How stone age people buried their dead

About 12,000 years ago, a great feast was
held in honour of a mysterious woman. The
group filled her grave with strange objects.

Then, bizarrely, they threw the remains of
their meal into the grave.
The remains of the feast were discovered in
Hilazon Tachtit cave in Israel, where other
human remains have previously been found .
Archaeologists have been poring over the
remains from this fateful day ever since
they were discovered.
They have now managed to reconstruct the
exact sequence of events at the funeral.
Their findings are published in the journal
Current Anthropology .
The group belonged to the Natufian culture,
who lived in the Levant from about 15,000 to
11,500 years ago.
This is the first time burials were the
order of the day
They lived in groups and had settled down,
before the dawn of farming. This was
unusual: most other humans at this time
lived in bands of hunter-gatherers who
moved from place to place.
The Natufians were among the first groups
to carry out organised burial rituals.
"This is the first time burials were the order
of the day at that time. Maybe it's because
we are seeing [greater] complexity in
society," says Leore Grosman of the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem in Israel, who has
been analysing the grave for over eight
years.
The feast in Hilazon Tachtit was one of the
most extensive funeral banquets ever
discovered. It is also one of the oldest.
It included an impressive menu. Fish,
mountain gazelles, red foxes, pine martens,
snakes and hares were among the species
uncovered.
The forearm of a wild boar and yet
more tortoise carapaces were placed
under her head and pelvis
Roast tortoises were evidently a favourite.
The remnants of over 80 were found,
representing about 44lb (20kg) of meat.
There must have been a lot of people to get
through all this food, though just how many
is difficult to know.
Grosman and her colleague Natalie Munro of
the University of Connecticut in Storrs, US
found that the funeral preparations and
feast were divided into at least six carefully-
planned stages.
First, the Natufians excavated the cave floor
so that the grave could be made.
The Natufians sealed the body with a
large slab of limestone
Next, they placed a limestone cache inside
the grave and filled it with strange objects.
These included a horn from a male gazelle, a
chunk of red ochre, three or more tortoise
carapaces, and fragments of chalk. They
then "dumped" ash sediment onto the cache.
It was only in the fourth stage that the
people placed the woman's body inside the
grave, in an almost sitting position. The
forearm of a wild boar and yet more tortoise
carapaces were placed under her head and
pelvis.
Many other unusual objects – not seen in
other Natufian sites – were then placed
around and on top of the body. These
included sea shells and a golden eagle's
wing tip. The most bizarre inclusion was "an
articulated human foot" that belonged to
another individual.
The fifth stage was the feast itself. People
threw the remnants of food into the grave
before it was sealed.
"They were not afraid to dispose [of] what
we call garbage in the grave," says Grosman.
"It was almost like they were weighing the
body down."
In the sixth and final stage, the Natufians
sealed the body with a large slab of
limestone that weighed 165lb (75kg). It is
the largest block of limestone ever
discovered in a Natufian site.
Later Neolithic rituals were rooted, to
varying degrees, in earlier Natufian
traditions
This funeral feast would have taken a lot of
preparation. Gathering and hunting the
animals could have taken weeks.
We do not know for sure why this woman
received such a special grave, while others
nearby had much plainer burials. But her
elaborate burial suggests the woman was an
important individual.