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15,000-year-old human burial shows evidence of medicinal plant use
The grave of a young man in Morocco is providing astonishing insights into human culture 15,000 years ago.
Buried alongside this individual were a range of symbolic objects, including a plant that has been used in traditional medicine for thousands of years.
A cave in northern Morocco contains dozens of ancient graves.
Dating towards the end of the Pleistocene, some 15,000 years ago, the burials at Grotte des Pigeons are providing a wealth of information about the lives and culture of hunter-gather people.
One grave in particular has provided astonishing insights into potential cultural behaviours. It appears that a young man was buried carefully in an oval pit alongside a medicinal plant now known as Ephedra.
In some parts of the world, such as China and India, this plant is in use as a traditional medicine, with properties that lower blood pressure and act as a decongestant.
The remains of the plant in the ancient burial show signs that it may have been burnt and consumed. This would make it the earliest evidence for the use of Ephedra as a medicinal food.
Dr Louise Humphrey is a Research Leader in human evolution at the Natural History Museum and an expert in ancient human funerary practices. She’s been part of an international team excavating at Grotte des Pigeons for the last two decades.
“Ephedra has vasoconstriction properties,” says Louise, referring to how using the plant can narrow blood vessels. “So, if people were bleeding, this might have helped. It also helps people stay more alert and might have contributed a general sense of wellbeing.”
The paper discussing the finding and its implications is published in the journal Scientific Reports.
The Ephedra plant has been used as a herbal medicine for thousands of years due to its vasoconstriction properties ©Bin Zhu/Shutterstock
The cave of pigeons
The burial was unearthed at site in north Africa called Taforalt, or Grotte des Pigeons. There is evidence of humans living in this cave over a period of tens of thousands of years.
It has a relatively open entrance in which people were living. The sediments here are so fine they preserve not only tools used for processing food and the remains of animals such as wild antelopes, wild sheep and horses, but also the remains of burnt plants. This shows us that these people were eating and using a wide variety of species.
“A long list of plants has been identified at the site,” explains Louise. “Acorns are most abundant and formed a key part of their diet, but there are also pine nuts and smaller amounts of other edible plants, such as lentils and juniper berries.”
These people were also processing plants to make items such as baskets. But it’s the plant material the team has unearthed in a grave towards the back of the cave that is of particular interest.
While it seems that people were living in the cave entrance, they were burying their dead towards the rear. So far, the remains of at least 100 individuals have been recovered from an area that appears to have been extensively used and reused to bury the dead.
One of these graves has revealed a lot about the lives of these people and pushed back the ideas of certain human behaviours.
Early medicinal food use
Louise and her colleagues unearthed a rich variety of grave goods in the resting place of a young man aged about 20 years old.
They found the skull of a barbary sheep that shows evidence of having the brain removed, a fox jaw, fragments of wild cow bones, and even the butchered remains of great bustards. There was also a pestle and mortar, which was covered in a layer of red ochre, and a marine shell that might have been used as a pendent.
The grave of the young man contained many different objects, including multiple deposits of Ephedra plant remains, shown in red here.
Within the surrounding sediment the researchers were also able to tease out the fragments of the Ephedra plant, which showed signs of being burnt. Today, Ephedra is used for its medicinal properties. The plant has limited nutritional value, so it seems likely that the people who buried this young man 15,000 years ago were consuming it for cultural reasons.
This makes it the earliest evidence of Ephedra being used for such purposes.
Dr Joanne Cooper is a Senior Curator of Birds at the Natural History Museum and has been working with Louise to identify and document the bird bones coming out of the cave.
“One of the things that’s really affected me working at this site is that they’re treating death as important, it’s something special,” explains Joanne.
“There's an engagement with the person who's gone. They are marking that passing and I think that respect and that sense of – we don’t know what they thought about what happened next – but they cared about the lost person enough to give them things to be buried with.”
“Now we don’t know all of the symbolisms, we can only guess at that, but we know that there’s care and there’s thought and there’s respect.”
What’s also fascinating is that ideas around some of these behaviours, such as the use of plants for medicinal purposes, have long been associated with the onset of events such farming.
“We have this general idea that human culture shifted dramatically with the origins of agriculture,” says Louise. “But at Taforalt we see many behaviours that we usually associate with farming populations more than 7,000 years before the onset of food production in this region.”
This is also seen in other cultural shifts. For example, it has long been thought that people only really settled and became sedentary when farming allowed for a regular supply of food. But the site in Morocco is showing that these hunter gathers were using and returning to this cave on a regular basis.
As more work is carried out in Grotte des Pigeons, more exciting discoveries are likely to emerge about the lives of early hunter-gatherer communities.
