Oldest burial found in Africa is a newly found child's grave

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In a tour de force of discovery, recovery, and analysis, an interdisciplinary research team has uncovered the earliest known human burial in Africa. The grave, found less than 10 miles inland from southeast Kenya’s lush ocean beaches, contained the remains of a two- to three-year-old child buried with extraordinary care by a community of early Homo sapiens some 78,000 years ago. While some human burials in the Middle East and Europe are older, the find in Africa provides one of the earliest unequivocal examples anywhere of a body interred in a pit prepared for that purpose and covered with earth.

“This is unambiguously a burial, unambiguously dated. Very early. Very impressive,” says Paul Pettitt of Durham University in England, an expert on Paleolithic burial who was not involved in the research.

The remains also offer a rare glimpse into the workings of the early human mind—and heart. Described online today in the journal Nature, the fossil has been nicknamed “Mtoto”—Swahili for "child"—and it joins two other, slightly younger burials in Africa that also involve children. While three instances across an entire continent hardly make a hefty sample, Pettitt finds the ages of the deceased particularly telling in understanding the development of burial as a ritual practice.

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“The bones were literally turning to powder,” says Martinón-Torres. “We arrived just in time, before they finally disappeared.”

The other early modern human child burials known in Africa include an eight- to 10-year-old from a site called Taramsa Hill in Egypt, believed to be around 69,000 years old, and an infant from Border Cave in South Africa, with an estimated age of 74,000 years. (Both fossils are less certainly dated than the Panga ya Saidi burial.)

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/childs-grave-is-the-oldest-human-burial-found-in-africa

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The video is so interesting to watch