Earliest female infant burial in Europe holds cultural significance

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Ten thousand years ago, just after the last Ice Age, a group of hunter-gatherers buried an infant girl in an Italian cave. They entombed her with a rich selection of their treasured beads and pendants, and an eagle-owl talon, signaling their grief, and showing that even the youngest females were recognized as full persons in their society.

The excavations and analysis of the discovery are published this week in Nature Scientific Reports and offers insight into the early Mesolithic period, from which few recorded burials are known. Claudine Gravel-Miguel, coauthor on the paper, performed the analysis of the ornaments, which includes over 60 pierced shell beads and four shell pendants.

Mortuary practices offer a window into the worldviews and social structure of past societies. The seemingly "egalitarian" funerary treatment of this infant female, who the team nicknamed "Neve," shows that as early as 10,000 years ago in Western Europe, even the youngest females were recognized as full persons in their society.

"I was excavating in the adjacent square and remember looking over and thinking 'that's a weird bone,'" says Gravel-Miguel. "It quickly became clear that not only we were looking at a human cranium, but that it was also of a very young individual. It was an emotional day."

Radiocarbon dating determined that the child lived 10,000 years ago, and amelogenin protein analysis and ancient DNA revealed that the infant was a female belonging to a lineage of European women known as the U5b2b haplogroup.

Source - https://phys.org/news/2021-12-earliest-adorned-female-infant-burial.html?