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Archaeologists have made an important discovery in understanding the prehistoric roots of one of the world's most common funeral practices - cremation. NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reports on how the scientists pieced together something that happened nearly 10,000 years ago.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE: In Malawi, in south-central Africa, there's a big rocky mountain called Mount Hora. This distinctive landmark abruptly rises up from a flat floodplain. It can be seen from miles around. At its base, there's big boulders. Prehistoric people used these rocks as shelters for thousands of years.
JESSICA THOMPSON: They would camp there. They would light fires there. They would hunt and so on. But they also, in some cases, would bury their dead there.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Jessica Thompson is an anthropologist at Yale University. She led a team that excavated this site to search for clues about the everyday life of Stone Age hunter-gatherers. The dig uncovered all sorts of things - beads, tools.
THOMPSON: And then we found this giant pile of ash. And when I say giant, I mean, it's like the size of a - like a bed, you know, a queen-sized mattress.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: In the middle of this ash, they found burned bones from the skeleton of a small adult woman. That's unusual. There's hardly any evidence of human cremation from this time period or earlier. And what was really special was all that ash, the remains of the large wooden pyre constructed to burn the body. The researchers say this is the oldest cremation pyre for an adult ever discovered. Thompson says when all archaeologists have is charred bone fragments and not the pyre...
THOMPSON: You don't know necessarily the scale of the burning or the sequence of steps that people took or how many people might have been involved. You know, it's just so much more information-rich to be able to reconstruct step by step something that happened almost 10,000 years ago.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: That's just what the researchers have done, as they describe in the journal Science Advances. A painstaking study of the ash and skeletal remains shows that soon after death, the body was cut apart before being burned. A large amount of wood and grass was gathered for the fire, which was actively tended with fuel being added and the bones moved around. The fire also contained stone tools, suggesting they were thrown into the blaze. Ebeth Sawchuk is the curator of human evolution at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. She says at this site, before and after this event, dead people were buried. No one else seems to have gotten a fiery send-off.
EBETH SAWCHUK: There is something really unusual about either this person in life or this person in death. Whether something positive, whether something negative, we just don't know, but that's also what makes this discovery really spectacular.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: And there's another mystery.
SAWCHUK: What keeps me up at 2 a.m. is, where is her head?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: The cremated woman's skull is missing. Maybe it was removed and kept as a relic. All of this fascinates Howard Williams, an archaeologist at the University of Chester in the United Kingdom, who wasn't part of the team. He says intact cremation pyres are a rare thing to find, really, from any part of the past.
HOWARD WILLIAMS: This is so exceptional, so early and so odd, in terms of the sequence of fires and the absence of the cranium and, well, the skull entirely.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: He would love to know the motivation for all this and says it shows how using fire to transform the human body goes way back into deep time.
Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF ANDREW MARLIN'S "FIREFLIES AND FAIRYDUST") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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