Earliest adorned female infant burial in Europe significant in understanding evolution of personhood


December 14, 2021

Ten thousand years ago, just after the last Ice Age, a group of hunter-gatherers buried an infant girl in a cave in what is now Italy. They entombed her with a rich selection of their treasured beads and pendants, and an eagle-owl talon, signaling their grief and showing that even the youngest females were recognized as full persons in their society.

The excavations and analysis of the discovery are published this week in Nature Scientific Reports and offer insight into the early Mesolithic period, from which few recorded burials are known. Arma Veirana cave The mouth of the Arma Veirana cave, a site in the Ligurian mountains of northwestern Italy.

Claudine Gravel-Miguel, postdoctoral researcher with the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University and co-author on the paper, performed the analysis of the ornaments, which includes over 60 pierced shell beads and four shell pendants.

Mortuary practices offer a window into the worldviews and social structure of past societies. Child funerary treatment provides important insights into who was considered a person and afforded the attributes of an individual self, moral agency and eligibility for group membership. The seemingly “egalitarian” funerary treatment of this infant female, whom the team nicknamed “Neve,” shows that as early as 10,000 years ago in Western Europe, even the youngest females were recognized as full persons in their society.

“The evolution and development of how early humans buried their dead as revealed in the archaeological record has enormous cultural significance,” said Jamie Hodgkins, ASU doctoral graduate and paleoanthropologist at the University of Colorado Denver.

The excavation

Arma Veirana, a cave in the Ligurian pre-Alps of northwestern Italy, is a popular spot for local families to visit. Looters also discovered the site, and their digging exposed the late Pleistocene tools that drew researchers to the area.

The research team started surveying the site in 2015 and discovered the remains during the last week of the 2017 field season. The team of project coordinators includes Italian collaborators Fabio Negrino from the University of Genoa and Stefano Benazzi from the University of Bologna, as well as researchers from the University of Montreal, Washington University, University of Ferrara, University of Tubingen and ASU Institute of Human Origins.

The first two excavation seasons were spent near the mouth of the cave, exposing stratigraphic layers that contained tools over 50,000 years old typically associated with Neandertals in Europe (Mousterian tools). They also found the remains of ancient meals such as the cut-marked bones of wild boars and elk, and bits of charred fat. In addition, they found stone tools that were much more recent and that had likely been eroding from deeper inside the cave. To better understand the stratigraphy of the cave and document its occupation history, the team opened new sections further inside the cave in 2017. As the team explored this new section, they began to unearth pierced shell beads, which Hodgkins examined more carefully back in the lab.

burial layout

Illustration showing the placement of beads and shells along with the cranium. Image by Claudine Gravel-Miguel

A few days after they found the first bead, one of the excavators uncovered a small piece of the infant’s cranial vault.

“I was excavating in the adjacent square and remember looking over and thinking, ‘That’s a weird bone,’” Gravel-Miguel said. “It quickly became clear that not only we were looking at a human cranium, but that it was also of a very young individual. It was an emotional day.”

Using dental tools and a small paint brush, researchers spent that week and the following field season to carefully expose the whole skeleton, which was adorned with articulated lines of pierced shell beads.

“The excavation techniques are state-of-the-art and leave no doubt to the associations of the materials with the skeleton,” said Curtis Marean, who was not involved in the study. Marean is associate director of the Institute of Human Origins and Foundation Professor with the School of Human Evolution and Social Change

Important changes in human prehistory

In a series of analyses coordinated across multiple institutions and numerous experts, the team uncovered critical details about the ancient burial. Radiocarbon dating determined that the child lived 10,000 years ago, and amelogenin protein analysis and ancient DNA revealed that the infant was a female belonging to a lineage of European women known as the U5b2b haplogroup.

“There’s a decent record of human burials before around 14,000 years ago,” Hodgkins said. “But the latest Upper Paleolithic period and earliest part of the Mesolithic are more poorly known when it comes to funerary practices. Infant burials are especially rare, so Neve adds important information to help fill this gap.”

“The Mesolithic is particularly interesting,” said co-author Caley Orr, ASU doctoral graduate and paleoanthropologist and anatomist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “It followed the end of the final Ice Age and represents the last period in Europe when hunting and gathering was the primary way of making a living. So, it’s a really important time period for understanding human prehistory.”

Detailed virtual histology, or study of the tissue and structure, of the infant’s teeth showed that she died 40 to 50 days after birth and that she experienced stress that briefly halted the growth of her teeth 47 days and 28 days before she was born. Carbon and nitrogen analyses of the teeth revealed that the baby’s mother had been nourishing the infant in her womb on a land-based diet.

The child as a member of the community

Gravel-Miguel performed an analysis of the ornaments adorning the infant, which demonstrated the care invested in each piece and showed that many of the ornaments exhibited wear that proves they were passed down to the child from group members. The details of this research — along with further results — are the focus of a separate article, currently under review.

Citing a similar burial of two infants dating to 11,500 years ago at Upward Sun River, Alaska, Hodgkins said the funerary treatment of Neve suggests that the recognition of infant females as full persons has deep origins in a common ancestral culture that was shared by peoples who migrated into Europe and those who migrated to North America. Or it may have arisen in parallel in populations across the planet.

The research, excavation and analysis were made possible with funding from The Wenner-Gren Foundation, Leakey Foundation, National Geographic Society Waitt Program, Hyde Family Foundations, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, and the Max Planck Society.

Article: “An infant burial from Arma Veirana in northwestern Italy provides insights into funerary practices and female personhood in early Mesolithic Europe,” Jamie Hodgkins, et al. Nature Scientific Reports.

Julie Russ

Assistant director, Institute of Human Origins

480-727-6571

Study suggests earliest use of bone tools to produce clothing in Morocco 120,000 years ago

Dating from 120,000 to 90,000 years ago, the bone tools were found in association with carnivore remains that showed signs of skinning for furs and pelts


September 16, 2021

A new study led by Arizona State University paleoanthropologist Curtis Marean and ASU doctoral graduate Emily Hallett details more than 60 tools made of bone and one tool made from the tooth of a cetacean, which includes whales, dolphins and porpoises. These finds, first unearthed from Contrebandiers Cave, Morocco, in 2011, are highly suggestive proxy evidence for the earliest clothing in the archaeological record and attest to the pan-African emergence of complex culture and specialized tool manufacture.

The invention of clothing, and the development of the tools needed to create it, are milestones in the story of humanity. Not only are they indicative of strides in cultural and cognitive evolution, archaeologists also believe they were essential in enabling early humans to expand their niche from Pleistocene Africa into new environments with new ecological challenges. However, as furs and other organic materials used to make clothing are unlikely to be preserved in the archaeological record, the origin of clothing is still poorly understood. Contrabandiers cave, Morocco map Location of Contrebandiers Cave, Morocco. Google map image Download Full Image

The current study published this week in iScience, which reports on a worked bone assemblage found near the Atlantic Coast of Morocco, provides strong evidence for the manufacture of clothing as far back as 120,000 years ago. 

As part of her research with the Institute of Human Origins and the Lise Meitner Pan-African Evolution Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH), Hallett was studying the vertebrate remains from Contrebandiers Cave deposits dating from 120,000 to 90,000 years ago. 

“The Contrebandiers assemblage now replaces Blombos as the oldest bone tool assemblage and industry,” said Marean, who is associate director with the ASU Institute of Human Origins and Foundation Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, as well as honorary professor and international deputy director at the African Centre for Coastal Palaeoscience, Nelson Mandela University.

“This was a critical time period and location for the early members of our species,” said Hallett, “and I was primarily interested in reconstructing the diet and habitat niche of the people who used this cave.”

Among the roughly 12,000 bone fragments, Hallett found more than 60 animal bones that had been shaped by humans for use as tools. At the same time, Hallett identified a pattern of cut marks on the carnivore bones suggesting that, rather than processing them for meat, the occupants of Contrebandiers Cave were skinning them for fur.

Hallett compared the tools she identified with others in the archaeological record and found that they had the same shapes and use marks as leather working tools described by other researchers.

contrabandiers bone example

Carnivores were skinned for fur, and bone tools were then used to prepare the furs into pelts. Image by Jacopo Niccolò Cerasoni 2021

“The combination of carnivore bones with skinning marks and bone tools likely used for fur processing provide highly suggestive proxy evidence for the earliest clothing in the archaeological record,” Hallett said. “But given the level of specialization in this assemblage, these tools are likely part of a larger tradition with earlier examples that haven’t yet been found.”

Also hidden amongst the bone fragments was the tip of a tooth from a whale or dolphin bearing marks consistent with use as a pressure flaker — a tool used for shaping stone tools. Given the age of the find, this represents the earliest documented use of a marine mammal tooth by humans and the only verified marine mammal remain from the Pleistocene of North Africa.

“Once again, we see that complex technologies such as bone tools are only associated with aquatic adaptations at the origin point of modern humans,” Marean said. “The coast was crucial.”

“The Contrebandiers Cave bone tools demonstrate that by roughly 120,000 years ago, Homo sapiens began to intensify the use of bone to make formal tools and use them for specific tasks, including leather and fur working,” Hallett said. “This versatility appears to be at the root of our species and not a characteristic that emerged after expansions into Eurasia.”

In the future, Hallett hopes to collaborate with other researchers to identify comparable skinning patterns in the assemblages they study and gain a better understanding of the origins and diffusion of this behavior.

Published article: "A worked bone assemblage from 120,000–90,000 year old deposits at Contrebandiers Cave, Atlantic Coast, Morocco." iScience. Emily Yuko Hallett, Curtis W. Marean, Teresa E. Steele, Esteban Álvarez-Fernández, Zenobia Jacobs, Jacopo Niccolò Cerasoni, Vera Aldeias, Eleanor M.L. Scerri, Deborah I. Olszewski, Mohamed Abdeljalil El Hajraoui, Harold L. Dibble.

Julie Russ

Assistant director, Institute of Human Origins

480-727-6571