Per-Andre Hoffmann/Aurora
NO OTHER animal buries its dead. It is a peculiarly human thing to do, and we’ve been doing it for a long time. Last year, it emerged that our ancestors may have laid their dead to rest as far back as 3 million years ago. This raises intriguing questions about the evolution of the human mind. To understand the idea of death, you need empathy and intuition. To feel your own mortality and to create rituals that recognise the mortality of others, you must be capable of symbolic thinking – which also underpins language, art and religion. What’s more, burials reflect the cultural concerns and practices of the people who created them. Graves, therefore, hold clues about human curiosity, the dawning of spirituality, ancestor cults, global domination, trade, technological ingenuity and more. In search of these, we’ve unearthed 10 of the most significant gravesites:
2-3 million years ago
The first burials?
The ancient remains discovered deep inside the Rising Star cave in South Africa were in a place so inaccessible that petite climbers had to be hired to get them out. Last year, the bones were identified as belonging to a previously unknown species of human, Homo naledi, dating from between 2 and 3 million years ago. But how and why they ended up in such an inaccessible cave system remains a mystery. One idea is that they were laid there after death. If so, the first burials were much earlier than we thought.
Until Rising Star, the best contender for the oldest gravesite was the Sima de los Huesos, or “pit of bones”, in Spain. It lies at the end…
