at that time. This is primarily due to the lack of clear, intentionally made human graves from that time period found on the continent to date.

Virtual ideal reconstruction of Mtoto’s position in the burial pit. (Jorge González/Elena Santos/Nature)

Finding the Child Grave in the Cave Wasn’t a Straightforward Process

A Nature press release states that María Martinón-Torres of CENIEH (National Research Center on Human Evolution), in Burgos, Spain and her colleagues analyzed the remains of the child which came from Panga ya Saidi, a cave site on the Kenyan coast.