Humans bury their dead with intention at caves in what is now Israel

Story: ~90,000 B.C.E.  |  Last updated: January 3, 0001

About 90,000 years ago, someone placed a child’s body in the earth with apparent care. Over that body, a community arranged the rack of a fallow deer — and left it there. The act was deliberate. The people who did it were anatomically modern humans, and what they were doing would never stop.

What the evidence shows

• Early human burial: The Qafzeh Cave site near Nazareth, Israel, contains at least 15 individuals buried by anatomically modern Homo sapiens, dated to approximately 90,000–100,000 B.C.E. — among the oldest confirmed intentional burials in the world.
• Grave goods: Several burials included red ochre, animal bones, and in one striking case, fallow deer antlers placed deliberately over the pelvis of a child — objects with no practical purpose in a grave, strongly suggesting ritual intent.
• Skhul Cave: About 20 miles southwest on Mount Carmel, a second site yielded 10 additional burials from roughly the same period, including one individual interred with the jaw of a wild boar cradled in his arms — one of the oldest known burial offerings on record.

A cave near Nazareth and what it held

The Qafzeh Cave sits in the Lower Galilee region of what is now northern Israel. French and Israeli archaeologists excavated it through much of the 20th century, with intensive work under Bernard Vandermeersch in the 1960s and 1970s, and later under Erella Hovers of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

What they found was not a haphazard accumulation of bones. The remains of early human burial subjects lay in arranged positions. Ochre — the red iron-rich pigment found at burial sites across the ancient world, from Africa to Europe — had been placed with several of the bodies.

The color of blood, used with intent, in a grave. These were not hasty deposits. They were planned acts, carried out by people who understood what death was and felt compelled to do something about it.

Why the deer antlers matter

Archaeologists are careful about the word “ritual.” It is easy to project meaning onto the past, and the record is full of misreadings. But the fallow deer antlers at Qafzeh are difficult to explain any other way.

The antlers were placed — not dropped, not accidentally deposited — across the pelvis of a child estimated to be around 12 years old. Analysis of the burial context suggests the arrangement was intentional and that the child may have died from a traumatic injury. Someone grieved this child. Someone organized the community to mark the death in a way that went beyond disposal.

That impulse — to dignify the dead, to make death mean something — is one of the most persistent threads in all of human culture. It appears across every continent, in every era, in every tradition we have ever documented. Qafzeh C.E. 90,000 B.C.E. is one of the earliest moments we can see it clearly.

Skhul and the boar’s jaw

The Skhul Cave site, on the western slopes of Mount Carmel near what is now Haifa, adds a second data point from roughly the same period. Ten individuals were buried there, and one of them — Skhul V, a robust adult male — was interred holding the mandible of a wild boar.

It is one of the oldest burial offerings ever found. The Levant, sitting at the crossroads of Africa and Eurasia, appears to have been a place where early modern humans paused, lived, and developed some of the behaviors — including symbolic burial — that would eventually spread across the world.

Whether these were isolated innovations or part of a broader cultural tradition carried out of Africa is still debated. But the concentration of evidence in this narrow region, at this particular moment, is striking.

Who else was burying their dead?

The story of early human burial is not exclusively a story of modern Homo sapiens. Neanderthals buried their dead too — possibly as early as 60,000–70,000 B.C.E. at sites like Shanidar Cave in Iraq, though debate continues about how intentional those burials were and whether associated pollen evidence reflects true grave goods or natural deposition.

Even earlier, the Sima de los Huesos site in northern Spain, dated to roughly 430,000 B.C.E., contains a mass accumulation of hominin remains that some researchers interpret as deliberate disposal of the dead — though not formal burial in the Qafzeh sense.

What sets Qafzeh and Skhul apart is the combination: intentional positioning, clear grave goods, and the involvement of anatomically modern humans. The full picture suggests that the impulse to honor the dead evolved across multiple hominin lineages, not just our own.

Lasting impact

Burial changed everything downstream. It created the first dedicated spaces for remembering the dead — physical anchors for community identity, for the idea that the past matters, for the belief that individuals have a worth that outlasts their lives.

From Qafzeh and Skhul, a line runs — not straight, but continuous — through the megalithic tombs of Neolithic Europe, the pyramid complexes of Egypt, the burial mounds of the Americas, the churchyards of medieval England, and the cemeteries, mausoleums, and memorial parks of today. Every culture in recorded history has developed some form of burial practice. The specific forms vary enormously. The underlying impulse does not.

Burial also accelerated the development of symbolic thought. Objects placed in graves had to mean something. Red ochre, animal offerings, personal ornaments — these required a community to share a belief about what happens after death, about the relationship between the living and the dead, about what a person is worth. That is the beginning of theology, philosophy, and much of art.

Blindspots and limits

The archaeological record preserves only what survived — and much did not. Intentional burial in shallow soil, in acidic environments, or using perishable materials leaves no trace. Qafzeh and Skhul are exceptional partly because their cave conditions happened to preserve bone well. Many early burials, possibly older, are simply gone.

The interpretation of “ritual intent” also carries risk. Scholars continue to debate how much symbolic weight we can confidently assign to grave goods versus practical or incidental placement. The story is probably richer and older than what the current evidence allows us to see.