Anthropology Magazine

Discovering Africa’s Oldest Burial

Discovering Africa’s Oldest Burial

A team of archaeologists are busy learning about human evolution, symbolism, and ritual from the remains of a child laid to rest in a Kenyan cave during the Middle Stone Age—the oldest-known human burial on the African continent to date.


Africa is often referred to as the cradle of humankind—the birthplace of our species, Homo sapiens. There is evidence of the development of early symbolic behaviors, such as pigment use and perforated shell ornaments, in Africa, but so far most of what we know about the development of complex social behaviors, such as burial and mourning, has come from Eurasia.

However, the remains of a child buried almost 80,000 years ago under an overhang at Panga ya Saidi Cave in Kenya is providing important new details.

Working with a team of researchers from Kenya, Germany, Spain, France, Australia, Canada, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States, we studied the burial. Our results, published in Nature, reveal valuable insights into human cultural evolution, including how Middle Stone Age populations interacted with the dead.

A child called “Mtoto”

Around 78,000 years ago, a small child of 2 1/2–3 years of age was carefully placed on their right side in a shallow pit in a cave near Kenya’s coast. Their legs were raised to their chest in a flexed position, and their body wrapped in a special cloth, perhaps an animal skin.

The child’s head was placed gently on some kind of perishable supporta pillow in readiness for the long sleep. As a final act, the child was deliberately covered over with dirt from the cave floor and left for thousands of years, slowly becoming buried under another 3 meters of soil.

Our team later nicknamed this person “Mtoto,” meaning “child” in Kenya’s Swahili language.

Unearthing Africa’s oldest burial

Panga ya Saidi is roughly 15 kilometers from the Kenyan coast. Our team first visited in 2010 as part of an archaeological project on the origins of East Africa’s Indian Ocean trade.

When we first entered the cave with our colleagues from the National Museums of Kenya, we knew the site was special. The limestone walls towered some 20–30 meters above us, creating a cool microclimate for forest plants to thrive and humans and animals to take shelter. The cave is sacred to the Mijikenda people who occupy the area today.

With permission from the local community to conduct our research, we embarked on what has become a decadelong process of discovery at the cave. We quickly realized the site held far greater significance for understanding human evolution than we originally thought.

A small child lies on their side with their eyes closed and their hands under their chin. Their body below their hands is covered. The image is in shades of red.

A re-creation of Mtoto’s burial. Fernando Fueyo


But our most exciting find came in our third field season in 2013, when the shallow pit containing Mtoto’s burial was exposed some 3 meters below the cave floor.



Mtoto’s preservation was remarkable. The skull and face bones, including the jawbone, were still articulated. Based on the shapes of the teeth, Martinón-Torres was able to determine that the child was just 2 1/2–3 years of age.


A graphic divided in four quadrants shows the positioning of the bones of a very small child in a fetal position.

This virtual reconstruction details Mtoto’s remains at the site (left) and of the child’s original position at the moment of finding (right). Jorge González/Elena Santos



We turned instead to a method called luminescence dating, which measures when quartz grains in the sediment were last exposed to light—that is, when they were buried. The luminescence dates securely placed Mtoto’s burial at 78,000 years ago, making it the oldest-known human burial in Africa.

Implications for human cultural evolution

The Panga ya Saidi burial is a major breakthrough for understanding how early populations in Africa treated their dead, allowing us to start situating these behaviors alongside what we know about how culture developed in other regions.


A man with a shaved head, black glasses, and a beard wearing a black t-shirt sits at a table with different sized light colored shells on it. He holds up a giant snail shell in his right hand.

Patrick Faulkner, one of the authors, holds the shell of a land snail like the one found at the burial site. Louise Cooper/University of Sydney



Associated with the burial, though, is a fragment of giant African land snail shell that bears evidence of incisions from a pointed instrument or tool. While we cannot interpret this evidence symbolically, it does show some form of human modification.


We can also derive new information about the anatomical evolution of our species. A comparison of Mtoto’s teeth with a representative sample of Neanderthal teeth and those from recent and fossil Homo sapiens showed that, although they were clearly modern human, they also have some primitive features.
