Oldest known cremation pyre in Africa reveals mysterious woman who lived 9,500 years ago

(CNN) — Burned bone fragments found in northern Malawi have revealed the oldest cremation pyre ever found in Africa — and unearthed new mysteries that may be hard to solve.

By analyzing the bones and pyre sediments, researchers believe that hunter-gatherers cremated the body of a woman about 9,500 years ago, according to their study published Thursday in the journal Science Advances.

The pyre and human remains were found near the base of Mount Hora, a granite mountain that rises abruptly from and towers hundreds of feet above an otherwise flat plain. The fragments, largely from arm and leg bones, belonged to a woman between the ages of 18 and 60 who stood just under 5 feet tall, according to forensic analysis.

The site, called Hora 1, is underneath a natural boulder overhang large enough to shelter 30 people. It captured the interest of scientists in the 1950s when it was first excavated and discovered to be a hunter-gatherer burial ground. More recent research begun in 2016 has shown that humans started living at the site about 21,000 years ago and buried their dead there 8,000 to 16,000 years ago.

However, the bone fragments mark the only cremation to have occurred at the site, which makes the discovery even more unusual given that they were uncommon during that time period, the researchers said.

“Cremation is very rare among ancient and modern hunter-gatherers, at least partially because pyres require a huge amount of labor, time, and fuel to transform a body into fragmented and calcined bone and ash,” said lead author Jessica Cerezo-Román, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma.

The unusual discovery is shedding light on the complex nature of largely unknown funerary practices of African hunter-gatherers — and raises the question of why such effort was made to cremate only one person.

A spectacular effort

Excavations at the site between 2016 and 2019 revealed a large ash mound about the size of a queen bed containing two clusters of human bone fragments that exhibited burn patterns.

Previous discoveries of cremations in Africa date to pastoral neolithic herders from 3,500 years ago or later food-producing societies with higher population densities, which made the discovery even more unexpected, the researchers said.

“While we were excavating the pyre feature, there was an ongoing argument about how this could not possibly be a hunter-gatherer mortuary practice, and how there was no way it could be more than a couple thousand years old,” said study coauthor Dr. Jessica Thompson, assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Yale University. “When the radiocarbon dates came back, they blew us away.”

The researchers’ analysis also revealed that tremendous care had been taken to carry out the cremation.

Based on evidence of fungus and termites in the wood, about 70 pounds (30 kilograms) of dry deadwood was collected for the pyre, which would have taken considerable time to collect, said study coauthor Dr. Elizabeth Sawchuk, curator of human evolution at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

A detailed analysis of the pyre sediments shows the fire reached temperatures greater than 932 degrees Fahrenheit (500 degrees Celsius).

The size of the ash mound also suggests that the fire burned anywhere from several hours to several days, which wouldn’t have been possible unless the blaze was actively refueled and stoked, Sawchuk added.

Flaked points of stone tools were also found on the pyre, suggesting the pointed stones were added during the cremation as funerary objects.

It’s fascinating to see how far back cremation practices originate, said Lorraine Hu, manager of human histories and cultures at the National Geographic Society. Hu is currently a program officer for the society’s grants program that awarded Thompson’s grant, but she was not employed by the organization during Thompson’s grant-funded work.

“Cremation is something that we in the modern Western world don’t often give a second thought to, because it’s done by professionals in closed environments, but for other societies it would’ve been an intense visceral experience to build, light, and bury a funeral pyre,” Hu said. “It shows that these early hunter-gatherers had intentional, complex beliefs about remembrance and how to treat their dead.”

Missing pieces

Cut marks on the bones show that people actively helped the cremation process along by removing some of the woman’s flesh, said Thompson, who is also an assistant curator of anthropology at the Yale Peabody Museum. The team ruled out the idea that the woman was a victim of cannibalism because the cut marks were different from patterns on animal bones from the site, she added.

“Surprisingly, there were no fragments of teeth or skull bones in the pyre,” Sawchuk said. “Because those parts are usually preserved in cremations, we believe the head may have been removed prior to burning.”

While removing the skull and cutting flesh from bone sounds gruesome, complex rituals of remembrance may have been the underlying motivation, Cerezo-Román said.

“There is growing evidence among ancient hunter-gatherers in Malawi for mortuary rituals that include posthumous removal, curation, and secondary reburial of body parts, perhaps as tokens,” she said.

Cut marks on bones are commonly obscured or lost during the cremation process, which makes the discovery a great find, said Dr. Joel D.
Irish, subject leader in anthropology and archaeology at the UK’s Liverpool John Moores University. Irish was not involved in the new research. Dismembering an adult for cremation would have made the process easier, especially after the hunter-gatherers went to such extreme measures just to cremate one body, he said.

“That it is such an early date, and that they would have been transient as hunter/gatherers makes it more amazing,” Irish wrote in an email. “They clearly had advanced belief systems and a high level of social complexity at this early date.”

But why was this one woman cremated? There is evidence of other complete burials at the site, indicating that the woman must have merited special treatment, Thompson said.

Little is known about her, other than her bones suggest she was likely middle-aged with a low degree of mobility. But she used her arms more than expected compared with other hunter-gatherers buried at the site, Cerezo-Román said.

“While we can never truly know the motivations of ancient peoples, it seems likely that unusual circumstances in her life and/or death prompted this kind of unusual cultural treatment,” Sawchuk said. “Whether it was for positive or negative reasons is a big question mark.”

Recovering lost cultural history

Malawi was a British colony when Hora 1 was first excavated in 1950, a time when archaeology seemed more like treasure hunting than science, Thompson said. Skeletons belonging to a man and a woman were found there, but the remains weren’t dated. The rest of the site was considered mysterious but largely ignored due to the lack of complete remains.

The excavations between 2016 and 2019 were conducted as part of the Malawi Ancient Lifeways and Peoples Project, an effort to collect missing cultural evidence of the people who inhabited the site for 21,000 years and left behind beads, animal bones and chips from crafting stone tools, Thompson said. Over time, Thompson and her colleagues have unearthed more burials, ancient human DNA and tiny human bone fragments.

The hunter-gatherers may have practiced token taking, or carrying small pieces of bone from people they lost, and then placing them at landmarks.

Additional evidence at the Hora 1 site found beneath the ash mound shows that 700 years before the cremation, large fires were set in the same location. And 500 years after the cremation, large fires were lit on top of the pyre, although no cremated remains were found.

Mount Hora may have been a natural monument, memorial or place where people returned to share cultural rituals — even generations after the cremation, Sawchuk said.

“It felt like people had come back, within community memory of what had happened there, and reenacted the ritual all over again,” Thompson said. “The fires were so unnecessarily large to just be campfires, which are usually economical in size, that it really seems like this was an event that lived on in oral history for quite some time. This place, and this event, must have had meaning to these people long after the pyre itself occurred.”

The recent discoveries at Hora 1 show that hunter-gatherers had complex cultural behaviors and practices thousands of years before the rise of cities, ironworking and agriculture, Sawchuk said.

“What is so interesting about this case is that it shows that hunter-gatherers living nearly 10,000 years ago had the capacity for and skills to cremate their dead, and that they could coordinate this degree of labor, but generally chose not to do so,” she added.

The difficulty in understanding hunter-gatherer societies stems from the fact that they didn’t leave behind large settlements. Studying other natural rock formation sites that may have sheltered hunter-gatherers across the region and even revisiting old museum collections could shed light on the diverse lives they lived.

“Ancient African hunter-gatherers have historically been treated as though they were all the same, when in fact they would have had as much cultural diversity in belief systems and lifeways as any other group of people,” Thompson said.

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