At what point in our evolution did humankind start to grapple with the concept of death and mark our mortality with graves? It’s hard to tell without the knowledge of a time-traveling philosopher, but we can learn a lot from the archaeological history of early human burials. 

Some of the earliest evidence of intentional burials comes from the Qafzeh Cave in Israel, home to 25 human graves spanning tens of thousands of years. The bodies are widely believed to have been intentionally buried here, owing to the dozens of funerary objects at the site, such as seashells and relics tinted with red ocher.

The oldest of the skeletons dates back to at least 100,000 years ago, according to a 1993 study, although other papers have suggested they might be as old as 130,000 years old. 

This dating could be considered to be surprisingly early as it’s long before the Upper Paleolithic (roughly 50,000 to 12,000 years), a period when evidence reflects how human behavior became notably more complex in the form of abstract thinking, symbolic behavior, and technological development.

Burials are often thrown into the class of “advanced” behaviors, along with things like creating artworks and wearing personal ornaments, as it hints at an awareness of abstract concepts, individual identity, and impermanence. However, the truth is perhaps not so clear-cut (a bit more on that later).

The burials at Qafzeh Cave were Homo sapiens, but elsewhere in the surrounding region we can in equally old evidence of burials by our sister species, Neanderthals, who may have been intentionally burying their dead around 120,000 years ago.

In Africa, there’s concrete evidence of human burials that date to at least 78,000 years ago. A 2021 study identified the burial of a young Homo sapien child in a cave near the coast of East Africa in modern-day Kenya, providing clear evidence the burial was intentional.

If you’re a fan of science documentaries on Netflix, you might be aware of the sensational show UNKNOWN: Cave Of Bones. It focuses on the work of paleontologist Lee Berger in South’s Africa Rising Star Cave which claims to have found evidence that an extinct human relative with a tiny brain called Homo naledi buried its dead over 240,000 years ago.

It’s a fascinating watch, but hasn’t convinced many other researchers. A peer review of Berger’s articles found that the evidence was “incomplete and inadequate,” and it has been broadly rejected by the wider scientific community.

Burials might be just a small part of the wider picture, however. Today, many cultures around the world practice funerary rituals that don't leave a trace by effectively ridding the physical body from Earth, most notably cremation and the scattering of ashes (or yeeting them into space). There are also "Sky Burials" practiced in Tibet and other parts of Asia where human corpses are left on a mountaintop to decompose or be picked apart by scavenging vultures.

Both these practices are steeped in ritualistic complexity, yet they leave little trace, let alone any physical evidence that will last thousands of years to be studied by future humans.  

It’s also worth considering burials don’t always indicate some “deep” understanding of mortality. It’s easy to imagine that burials started as a way to keep corpses away from scavengers or help to control diseases and smells associated with decomposing bodies. 

Nevertheless, the question of when humans started burying their dead is central to our understanding of ourselves as it marks a key milestone in the development of cognitive abilities, social complexity, and perhaps even our understanding of death. 

In an excellently titled 2016 article on "Love and Death in the Stone Age", author Mary Stiner concluded: “[B]urial may reveal the first demonstrably ritualized bridge between the living and the deceased in human evolutionary history."