The remains of an ancient female child, no more than two months of age, have been found decorated with pendants and beads in northwest Italy.
The skeleton was discovered in the cave in the year of 2017: it is about 10,000 years old. This time is known as the early Holocene, a time when burials are rare.
The child's skeleton was damaged so much that the few teeth that were left were strongly suggesting the child was female. Archeologists think the community valued prehistoric infants regardless of her age or sex because of the number of ornaments surrounding her body.
The authors write that child funerary treatment provides important insights into who was considered a person and who was not and who was eligible for group membership.
Dominique Meyer, Danylo Drohobytsky, and Falko Kuester are related.
The burial layout is above. The bones and artifacts were in situ. (B)
The oldest example of an infant burial in Europe is the child known as "Neve", but it is also the oldest European infant to be female.
It's harder to determine the sex of the deceased from bones that have been degraded as far back as 80,000 years ago.
The lack of infant burials in Europe from 22,000 to 33,000 years ago is thought to be a sign that ancient societies did not see the youngest humans as people.
The argument is based on the fact that society couldn't afford to bury every baby because they were dying so often.
It's an interesting idea, but it could also be based on misinterpretations of what is a patchy fossil record.
Most infant burial sites from thousands of years ago suggest that the children were laid to rest with the utmost respect and care.
Recent studies have found that burial sites might say less about the rate of childhood death in prehistoric times than they do about the rate of birth.
Researchers found at least 66 shell ornaments and 3 pendants with a hole carved out of them. The decorations may have been sewn onto a blanket, hood, or skirt that would break over time.
The hours of work are indicated by the whole ensemble.
The authors estimate that the manufacture of all the ornaments took 9-11 hours, not including the time needed to collect shells and sew the beads onto a garment.
The Scientific Reports, 2021.
There are ornaments associated with Neve, including shell beads and pierced pendants.
The claw of an eagle-owl, which was about 20 centimeters from the infant, was one of the artifacts found at the site.
It's not clear if the gifts were intended for the child or just remnants of previous cave use. Experts think that the baby was put next to the body on purpose because of the flint that sat close to the infant's head.
We don't know if it was a common practice throughout Europe in the early Holocene, but there is reason to believe it was.
The way in which Neve was laid to rest is very similar to that of an ancient female infant who was buried at six weeks of age on the land bridge that once connected Europe and North America.
The child burial was done around 11,500 years ago. The treatment of baby girls following death is thought to have been similar in European cultures at the end of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the Holocene.
The authors write that this implies that infant personhood inclusive of females has deeper origins in a common ancestral culture or that it arose in parallel with nearly contemporaneous populations across the planet.
The minimum antiquity for the recognition of young girls as members of society in cultures around the globe should be the terminal Pleistocene and earliest Holocene.
For thousands of years, love has a way of lasting.
The study was published.
