We knew that our ancestors adorned themselves with animal bones. It turns out that they also made it with … human bones

A study carried out at an archaeological site in northwestern Russia has announced a curious, and somewhat macabre, discovery. Some of the ornaments with which the dead were buried in the Palaeolithic necropolis on the island of Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov were made from human bones. Previous studies had classified them as animal bones, but now an international team of researchers has found the true nature of these ornaments.

Humans in the Stone Age.
The stone age is the longest stage of the prehistoric eras of the human being, and covers several million years, beginning with the use of the first stone tools, before the arrival of Homo sapiens and ending progressively as our ancestors began to make use of metals.

Ornaments.
The study has analyzed the ornaments found in a burial site dating back 8,200 years and which was found in the 1930s. The site is located on the island of Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov, which in turn is located in Lake Onega, in Russia, near the border with Finland.

Nothing seemed unusual in the studies that looked at the site before. We know that stone age humans, even pre-sapiens species, used ornament. These had been cataloged as animal bones.

The study.
The latest study conducted at the archaeological site disagrees with this conclusion. In their analysis, the Russian-Finnish team found that several of the skeletal remains used as ornaments in the tombs belonged to human beings. The work is part of the research project “animals make identities” from the University of Helsinki and has been published in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

The archeological site in which the analysis was carried out is an 8,200-year-old necropolis containing some 177 tombs. Mannermaa and his team set out to identify the animals the bones belonged to as they were unable to link them to any of the candidate species, those that the team believed were culturally relevant to the area, such as grizzly bears, beavers and moose.

They sent 37 samples to the BioArCh laboratory at the University of York. The analysis methodology is zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry (ZooMS). Of these samples, 12 turned out to belong to human bones.

One out of three.
The 12 human bone samples, a third of those analyzed had been taken in three of the tombs of the Paleolithic cemetery. The remaining two-thirds of the samples were from elk and one bovine animal.

They weren’t the only ones.
This is not the only finding of its kind. The ornamental use of human bones had already been identified in various parts of the world. This phenomenon is often associated with cannibalism, but the wear of the pieces did not allow the team to find marks and indentations that these practices often leave on the bones. “This means that we have no reason to suspect cannibalism based on the discoveries at Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov,” explains Mannermaa.

Questions to answer.
The study still raises questions to solve. One of them was who the bones belonged to. The team mentions both the possibility that they belong to rivals or that they belong to family members. It would even be possible that the bones belonged to people unknown to the person buried with them.

“The fact that the use of human bones was not emphasized in any way and that the objects are indistinguishable from and similar to objects made from animal bones may indicate a mixture of animals and humans in the Stone Age worldview,” explains Mannermaa.

New lessons.
It is extremely difficult to know about the culture of our ancestors based on the few remains that we find, but each find has the ability to tell us new details about life in the place. Even sites discovered nearly a century ago can still teach us important lessons about our ancestors.

Image | Jose-Manuel Benito Alvarez