The oldest traces of human cremation have been found in Ethiopia
In Ethiopia, archaeologists have found human bones about 100,000 years old that were burned at high temperatures. Researchers believe this may be the earliest known evidence of human cremation.
The discovery was made in the Afar Rift, one of the key regions for studying the early history of Homo sapiens. Here, an international team of researchers has been studying ancient sites, stone tools, animal bones and remains of Middle Stone Age people for many years. The work is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Important: it is not yet about proven cremation in the modern sense. Scientists have found human bones that have been subjected to intense heat, and this may indicate that the body was deliberately burned. But the remains have other marks - including predator bites and signs of quick burial. So the conclusion remains cautious.
Details
The study is linked to the Middle Awash region of Ethiopia. This is part of the Afar Rift, where geological layers preserve traces of life over a huge span of time. The new material is from the lower part of the Halibee Member of the Dawaitoli Formation. One of the sites, Faro Daba, dates back to about 100,000 years ago and contains many fossilised bones and stone tools from the Middle Stone Age.
Among the finds were the remains of several Homo sapiens. Some of the human bones appeared to have been burnt at high temperatures. This is what led researchers to ask the question: could people even then have used fire not only for domestic purposes, but also in dealing with the bodies of the dead?
However, the picture is more complicated. Some of the bones have traces of predators' teeth. Other signs suggest sudden or rapid burial in the sediment. This means that bodies may have entered the ground in different ways: after death, after exposure to animals, after natural processes, or perhaps after the actions of the people themselves.
Archaeologists have also found thousands of stone tools. They show that people did not live here permanently, but probably returned to the area again and again for short periods of time. The site was on a seasonally flooded plain connected to the ancient Avash River.
One of the important findings of the work is that the lives of people in the area were more strongly influenced by local conditions, such as water, river flooding, seasonal changes in the landscape and the availability of resources, rather than global climatic shifts. According to the researchers, these were the factors that determined when people came here and how they used the area.
What makes the find especially valuable is that it is an open car park, not a cave. Much of the knowledge about early humans is often based on cave deposits where objects are better preserved, but this picture can be incomplete. In the Afar rift, artefacts and bones have been preserved in layers with almost no displacement, so scientists can understand more precisely how they were positioned in relation to each other.
Why it matters
If the cremation theory is confirmed, the find would greatly push back the history of people's complex treatment of the dead. Until now, much later cremations have been considered reliable examples of the practice. For example, 2026 separately described an approximately 9,500-year-old cremation in Malawi as the oldest confirmed example of intentional cremation in Africa.
But the new find from Ethiopia is much older. It dates to a time when Homo sapiens were already in existence, making complex stone tools, moving across the landscape and adapting to seasonal changes in the environment.
That said, the significance of the work is not just about possible cremation. It shows how early humans lived in an open landscape: where they came from, what resources they used, what animals lived nearby and how water governed the life of the area.
The main conclusion should be worded cautiously: the bones from the Afar Rift may be the oldest trace of human cremation, but a definitive conclusion requires more data and the exclusion of other heating scenarios and postmortem changes.
Background
Cremation is not simply the burning of a body. In archaeology, it is important to understand whether exposure to fire was accidental, natural, or intentional. The bones could have been burned in a fire, caught in an area that was already burning, exposed to heat after death, or been part of a specially organised rite.
Scientists therefore pay attention not only to the fact of burning itself, but also to the temperature, the position of the bones, the condition of the layer, the marks on the remains, the presence of a hearth, associated objects and the general context of the find.
The Afar rift is particularly important for such studies. It is one of the regions where key evidence for human evolution and the behaviour of early Homo sapiens is found. The Middle Awash project has been studying these sites since 1981 and combines geology, palaeontology and archaeology to reconstruct not a single episode but a whole picture of the ancient environment.
Source
Yonas Beyene et al, "Halibee member archaeology: Middle Stone Age environment, technology, and postmortem modifications," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2026.
The study describes materials from the Halibee Member of the Dawaitoli Formation in the Afar Rift of Ethiopia. The Faro Daba site has been dated to about 100,000 years ago. The team studied human remains, animal bones, stone tools and evidence of postmortem alterations, including high-temperature effects on individual human bones, predator bites and signs of rapid burial.