Red Lady cave burial reveals Stone Age secret

[Still Waters]

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 Miron 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.

http://www.newscient...ue#.VQ3Y8I4vwdU

[Gingitsune]

The report is sill rather scketchy, I can't wait to get updates and contextualisation in the future. They said a DNa is on going, I hope we'll get news soon!

[MyOtherAccount]

Nice bit of discovery. I hope we hear more as time passes, esp. about the DNA. I wonder if she was exceptionally loved and respected because of personality traits.

[KariW]

I have to admit I am fascinated by Paleolithic burials, and funerary customs. IMO, We may never really know who she was, but undoubtedly she was a person of significance in her "tribe". Excellent article! Thanks so much for sharing it with us!

[She-ra]

Ancient mourners may have left flowers on the grave of an Ice-Age woman known as the Red Lady of El Mirón, new research suggests.

The woman, called the Red Lady because her body and bones had been smeared with a brilliant, sparkling pigment made from red ocher, lived about 18,700 years ago and was buried in a cave in what is now Spain. A large clump of pollen that was unearthed in the burial suggests people at the time placed flowers into the woman's grave, researchers said in a new study.

Read more here: http://www.livescience.com/50897-red-lady-grave-flowers.html

[KariW]

Fascinating, She-ra! I have always been interested in the funerary customs of ancient cultures, and it is interesting to think about the care and concern her tribe members took to exhume, redecorate her bones with red ochre, and place her back in a burial site. I wonder if this is a form of ancestor worship, or something else?

[freetoroam]

People would have had feelings back then too, the loss of a loved one must still have been a traumatic time, hence why I believe religion first came about. So placing flowers on a grave would not seem an unusual thing to do at all, respecting the dead is what humans do, its respecting the living we sometimes have difficulty doing.

We must not be too surprised by the past, without it there is no future....we know what we know today because of the past.

Fascinating stuff.

[KariW]

People would have had feelings back then too, the loss of a loved one must still have been a traumatic time, hence why I believe religion first came about. So placing flowers on a grave would not seem an unusual thing to do at all, respecting the dead is what humans do, its respecting the living we sometimes have difficulty doing.

We must not be too surprised by the past, without it there is no future....we know what we know today because of the past.

Fascinating stuff.

Quite insightful and very well said, Freetoroam!

[Likely Guy]

It is nice to think that even after all these thousands of years we still carry on the same tradition and leave flowers at the graves.

The tradition is thousands of years old, we don't know 'why' we still do it, just "that it's always been done".

[Jon101]

I initially thought this related to 'The red lady of Paviland', an older ochre stained burial from wales, (now known to be a male), and thought to be from 33,000bp. The staining of both skeletons suggest a common culture, perhaps, and if so, it is a cultural tradition that was already fourteen thousand years old at the time of the Red Lady Cave burial.

That is a staggering amount of time when compared to recorded history - it's a pity we may never know how long humanity's cultural traditions endured and spread in the truly ancient world of the Paleolithic.

http://en.wikipedia....ady_of_Paviland

Edited May 22, 2015 by Jon101