Neolithic burial practice pushed back to HGs

Angela

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It's the practice of place the body in the home and burning the edifice with the body inside.

See:

https://www.archaeology.org/news
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA—Hunter-gatherers in the Middle East linked the death of a person and the destruction of a building some 10,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to a Science News report. It had been previously thought that early farmers in the region were the first to place their dead in or under burned houses. Archaeologists Lisa Maher of the University of California, Berkeley, and Danielle Macdonald of the University of Tulsa and their colleagues uncovered a hunter-gatherer woman’s partial charred skeleton in eastern Jordan at a hunting and trading site known as Kharaneh IV. She had been placed on her side, with knees flexed, inside a brushwood structure. Traces of this structure were identified as an outline of sediments rich in charcoal and ash, and these borders suggest the fire was intentional and contained to the solitary structure, Maher explained. Radiocarbon dating of sediments near the woman’s bones indicate the ritual took place some 19,200 years ago. Other structures at the site were occupied for several generations after the woman’s funerary rite, Maher added"

I wonder if this is related to the burning of houses in "Old Neolithic Europe". Perhaps so many houses were burned at once because of the plague which suddenly appeared?
 

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