Some of the oldest burials that most archaeologists accept are roughly 120,000 to 90,000 years old. They come from two caves in present-day Israel, Skhul and Qafzeh, where early members of our own species, Homo sapiens, placed some of their dead in the ground (Vandermeersch & Bar-Yosef 2019). Neanderthals buried at least some of their dead too. The oldest known burial in Africa is a small child laid in a pit at Panga ya Saidi, Kenya, about 78,000 years ago (Martinón-Torres et al. 2021). These graves show people doing something deliberate after a death: digging, arranging a body, sometimes adding an object. What they believed about death is a separate question that soil and bones can’t answer.
How can anyone tell a grave from a body that just ended up there?
Bodies end up underground for many reasons besides funerals: caves fill with sediment, roofs collapse, animals drag remains around. So archaeologists work a bit like crime-scene investigators. (That’s an analogy. Nobody gets a confession.) They look for:
- A cut. Was a hole dug into an older layer? At La Ferrassie, France, a 2020 team concluded that a pit had been dug into a layer with no artifacts and a Neanderthal child of about two laid inside (Balzeau et al. 2020, Conclusions).
- Bones still in place. If fragile joints are still connected, the body probably decayed where it lay, covered before scavengers reached it.
- Position. A tightly bent body, or a head raised on something, points to someone arranging it.
- Objects. Something set on the body, not just lying in the same dirt.
Each step gets harder. A dug pit can be tested under a microscope. A wish to honor the dead can’t. This collection climbs the same ladder for all evidence from before writing (what was found and where → what is physically there → how it got that way → what people did → what it meant) and stops when the evidence runs out.
What do the oldest graves actually look like?
Skhul and Qafzeh, Israel: about 120,000–90,000 years ago
Two lab dating methods (thermoluminescence and electron spin resonance) put the human remains in both caves at roughly 120,000–90,000 years old (Strongly supported; Vandermeersch & Bar-Yosef 2019, abstract and ¶15; Smithsonian, Skhul V).
At Qafzeh, a 12- or 13-year-old lay on their back in a roughly rectangular pit dug into bedrock, head propped against the pit wall. Part of a hunted fallow deer, including a piece of its skull, lay across the upper chest. Vandermeersch and Bar-Yosef call this “probably the clearest evidence” of a grave offering from that era, but they prefer the more neutral phrase “intentionally deposited” (Vandermeersch & Bar-Yosef 2019, ¶42–44). Whether it was an offering is Plausible, not proven. The same teen had a serious fracture of the forehead bone with signs of healing, so the injury wasn’t fatal, at least not right away (Vandermeersch & Bar-Yosef 2019, ¶46). What it meant for their daily life is Unknown.
Qafzeh also held an adult, possibly a young woman, buried with a child. The authors call it the only double burial known from this whole period (Vandermeersch & Bar-Yosef 2019, ¶30, ¶39). At Skhul, a cave on Mount Carmel, excavators in the 1930s recorded a wild boar’s jawbone lying between the arm bones of the adult known as Skhul V (Vandermeersch & Bar-Yosef 2019, ¶45).
The two archaeologists sum it up: people at Qafzeh gave several of their dead special treatment, but “we do not know why” (Vandermeersch & Bar-Yosef 2019, ¶66).
Panga ya Saidi, Kenya: about 78,000 years ago
A team from the National Museums of Kenya and Germany’s Max Planck Institute found bits of bone here in 2013 and by 2017 had exposed a small, shallow pit about three meters below today’s cave floor. The bones were too delicate to study in the field, so the team plastered the whole block and sent it to Nairobi, then to a lab in Burgos, Spain (Max Planck Society 2021, ¶8–11).
Inside was a child of 2½ to 3 years, nicknamed Mtoto, Swahili for “child,” lying on the right side with knees drawn toward the chest. The spine and ribs were still in place, and microscope work on the bones and soil showed the body was covered quickly and decayed in the pit. Luminescence dating puts the burial at 78,300 ± 4,100 years ago, and the team links the child to Homo sapiens (Martinón-Torres et al. 2021, full manuscript, Results and Methods; Max Planck Society 2021, ¶13–16).
The way the head had shifted suggested it may have rested on a soft support, perhaps something like a pillow, that has since rotted away. Lead author María Martinón-Torres said the community “may have undertaken some form of funerary rite” (Max Planck Society 2021, ¶15). That is the team’s reading (Plausible).
Shanidar Cave, Iraqi Kurdistan: the “flower burial” and the bees
Between 1951 and 1960, archaeologist Ralph Solecki dug a deep trench in Shanidar Cave and found the remains of 10 Neanderthal men, women, and children (Pomeroy et al. 2020, Introduction). He argued that falling rock killed some and that others were buried with ceremony. Shanidar 4 became famous as the “flower burial” because pollen expert Arlette Leroi-Gourhan found clumps of pollen in soil samples from under and beside it.
A real detail from the record: after Shanidar 4 was found in 1960, the block of sediment holding it rode to Baghdad on a taxi roof. The trip disturbed the block, so exactly how the bodies inside lay relative to one another is now unknown (Pomeroy et al. 2020, Introduction).
New excavations began in 2015, at the invitation of the Kurdistan Regional Government (Pomeroy et al. 2020, “The new excavations”). The team found another adult Neanderthal right beside the old Shanidar 4 spot, later called Shanidar Z. The body was probably laid on its back, head resting on the left hand, with a triangular stone behind the head. The team called the evidence “a strong case for deliberate burial” and gave a preliminary date of 70,000–60,000 years ago (Pomeroy et al. 2020, “The new Neanderthal skeletal remains”).
And the flowers? A 2023 review by the same research group concluded that nesting solitary bees probably left at least some of the pollen clumps (Plausible, the authors’ own hedge). It calls Solecki’s idea that all the pollen came from flowers laid under the body “very unlikely,” partly because those plants don’t bloom at the same time today (Hunt et al. 2023, abstract and §8). Their bigger point (Hunt et al. 2023, §9) is that Shanidar holds a tight cluster of bodies placed in one spot, something almost unknown elsewhere for Neanderthals.
Did Neanderthals really bury their dead?
People have argued about this since August 3, 1908, when the Bouyssonie brothers uncovered a nearly complete Neanderthal skeleton at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France. After new digging there in 2011 and 2012, a team argued in 2014 that the pit was human-made and the body covered quickly (Rendu et al. 2014). La Ferrassie and Shanidar Z added newer evidence.
The fair summary: Neanderthals buried at least some of their dead (Strongly supported), but individual cases, especially ones dug a century ago, are still argued over (Disputed). The Shanidar team wrote in 2020 that “debates continue” (Pomeroy et al. 2020, Conclusion). Lead author Emma Pomeroy told a University of Cambridge feature that she prefers “mortuary behaviour” (a broader term for how people treat the dead), because the team can’t yet be absolutely sure Neanderthals dug holes for the dead (University of Cambridge). The La Ferrassie team notes that the argument can drift into ideology, tied to an older fight over whether Neanderthals were brutes or much like us (Balzeau et al. 2020, Introduction).
Are humans the only animals that respond to death?
No. Archaeologist Paul Pettitt and primatologist James Anderson describe primates inspecting, grooming, and carrying dead group members, and a captive chimpanzee group avoiding the spot where one had died. Some insects cover or remove their dead (Pettitt & Anderson 2019). What developed especially in the human lineage, they argue, is funerary activity: using a place or a tool, like a dug grave or marker stone, to tie the dead to a spot.
Who did that first is Unknown. Pettitt has proposed that earlier humans were leaving bodies in caves and rock fissures by about 500,000 years ago, and some suggest a pit of human bones at Spain’s Sima de los Huesos was filled on purpose (Pettitt & Anderson 2019; Balzeau et al. 2020, Introduction). A 2023 team claimed burials by the small-brained species Homo naledi in South Africa; the journal’s reviewers split, even on the 2025 final version (Berger et al., eLife assessment). Both claims are Disputed.
What did burial mean to them?
Researchers weigh several explanations that can all be true at once:
- Practical. Moving a body away from where the living camp, which Pettitt and Anderson think was probably common for much of human evolution (Pettitt & Anderson 2019). Plausible.
- Place. Returning to the same spot, as the Shanidar cluster suggests (Hunt et al. 2023, §9). Plausible.
- Belief. Ideas about spirits, an afterlife, or honoring the dead. This is the step bones can’t take. Unknown.
One more pattern: many early burials are children. The Max Planck release notes a “high proportion of children and juveniles” in early Eurasian burials and young people in later African Stone Age burials, “perhaps signaling special treatment” of children (Max Planck Society 2021, ¶16, ¶19; Plausible).
How we know
What evidence exists: skeletons, pit edges, body positions, a few objects, lab dates, pollen, and microscope studies of soil. Every site here is a cave or rock shelter.
Whose voices are missing: everyone’s. No words survive from the dead, from whoever dug, or from anyone who mourned. We found no published account from communities near Panga ya Saidi or Shanidar about how these remains should be discussed. That is a gap, not a sign they have nothing to say.
How power shaped the record: The debate began at French sites (Balzeau et al. 2020, Introduction). Africa has very few early burials; the Kenya team suggests different practices or too little fieldwork across much of the continent (Max Planck Society 2021, ¶19). Remains travel: Shanidar 4 to Baghdad, Mtoto to Nairobi and then Spain. The threat from ISIS delayed new work at Shanidar (Pomeroy et al. 2020, “The new excavations”).
Then vs. now
What people did then: dug pits, arranged bodies, covered them, sometimes set an animal part with them, and at Shanidar placed several bodies in one spot, whether at once or over time (Unknown). What they felt or believed is Unknown.
What researchers thought then, and what the evidence says now:
| Earlier idea | Current evidence |
|---|---|
| An early scientific picture, traced to M. Boule, showed Neanderthals as brutes (Balzeau et al. 2020). Whether they buried anyone has been debated since the 1908 La Chapelle find. | At least some Neanderthal burials are widely accepted. Individual sites are still debated. |
| Solecki read Shanidar 4 as a burial on a bed of flowers. | Bees probably explain at least some of the pollen. |
| A burial proves symbolic thought or religious belief. | Whether burial counts as symbolic behaviour is itself debated (Balzeau et al. 2020). A grave shows an action; belief needs other evidence, which doesn’t survive from this period. |
| Early debate centered on French sites. | The oldest widely accepted burials are in southwest Asia. Africa’s early record is thin; its oldest known burial is about 78,000 years old. |
No one from these graves can be asked what the burial meant. So the honest answer to “what did they believe about death?” is still: we don’t know.