The child was not older than 2.5-3 years old: For 78,000 years, he rested in a shallow grave., where his family carefully placed him inside a cave in Kenya. After eight years of excavations, archaeologists, They uncovered the oldest tomb of modern humans in Africa, in the heart of a tropical forest.
«Mto,» as scientists named him, a word meaning «child» in Swahili, died before reaching the age of 3 in an area now called Panga for Saidi.. His body was placed in a tomb, wrapped in a shroud, in a fetal position, with his head resting on a «pillow.» For archaeologists, this means that our hunter-gatherer ancestors who lived in the area had already developed burial rituals.
It is the oldest tomb ever found in Africa, the continent where modern humans first appeared.
His discovery, as described today in Nature magazine, was the result of a long process full of surprises.
It all started in 2013. A team of archaeologists began excavation in the cave, at a spot where many prehistoric tools had already been found in the past.
Among other things, they found an unusual cavity containing bones, which disintegrated when they tried to uncover them.
In 2017, during additional excavations, they uncovered the entire trench, finding a small grave three meters deep containing a pile of decomposed bones. No one knew whether they came from animals or humans. Due to their size, some believed they were monkey bones, as explained by Michael Petralia, professor at the Max Planck Institute and one of the authors of the study.
This time, however, archaeologists would not let the fragile bones disintegrate: they preserved them by covering them with plaster and sent them to Nairobi Natural History Museum, where scientists managed to locate teeth that appeared to belong to a human being. The bones continued their odyssey, this time to a specialized laboratory. in Burgos, Spain, where they were transported by a Kenyan researcher. Using tomography, the experts «saw» a small skeleton, as Maria Martinon-Torres, the lead author of the study, recalls, visibly moved even today.
The skeleton shows that the child was placed lying on his right side, with his legs folded toward his chest. His skull had been severed because it appears that the «cushion» on which he was resting had decomposed over time, leaving a gap where the child's head later fell.
The body also appears to have been wrapped in a kind of «shroud,» but experts do not know whether it was animal skin or some other kind of plant-based «fabric.».
«The child was deliberately placed there and received special attention from his community,» says the researcher at the National Center for Human Evolution in Burgos. The fetal posture was common practice among Homo sapiens and Neanderthals., but the fact that they laid Mto «as if he were asleep» and covered him with a shroud «shows tenderness, a gesture of farewell.» «Only humans treat the dead with the same respect, even the same tenderness, that they treat the living. Even when we die, we remain members of our group,» he added.
The discovery of a child's bones, so well preserved, is extremely rare in Africa, where human remains «can be counted on the fingers of one hand,» commented Antoine Balzo, a paleoanthropologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, who did not participate in the study. The oldest fossils of «Homo sapiens,» dating back 300,000 years, have been found on this continent.. However, the oldest graves, dating back more than 100,000 years, have been found in Europe and the Middle East.
The sex of the child remains unclear. However, it is certain that he belonged to a community of hunter-gatherers, as various remains of antelopes and other animals, as well as stone tools, have been found in the area. Scientists therefore have an idea of what life was like at the time when Mto lived and died.
