Archaeologists find a hidden message in a mysterious 18,700-year-old tomb
Some 19,000 years ago, a woman was coated in red ochre and buried in a cave in northern Spain. What do her remains say about Paleolithic life in western Europe?
SHE was privileged to have a tombstone, and her grave may have been adorned with flowers. But the many who, for millennia after her death, took shelter in El Mirón cave in northern Spain must have been unaware of the prestigious company they were keeping. Buried in a side chamber at the back of the cave is a very special Palaeolithic woman indeed.
Aged between 35 and 40 when she died, she was laid to rest alongside a large engraved stone, her body seemingly daubed in sparkling red pigment. Small, yellow flowers may even have adorned her grave 18,700 years ago – a time when cave burials, let alone one so elaborate, appear to have been very rare. It was a momentous honour, and no one knows why she was given it.
"It's an area in the cave right where people were living," says Lawrence Guy Straus at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Along with Manuel González Morales of the University of Cantabria, Straus has been leading the excavation of El Mirón for 19 years. "It's not hidden away. This person in death was kind of presiding over the activities of her people."
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The people who buried her used a special form of ochre, not from local sources, that sparkled with specular haematite, a form of iron oxide. It may have been applied to her corpse or clothes as a preservative or as a ritual. The regular use of red ochre at burials throughout the Upper Palaeolithic elsewhere in Europe implies this formed part of a burial rite, says William Davies of the University of Southampton, UK. "It is certainly possible that [these people] held spiritual beliefs," Davies says.
Could she have been some sort of leader or queen? "We don't really know much about the social structure of these hunter-gatherers, whether they were matriarchal or patriarchal societies," says Ignacio de la Torre of University College London. "But certainly hunter-gatherer societies had no queens or kings," he says, as they did not have much of a social hierarchy.
The people who buried the woman may have had some strong emotional connection with her, suggests Davies, or perhaps she was exceptional in some way. "For example," he says, "some individuals buried in Italy have skeletal abnormalities and might have been seen as a special people, thus warranting a separate burial."
Whoever she was, the Red Lady lived at a time when Europeans were recovering from the worst of the last ice age, about 21,000 years ago. Many people took refuge in Iberia and southern France, and then expanded back out across the continent. Straus hopes that the Red Lady's DNA – to be analysed by Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany – will provide evidence that it was these Magdalenians in south-western Europe who went on to repopulate northern areas, including Belgium, Germany and the UK.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530134.200-red-lady-cave-burial-reveals-stone-age-secrets.html?full=true#.VReqL_yUe0j
