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SUNDAY SCIENCE: OLDEST KNOWN CREMATION IN AFRICA POSES 9,500-YEAR-OLD
MYSTERY ABOUT STONE AGE HUNTER-GATHERERS  
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Jessica C. Thompson, Elizabeth Sawchuk, Jessica Cerezo-Román
January 1, 2026
The Conversation
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_ We are a team of bioarchaeologists, archaeologists and forensic
anthropologists who, with our colleagues, recently discovered the
earliest evidence of cremation. _

Why did this community burn one woman’s remains in such a visible,
spectacular way?, Patrick Fahey

 

Near the equator, the Sun hurries below the horizon in a matter of
minutes. Darkness seeps from the surrounding forest. Nearly 10,000
years ago, at the base of a mountain in Africa, people’s shadows
stretch up the wall of a natural overhang of stone.

They’re lit by a ferocious fire that’s been burning for hours,
visible even to people miles away. The wind carries the smell of
burning. This fire will linger in community memory for generations −
and in the archaeological record for far longer.

We are a team of bioarchaeologists
[[link removed]],
archaeologists
[[link removed]]
and forensic anthropologists
[[link removed]]
who, with our colleagues, recently discovered the earliest evidence of
cremation – the transformation of a body from flesh to burned bone
fragments and ashes – in Africa and the earliest example of an adult
pyre cremation in the world.

[Small map of Africa next to a big image of a bare rock mountaintop at
sunset. The slopes are covered in forest.]
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The pyre was found under a giant boulder near the base of Mount Hora.
The site is in Malawi, which is outlined in black within the Zambezian
forest (colored green) on the map of Africa. Jessica Thompson and
Natural Earth

It’s no easy task [[link removed]]
to produce, create and maintain an open fire strong enough to
completely burn a human body. While the earliest cremation in the
world dates to about 40,000 years ago in Australia
[[link removed]], that
body was not fully burned.

It is far more effective to use a pyre: an intentionally built
structure of combustible fuel. Pyres appear in the archaeological
record only about 11,500 years ago, with the earliest known example
containing a cremated child [[link removed]]
under a house floor in Alaska.

Many cultures have practiced cremation, and the bones, ash and other
residues from these events help archaeologists piece together past
funeral rituals. Our scientific paper, published in the journal
Science Advances, describes a spectacular event
[[link removed]] that happened about 9,500
years ago in Malawi in south-central Africa, challenging long-held
notions about how hunter-gatherers treat their dead.

[people with digging tools against a landscape that looks like
hardpacked earth]
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Excavators standing at the depth of the pyre at the Hora 1 site in
northern Malawi. Jessica Thompson

The discovery

At first it was just a hint of ash, then more. It expanded downward
and outward, becoming thicker and harder. Pockets of dark earth
briefly appeared and disappeared under trowels and brushes until one
of the excavators stopped. They pointed to a small bone at the base of
a 1½-foot (0.5-meter) wall of archaeological ash revealed under a
natural stone overhang at the Hora 1 archaeological site in northern
Malawi.

The bone was the broken end of a humerus, from the upper arm of a
person. And clinging to the very end of it was the matching end of the
lower arm, the radius. Here was a human elbow joint, burned and
fractured, preserved in sediments full of debris from the daily lives
of Stone Age hunter-gatherers.

We wondered whether this could be a funeral pyre, but such structures
are extremely rare in the archaeological record.

[man kneeling on a board measures down into the excavated area]
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Excavators began finding a thick ash deposit about 2 feet (0.6 meters)
under the modern-day surface of the rock shelter. Jessica Thompson

Finding a cremated person from the Stone Age also seemed impossible
because cremation is not generally practiced by African foragers,
either living or ancient. The earliest evidence of burned human
remains from Africa date to around 7,500 years ago, but that body was
incompletely burned, and there was no evidence of a pyre.

The first clear cases of cremation
[[link removed]] date to around 3,300 years
ago, carried out by early pastoralists in eastern Africa. But overall
the practice remained rare and is associated with food-producing
societies and not hunter-gatherers.

We found more charred human remains in a small cluster, while the ash
layer itself was as large as a queen bed. The blaze must have been
enormous.

When we returned from fieldwork and received our first radiocarbon
dates, we were shocked again: The event had happened about 9,500 years
ago.

Piecing together the events

We built a team of specialists to piece together what had happened
[[link removed]]. By applying forensic and
bioarchaeological techniques, we confirmed that all the bones belonged
to a single person who was cremated shortly after her death.

This was a small adult, probably a woman, just under 5 feet (1.5
meters) in height. In life, she was physically active, with a strong
upper body, but had evidence of a partially healed bone infection on
her arm. Bone development and the beginnings of arthritis suggested
she was probably middle-aged when she died.

[Three images showing thin marks on a gray bone fragment. The images
get more zoomed in moving to the right.]
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Marks incised on the shaft of the lower arm bone (radius) were
inflicted by a stone tool. The bone then turned gray as it burned. The
area in the box on the left is enlarged on the right of the image.
Jessica Thompson

Patterns of warping, cracks and discoloration caused by fire damage
showed her body was burned with some flesh still on it, in a fire
reaching at least 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit (540 degrees Celsius).
Under the microscope we could see tiny incisions along her arms and at
muscle connections on her legs, revealing that people tending the pyre
used stone tools to help the process along by removing flesh.

[Six fragments of shiny white and brown stone on a black background.]
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Tiny pointed tools made from local stone were found within the pyre.
They were probably made at the same time that it burned. Justin
Pargeter

Within the pyre ash, we found many small pointed chips of stone that
suggested people had added tools to the fire as it burned.

And the way the bones were clustered inside such a large fire showed
that this was not a case of cannibalism: It was some other kind of
ritual.

Perhaps most surprisingly, we found no evidence of her head. Skull
bones and teeth usually preserve well
[[link removed]] in cremations because they
are very dense. While we can’t know for sure, the absence of these
body parts suggest her head may have been removed before or during the
cremation as part of the funeral ritual.

A communal spectacle

We determined that the pyre must have been built and maintained by
multiple people who were actively engaged in the event. During new
excavations the following year, we found even more bone fragments from
the same ancient woman, displaced and colored differently from in the
main pyre. These additional remains suggest that the body was
manipulated, attended and moved during the cremation.

Microscopic analysis of ash samples from across the pyre included
blackened fungus, reddened soil from termite structures, and
microscopic plant remains. These helped us estimate that people
collected at least 70 pounds (30 kg) of deadwood to do the task and
stoked the fire for hours to days.

We also learned that this was not the first fire at the Hora 1 site
– nor its last. To our astonishment, what had seemed during
fieldwork to be a single massive pile of ash was in fact a layered
series of burning events. Radiocarbon dating of the ash samples showed
that people began lighting fires on that spot by about 10,240 years
ago. The same location was used to construct the cremation pyre
several hundred years later. As the pyre smoldered, new fires were
kindled on top of it, resulting in fused ashes in microscopic layers.

[A mix of grey, brown, white and black colors showing what soil and
ash looks like under a microscope.]
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Loose, sandy, burned soil was mixed on top of very thin layers of ash,
showing that the pyre was lit over and over again. Flora Schilt

Within a few hundred years of the main event, another large fire was
built again at the exact same place. While there is no evidence that
anyone else was cremated in the subsequent fires, the fact that people
repeatedly returned to the spot for this purpose suggests its
significance lived on in community memory.

A new view of ancient cremation

What does all of this tell us about ancient hunter-gatherers in the
region?

For one, it shows that entire communities were engaged in a mortuary
spectacle of extraordinary scale. An open pyre can take more than a
day of constant tending and an enormous amount of fuel
[[link removed]] to fully reduce a
body, and during this time the sights and smells of burning wood and
other remains are impossible to hide.

This scale of mortuary effort is unexpected for this time and place.
In the African record, complex multigenerational mortuary rituals tied
to specific places are generally not associated with a
hunting-and-gathering
[[link removed]]
way of life.

[flames of a pyre against dark black background]
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The pyre event was a spectacle that required many hours of communal
effort and would have been impossible to hide. Anders Blomqvist/Stone
via Getty Images
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It also shows that different people were treated in different ways in
death, raising the possibility of more complex social roles in life.
Other men, women and children were buried at the Hora 1 site beginning
as early as 16,000 years ago. In fact, those other burials have
provided ancient DNA evidence showing they were part of a long-term
local group
[[link removed]].
But those burials, and others that came a few hundred years after the
pyre, were interred without this labor-intensive spectacle.

What about this person was different? Was she a beloved family member
or an outsider? Was this treatment because of something she did in
life or a specific hope for the afterlife? Additional excavation and
data from across the region may help us better understand why this
person was cremated and what cremation meant to this group.

Whoever she was, her death had important meaning not just to the
people who made and tended the pyre, but also to the generations that
came after.[The Conversation]

Jessica C. Thompson
[[link removed]],
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, _Yale University_
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Elizabeth Sawchuk
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Curator of Human Evolution of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History
and Research Assistant Professor of Anthropology, _Stony Brook
University (The State University of New York)_
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and Jessica Cerezo-Román
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Associate Professor of Anthropology, _University of Oklahoma_
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This article is republished from The Conversation
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the original article
[[link removed]].

 

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ORDERS USDA EMPLOYEES TO INVESTIGATE FOREIGN
RESEARCHERS THEY WORK WITH
[[link removed]]BY
LISA SONG AND SHARON LERNERPROPUBLICAThe new directive asks workers to
check the backgrounds of foreign nationals collaborating with the
department’s scientists for evidence of “subversive or criminal
activity.” Their names are being sent to national security experts
at the agency.January 16, 2026

* Science
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* anthropology
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* cremation
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* Africa
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* hunters and gatherers
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* Malawi
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* funerals
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* paleoanthropology
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* bioarchaeology
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*
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