The exceptional discovery in a cave in the Savona area. The little girl, who was 40-50 days old, lived 10,000 years ago. With her her trousseau: 60 shell beads, four pendants and an eagle-owl claw. Professor Benazzi: “Understanding how our ancestors treated the dead has enormous significance”
When he died he was between 40 and 50 days old. By researchers it is nicknamed Name and lived about 10 thousand years ago in Liguria. His remains were pitifully buried in a cave today in the hinterland of Albenga, in the province of Savona. That of Neve is the oldest testimony of the burial of a newborn discovered in Europe. The research was published in Scientific Reports
. The team of Italian and foreign scholars responsible for the discovery and analysis of the remains is coordinated by Stefano Benazzi (University of Bologna), Fabio Negrino (University of Genoa) and Marco Peresani (University of Ferrara). The place of the discovery is the cave of Arma Veirana, about forty meters long and with a hut shape which is located in the Municipality of Erli, in the Neva valley.
The kit
The girl lived during the first phase of the Mesolithic, a period of which few burials are known and which probably saw great social changes after the end of the last ice age. Together with the remains of the newborn, a kit consisting of over 60 beads in perforated shells was found, four pendants, always perforated, made from fragments of bivalves, and an eagle-owl claw. The remarkable discovery sheds light on the ancient social structure and funerary and ritual behavior of hunter-gatherers of that period. “Understanding how our ancestors treated their dead has enormous cultural significance and allows us to investigate both their behavioral and ideological aspects ”, explains Professor Benazzi. “This discovery testifies how all members of the community, even small babies, were recognized as full-fledged people and apparently enjoyed equal treatment.”
The analysis of the genome
Analysis of the genome and a protein present in the dental buds revealed that the newborn was female and belonged to a lineage of European women known as haplogroup U5b2b. The virtual histology of the dental gems was carried out at the Bones Lab of the University of Bologna thanks to synchrotron images of a tooth obtained at the Elettra synchrotron center in Trieste. The study of carbon and nitrogen showed that Neve’s mother ate following a diet based on products deriving from terrestrial (for example, hunted animals) and non-marine resources and during the pregnancy the mother had suffered some physiological stress, perhaps food, which stopped the growth of the fetus’s teeth 47 and 28 days before delivery. The beads were probably sewn onto a dress or leather bundle. Several ornaments show wear that testifies that they were first worn for a long time by the members of the group and only later were used to adorn the baby girl’s dress.
December 14, 2021 (change December 15, 2021 | 15:45)
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