WHAT THE OLDEST AFRICAN BURIAL TELLS US ABOUT OURSELVES
This article is an adaptation of our weekly Science newsletter that was originally sent out on May 5, 2021. Want this in your inbox? Subscribe here.
By Victoria Jaggard, SCIENCE executive editor
Since I was about 8 years old, I've known that when my mother dies, she plans to turn into a mermaid. In a tribute to her childhood growing up along the blustery South Texas coast, she hopes to transform when I sprinkle her cremated ashes into the Gulf of Mexico. It’s a duty I will cherish when the day comes. My whole life, my family has been open discussing death (perhaps explaining my goth turn in my teenage years) and we’ve found comfort in designing the rituals we’ll use to cope with our grief at the loss of a loved one. It’s such a fundamentally human thing to do.
This week, science is giving us an amazing peek into just how deep the practice of deliberate burial goes, with the discovery of the oldest known Homo sapiens grave yet found in Africa. Dated to around 78,000 years, the fragile remains of a 2- to 3-year-old child were found in a pit dug in a cave in southern Kenya, Jamie Shreeve reports for Nat Geo.
Reports of older human burials pop up in Europe and the Middle East, including some sites attributed to Neanderthals. Many of these may be more akin to what scientists call “funerary caching,” or deliberately disposing of dead bodies in a location without burial rituals. By contrast, the Kenya grave is not only the oldest in Africa, it is unambiguously a burial (pictured above, the skull of the child). Sediments around the body show signs of a pit being filled in, and chemical traces reveal flesh decomposing in the earth. (Below, the burial site, directly under the sheltered overhang at the mouth of a cave.)
What’s more, based on the placement of the bones and the ways they have shifted over time, the researchers suspect the child was wrapped up in some kind of shroud, head nestled on a now-disintegrated pillow.
Under the long shadow of COVID-19, our relationship with death has had to change. We’ve lost so many—in the year 2020, I said goodbye to both of my grandmothers. Often, the circumstances didn’t allow us the healing rituals we’d normally rely on, and that’s a tragedy that will endure long after we’ve put the pandemic in the rear-view mirror. Memorializing the dead is a behavior clearly woven into the fabric of our species. That’s why I remain unafraid to talk about death and to plan for the inevitable in ways that will carry deeper meaning for my community.
Someday you can look for me on that South Texas shore, black veil fluttering in the breeze, waving at mermaids.
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TODAY IN A MINUTE
Unstoppable (so far): India’s official recorded toll of coronavirus infections has passed 20 million, but experts say only 3 or 4 percent of those stricken may have been counted, NPR reports. A “double mutant” variant spreading in the hard-hit country is raising concern. And Australia has even made it a criminal offense for its citizens to attempt to come home from India.
Missed your second COVID-19 shot? At least 5 million Americans have. How bad is that? Nat Geo’s Maya Wei-Haas emphasizes it’s not too late to get the second shot. Although the first dose may have 70 percent effectiveness itself, the second vaccine improves on that as a booster that also activates different parts of the immune system. Despite distribution, stressed hospital systems, and worries about the aftereffects of a second dose, the United States is one of the better nations at following up, with more than 92 percent of those vaccinated getting their second shot within six weeks, Wei-Haas writes.
Don’t underestimate our resilience: The mental health toll of the pandemic is real, but a leading psychiatrist argues that many of us are better equipped to handle trauma than we think. “Studies suggest that up to about 90 percent of Americans have experienced a traumatic event, yet the prevalence of PTSD is estimated to be 6.8 percent,” Richard A. Friedman writes for the New York Times. He adds that symptoms decrease for most people with PTSD three months after the trauma, and about 66 percent of those with PTSD eventually recover.
A black hole in the neighborhood? So the good news is this black hole is 1,500 light-years from Earth and relatively small for black holes—about three times the mass of our sun. The even better news is that it may help astronomers resolve a long-standing mystery about what happens to massive stars when they die, Dan Falk writes for Nat Geo.
INSTAGRAM PHOTO OF THE DAY
Swimming with a ghost: Nat Geo Explorer in Residence Enric Sala was diving off Palau when he sighted a World War II Japanese seaplane resting on a bed of healthy coral. “It was being slowly absorbed by the living reef. The plane is a ghost from the past and a fitting tribute to the ocean’s ability to heal when given the chance,” says Sala, who founded National Geographic Pristine Seas, a program that aims to protect more than 30 percent of the world’s oceans by 2030.
Learn more about the National Geographic Society’s support of ocean Explorers.
Go deeper: A new blueprint may help nations reach goals of protecting oceans
THE NIGHT SKIES
Double meteor shower: It’s not as flashy as the August Perseids, but the expected peak of the Eta–Aquarid meteor shower is tomorrow night. The apparent source of the meteors is in the constellation Aquarius—and is best seen from near the Equator and the Southern Hemisphere. Two nights later, Northern Hemisphere observers will get their chance to spot about five shooting stars an hour as the Eta-Lyrid meteor shower peaks. The apparent source of the Lyrids is easy to spot thanks to the bright star Vega, the lead member of the constellation Lyra, the harp, which will be rising in the east in late evenings. — Andrew Fazekas
SEE: How Nat Geo’s Babak Tafreshi photographs the night sky
DO: Dazzling images that you can try to replicate
THE BIG TAKEAWAY
New hope for an HIV vaccine: It’s been 40 years, but there’s hope on the horizon for an HIV vaccine. At an international AIDS conference in February, researchers announced promising blood test results from a human trial of a vaccine that uses a new strategy to combat the devastating virus. The vaccine may still take years to get to market—and will involve multiple jabs—but the results show progress against a frustratingly complex foe, Emily Sohn writes for Nat Geo. (Above, a computer image of an eOD-GT8, an immune-stimulating protein behind an advance in the search for a vaccine.)
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OVERHEARD AT NAT GEO
Not Siri, but ... This week’s episode of Overheard, Nat Geo’s podcast, covers the boundary-pushing discoveries and dilemmas of artificial intelligence. Nat Geo’s Brian Gutierrez co-hosts with Natalie, a text-to-speech program, on the biases creeping into AI, particularly with communities of color and vulnerable populations. “I think that we should all approach AI with a healthy dose of skepticism at all times,” says Tiffany Deng, a program manager at Google working in algorithmic fairness. “It can make our lives easier. It can make us safer. But it also has the potential to reinforce negative stereotypes and make things harder for people and exclude people, right?” (Above, an abstract illustration of big data.)
THE LAST GLIMPSE
The literary astronaut: Born in Rome, growing up around the world as part of a military family, Michael Collins had a skill few NASA pioneers could match: He could put his adventures into vivid and thoughtful words. Left orbiting the moon while his two Apollo 11 colleagues made history on the lunar surface, Collins wrote in his 1974 autobiography: “I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I feel this powerfully—not as fear or loneliness—but as awareness, anticipation, satisfaction, confidence, almost exultation.” (Pictured above, Collins practicing in June 1969, a month before his launch to the moon. The astronaut died April 28 at age 90.)
This newsletter has been curated and edited by David Beard and Monica Williams, with photo selections by Jen Tse. Have an idea or a link to share? We'd love to hear from you at david.beard@natgeo.com. Thanks for reading.
