Mysterious Pair Buried With Flowers—Oldest Example Yet
Scented flowering plants, such as mint and sage, were imprinted in soft mud after they decomposed some 12,000 years ago in the graves, which are located in a cave on northern Israel’s Mount Carmel.
Ancient mourners lined four graves with the flowers, most notably one that holds the bodies of two people. (Also see “Pagan Burial Altar Found in Israel.”)
The pair—an adult male and an adolescent of undetermined sex—belonged to the primitive Natufian culture, which flourished between 15,000 and 11,600 years ago in an area that is now Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.
The Natufian society was one of the first—possibly the first—to transition from a roaming hunter-gatherer lifestyle to permanent settlements, and was also the first to establish true graveyards, said study leader Daniel Nadel, an archaeologist at the University of Haifa in Israel.
“There are examples of groups living in a camp for a few years, but some of the [Natufian] sites we know about were used for thousands of years,” Nadel said.
So what’s new?
The new discovery indicates that the Natufians were also among the first to use flowers to honor their dead.
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