The earliest adorned female infant burial in an Italian cave helps in revealing the evolution of personhood in Europe
Arizona (US): An infant girl, adorned with a rich selection of treasured beads and pendants was buried in an Italian cave by a group of hunter-gatherers nearly ten thousand years ago, just after the last Ice Age, https://phys.org/news/2021 reports said.
To signal their grief, hunter-gatherers put an eagle-owl talon on the infant’s body and nicknamed her as showing that even the youngest females were recognized as full persons in their society.
An analysis of the ornaments, which includes over 60 pierced shell beads and four shell pendants, was done by Claudine Gravel-Miguel, a postdoctoral researcher with the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University (ASU) and coauthor was published this week in Nature Scientific Reports and offers insight into the early Mesolithic period, from which few recorded burials are known.
“The evolution and development of how early humans buried their dead as revealed in the archaeological record have enormous cultural significance,” says Jamie Hodgkins, ASU doctoral graduate, and paleoanthropologist at the University of Colorado Denver, https://phys.org/news/2021 reports said.
Mortuary practices also highlight the worldviews and social structure of past societies. Child funerary treatment provides important insights into who was considered a person and afforded the attributes of an individual self, moral agency, and eligibility for group membership.
The research team started surveying Arma Veirana, a cave in the Ligurian pre-Alps of northwestern Italy is a popular spot for local families to visit the site in 2015 and discovered the remains during the last week of the 2017 field season.
The team of project coordinators includes Italian collaborators Fabio Negrino, University of Genoa, and Stefano Benazzi, University of Bologna, as well as researchers from the University of Montreal, Washington University, University of Ferrara, University of Tubingen, and the Institute of Human Origins.
The researchers were exposed to the stratigraphic layers that contained tools over 50,000 years old typically associated with Neandertals in Europe (Mousterian tools).
They also found the remains of ancient meals such as the cut-marked bones of wild boars and elk and bits of charred fat, as well as stone tools that were much more recent and that had likely been eroding from deeper inside the cave.
By exploring new sections inside the cave in 2017, they were able to unearth pierced shell beads, which Hodgkins examined more carefully back in the lab.
One of the excavators uncovered a small piece of the infant’s cranial vault.
Using dental tools and a small paintbrush, researchers spent that week and the following field season carefully exposing the whole skeleton, which was adorned with articulated lines of pierced shell beads.
In a series of analyses coordinated across multiple institutions and numerous experts, the team uncovered critical details about the ancient burial and by further radiocarbon dating and by doing amelogenin protein analysis and ancient DNA they determined that the infant was a female belonging to a lineage of European women known as the U5b2b haplogroup 10,000 years ago.
“The Mesolithic is particularly interesting,” said coauthor Caley Orr, ASU doctoral graduate and paleoanthropologist and anatomist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “It followed the end of the final Ice Age and represents the last period in Europe when hunting and gathering was the primary way of making a living. So, it’s a really important time period for understanding human prehistory,” https://phys.org/news/2021 reports said.
After detailed virtual histology, or study of the tissue and structure, it was found that the infant’s teeth showed she died 40 to 50 days after birth and that she experienced stress that briefly halted the growth of her teeth 47 days and 28 days before she was born and that the baby’s mother had been nourishing the infant in her womb on a land-based diet, revealed by Carbon and nitrogen analyses of the teeth.
An analysis of the ornaments adorning the infant by Gravel-Miguel demonstrated the care invested in each piece and showed that many of the ornaments exhibited wear.
Citing a similar burial of two infants dating to 11,500 years ago at Upward Sun River, Alaska, Hodgkins said the funerary treatment of Neve was suggestive of the recognition of infant females as full persons with deep origins were shared by peoples who migrated into Europe and those who migrated to North America.