Excavations in one of the caves in northern Italy revealed extremely unusual burial rituals of the first Cro-Magnons - burying their fellow tribesmen, they painted their bodies with ocher, drawing patterns with pieces of pebbles, and then broke these stones, according to an article published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal.
“Usually, our colleagues rarely paid attention to these objects - if they did notice them, they considered them ordinary pieces of pebbles and threw them away with other 'trash'. We need to start to be very careful about such objects, which usually fall into the category of cobblestones and stones. Something that looks like an ordinary natural stone may actually be important,”says Julien Riel-Salvatore of the University of Montreal, Canada.
According to scientists today, the first modern people penetrated the territory of Europe about 45-40 thousand years ago, traveling in several ways - through the Balkans, the islands of the Mediterranean Sea and moving along the shores of Africa towards Spain. The traces of these first humans, in the form of artifacts from the Aurignacian and Gravetian cultures, preserved in caves in southern France and northern Italy, helped scientists figure out what these people looked like and find hints as to why they "beat" the Neanderthals in the competition.
One of the reasons for this victory today, many scientists consider the culture and religion that the Cro-Magnons possessed and which, presumably, the Neanderthals were deprived of. An example of this is that already 20-30 thousand years ago Cro-Magnons possessed complex funeral rites, decorating the bodies and graves of the deceased with flowers, patterns made of stones and other things that could be useful to their deceased tribesman in the afterlife.
Ril-Salvatore and his colleagues found that one of the strangest rites of the era originated about five thousand years earlier than previously thought, and was much more widespread than it is generally believed, by studying the "garbage" collected during excavations in the Arena Candide cave in 2011.
In this cave, located in the mountains of Northern Italy, in the distant past, at the end of the era of the existence of the Gravettian culture and during the appearance of its heiress, the Epigravetian culture, lived or was simply buried a large group of people, about 20 children and adults Cro-Magnons. Their remains were discovered by paleontologists back in the 40s of the last century, and since then the deposits of the Arena Candide have been periodically studied in search of new artifacts and traces of the life of the first inhabitants of Europe.
Studying the materials collected during one of the last round of such excavations, scientists noticed that their predecessors found in the cave many small pieces of pebbles, composed of rocks not found in the "tomb of the Stone Age" itself. On some of them they found traces of ocher, a red-brown mineral paint, while others were crushed or half destroyed.
Such oddities forced scientists to look for traces of similar stones in other sites of ancient people. It turned out that they really were present - similar in shape stones, covered with ocher, archaeologists have already found in the vicinity of other tombs of Cro-Magnons buried in later historical periods.
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According to Ril-Salvatore and his colleagues, these semi-crushed stones are traces of one of the oldest funeral rituals in the life of mankind. In their opinion, the inhabitants of the cave used such a pebble as a "brush" for drawing patterns on the body of the deceased, after which they took it outside and ritually broke it into parts, taking the whole half as a souvenir or talisman.
Why did they do it? As observations of African and Amazonian tribes stuck in a primitive communal order show, the people of the Stone Age considered their tools to be "living" objects, endowed with a soul and their own motives. Therefore, they could ritually "kill" such a pebble, splitting it into pieces and sending it on a journey to the afterlife with the deceased. If this is true, then such religious traditions appeared among the first inhabitants of Europe five thousand years earlier than historians assumed.