Great archaeological find in Kenya: An infant found in a tomb that died 78,000 years ago

The child was not more than 2.5-3 years old: for 78,000 years he rested in a shallow grave, where he was carefully placed by his family, in a cave of Kenya. Archaeologists, after eight years of excavations, have unearthed the oldest tomb of modern man in Africa, in the heart of a rainforest.

“Moto”, as the scientists called him, a word meaning “child” in Swahili, died before he turned 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”. And for archaeologists this means that our ancestors, hunter-gatherers living in the area, had already conducted burial ceremonies.

It is the oldest tomb found in Africa, the continent where modern man appeared.

His discovery, as described today in the journal Nature, was the fruit of a long process, full of surprises.

It all started in 2013. A team of archaeologists began excavating the cave, at a site where many prehistoric tools had already been found in the past.

Among other things, they found an unusual cavity, where there were bones which, however, disintegrated when they tried to reveal them.

In 2017, in additional excavations, they uncovered the entire trench, finding a small tomb three meters deep that contained a pile of decaying bones. No one knew if they came from animals or humans. Because of its size, some thought it was a monkey bone, explained Michael Petralia, a professor at the Max Planck Institute and one of the study’s authors.

This time, however, archaeologists would not let the fragile bones disintegrate: they rescued them by covering them with plaster and sent them to the Nairobi Museum of Natural History, where scientists were able to locate teeth that appeared to belong to humans. The bones continued their odyssey, this time in a specialized laboratory in Burgos, Spain, where they were transported by a Kenyan researcher. With the method of tomography, the experts “saw” a small skeleton, as he remembers, obviously excited even today, Maria Martinon-Torres, the main author of the study.

The skeleton shows that the child was placed lying on his right side, with his legs folded towards his chest. His skull had been cut off, because it seems that the “pillow” where he was resting disintegrated over time and left 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 if it was some animal skin or some other kind of vegetable “fabric”.

“The child was deliberately placed there and received special attention from his community,” said a researcher at the Burgos National Center for Human Development. Fetal posture was a common practice in Homo sapiens and Nettendals, but the fact that they placed Moto “as if asleep” and covered him with a shroud “shows a tenderness, a farewell gesture.” “Only people 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 team.”

The discovery of the bones of a child so well preserved is extremely rare in Africa, where human remains are “counted on the fingers of one hand,” said Antoine Balzo, a paleoanthropologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, who did not participate in the study. . The oldest fossils of the “Wise Man”, 300,000 years old, have been found on this continent. But the oldest tombs, more than 100,000 years old, have been found in Europe and the Middle East.

The sex of the child remains unclear. It is certain, however, that it belonged to a community of hunter-gatherers since in the area have been found various remains of antelopes and other animals as well as stone tools. Scientists therefore have an idea of ​​what life would have been like when Moto lived and died.