Funeral Service Times August 2017 March 2019 | Page 33

CEMETERIES AROUND THE WORLD 33
Cemeteries around
the world
An escapade into north Africa’s oldest cemetery and cave, the Taforalt in Morocco
T
aforalt, also known as Grotte
des Pigeons is a cave in
northern Oujda, Morocco,
and is thought to be the oldest
cemetery in north Africa and
one of the oldest in the world. It contained
at least 34 Iberomaurusian adolescent and
adult human skeletons, as well as younger
ones, from the Upper Palaeolithic between
15,100 and 14,000 years ago. There is
archaeological evidence for Iberomaurusian
occupation at the site between 22,100 and
12,600 years ago, as well as evidence for
Aterian occupation as old as 85,000 years
ago. La Grotte des Pigeons is the cemetery’s
official name with the derived name of
Taforalt being given to the cemetery due to
the town it is located near.
Recent excavations have discovered
that a large number of bodies that were
recovered showed signs of postmortem
processing. Some of the bodies showed
evidence of potential rituals with burials
containing animal remains including
horns, mandibles, a hoof, and a tooth. The
cemetery was first discovered in 1908,
with excavation work beginning in 1944
and continuing to the present day, many
of the field records from early excavations
at Taforalt have been lost. Archaeologists
have found artifacts at the site such as
unretouched and retouched flakes and
bladelets, single and opposed platform
bladelet cores, river cobbles, microburins,
La Mouillah points, backed bladelets,
Ouchtata bladelets, obtuse-ended backed
bladelets, side scrapers, large bifacial tools,
shell beads associated with bifacial foliates
and tanged tools associated with the Aterian
culture, and potential rock palettes. Along
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with artifacts, the area has also played host
to a range of floral remains from as far back
as 80,000 years ago, including charred
holm oak acorns and juniper and wild oat.
In 1995, the site became recognised by
UNESCO on its World Heritage Tentative
List in the cultural category under the name
‘Grotte de Taforalt’. The site itself is located
around steep hills, rocky mountains, and
the natural vegetation of the thermo-
Mediterranean biozone. The area itself is
located in the eastern part of Morocco with
the large mouth of the cave opening to the
north east. The earliest layers of human
habitation in the cave, dating from 85,000
to 82,000 years ago, contain evidence of a
pre-Mousterian industry where no evidence
of the Levallois lithic technology is apparent.
Taforalt is the most extensively dated site
of the north African later Stone Age. With
dating starting in the 1960s, the habitation
dates in this cave stretch from 12,500 years
ago to 85,000 years ago with a shift to
sedentary habitation about 15,000 years
ago. The local environmental data helps
establish the seasonality of the site, as much
of the modern vegetation was utilised by
the prehistoric population and follows a
set seasonal process of food production.
The presence of plant remains that would
have been harvested in spring indicate
that the cave or nearby environs were
inhabited during that season. Proxies for
environmental conditions during the phases
of cave occupation are available from
both wood charcoal and small mammal
evidence.
Last year, the oldest example of
human DNA was found on the site, which
suggested common understanding of
ancient human migration may need to be
rethought. The DNA led researchers to
believe that stone age human beings from
north Africa were interacting with those
from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle
East much earlier than was previously
thought. Johannes Krause and Choongwon
Jeong from the Max Planck Institute for the
Science of Human History in Jena, Germany,
made the discovery and Jeong said at the
time of the research: "Our analysis shows
that north Africa and the Near East, even
at this early time, were part of one region
without much of a genetic barrier.”
Louise Humphrey, of the Natural History
Museum in London, described the site
as “a crucial site to understanding the
human history of north-western Africa”,
adding that the cave had been inhabited
“intensively” by ‘modern humans’ in the
Middle and later Stone Age. Using advanced
sequencing methods the researchers were
also able to recover DNA from humans
that predated the agricultural revolution in
north Africa for the first time. Two thirds of
the remains found at Taforalt were found
to have heritage closely related to the
ancient Natufian culture which resided in
the Mediterranean region of the Middle East
until about 11,500 years ago.
MARCH 2019