Hunter-gatherers came together and built a pyre to burn a woman in a rock shelter, and lit fires there for hundreds of years
An artist's rendition of the pyre 9,500 years ago at Mount Hora in Malawi. Credit: Patrick Fahy
An artist's rendition of the pyre 9,500 years ago at Mount Hora in Malawi. Credit: Patrick Fahy
January 05, 2026
About 9,550 years ago in what is today northern Malawi, hunter-gatherers built a pyre in a rock shelter to cremate a person short in statue but apparently, large in status.
The pyre at Hora-1 is the earliest ritual cremation discovered to date in Africa by thousands of years, Jessica I. Cerezo-Román, Jessica C. Thompson, Elizabeth Sawchuk and colleague reported Thursday in Science Advances. This is one of the oldest known deliberate cremations anywhere, and the earliest in situ pyre containing the remains of an adult – who was a short, gracile person that the archaeologists think was a woman.
Modern-day Malawi outlined on a map of Africa, and Mount Hora. Credit: Jessica Thompson
Modern-day Malawi outlined on a map of Africa, and Mount Hora. Credit: Jessica Thompson
Her funeral, if she was female, was a communal effort, the team surmises. The people would have needed at least 30 kilograms of dry material to burn, and maintaining the flames in the open pyre would also have been a substantial effort.
After burning the body whole, though possibly minus her head, which wasn't found, the people collected the charred bones and buried them. They may have done something else with her skull. And for centuries, bonfires were lit in the shelter, which was occupied for about 21,000 years – though hers was the only cremation the team found, while other "regular" burials took place in the shelter there spanning thousands of years. So far the archaeologists have uncovered remains from at least 13 adults and juveniles buried in the rock shelter, between at least 16,000 and 8,000 years ago.
Could they have been commemorating the unusual cremation? Maybe, the authors suggest, though some large campfires may have predated it.
"We don't know why they lit the other large fires but it was not to cremate anyone," coauthor Sawchuk says by email. No other cremations were detected there.
The microscopic ash layers signaling a cremation, discovered by the researchers. Credit: Flora Schilt
The microscopic ash layers signaling a cremation, discovered by the researchers. Credit: Flora Schilt
Before this, the oldest known deliberate cremation in Africa was 3,300 years ago, by Elmenteitan pastoralists in Kenya, in subterranean settings. Elsewhere, the practice has been shown to go back much further.
Burial at home
The prehistoric site Hora-1 is a rock shelter at the base of Mount Hora in the Mzimba District of northern Malawi, with a handsome overhang open to the east with a roughly 20-square meter flat, dry shelter, where people occupied for over 21,000 years. It has, the archaeologists confirm, no enclosed spaces that could act as a natural furnace. The pyre was open-air.
The process of excavation at Hora. Credit: Jessica Thompson
The process of excavation at Hora. Credit: Jessica Thompson
The human remains found to date include two adults found in 1950, dating to about 9,000 and 8,000 years; two nearly complete baby boys dated to 14,000 and 16,000 years before present, then four more adults and five more children of whom only isolated remains were found. This suggested to the archaeologists that the people may have engaged in complex mortuary behaviors, involving secondary burial of bones; and potentially token-taking.
Complexities in prehistoric mortuary practice wouldn't have been confined to them. In the Near East at much the same time as the woman was cremated, at least some skulls of the dead were being removed and plastered, for reasons we can only guess. Some suspect ancestor adoration.
Also, burial under the floor at home – including inside proper homes with walls, not shelters or caves – was not unknown. At the Neolithic city of Catalhoyuk in Turkey, for example, people were apparently interred in their own homes. Separate cemeteries seem to have arisen largely from the Chalcolithic but at Çadır Höyük, also in Turkey, Chalcolithic infants were buried in corners of existing rooms, and incorporated in walls – possibly as foundation deposits.
Back in Malawi, the cremation fire wasn't hot enough to calcine the skeleton. After burning, her long bones were defleshed, the archaeologists deduce from marks on the bones. Ultimately, the bones were buried in the soil, but the skull is missing.
The team suspects her head had been removed for ceremonial purposes, but all they can say is they didn't find it, which is highly unusual in cremated remains, Sawchuk observes. In addition, she says, the woman's other remains had been manipulated post-mortem: Part of her body was found a short distance away in another part of the ash mound.
Post-mortem modification: A Neolithic plastered skull from 7,200 B.C.E. found in Jericho Credit: Zunkir
Post-mortem modification: A Neolithic plastered skull from 7,200 B.C.E. found in Jericho Credit: Zunkir
"Refits between bones in the pyre and this second area suggest that part of her cremated remains were moved," she tells Haaretz by email.
While the cremated woman's surviving remains couldn't produce DNA, analysis of ancient genetic material extracted from the buried individuals shows genetic population continuity.
Could the excarnation, the defleshing, have been indicative of unnatural appetites? No; the team did not find evidence of cannibalism. Defleshing was a common practice for whatever reason among many prehistoric peoples, including in Neolithic Turkey, Italy and Britain. "We propose she was partly defleshed as part of the cremation ritual," Sawchuk says.
Thick ash wall with distinct layers marked. Credit: Jessica Thompson
Thick ash wall with distinct layers marked. Credit: Jessica Thompson
What else can we say? The cremated person was on the short side, the archaeologists estimate, between 145 to 155 centimeters tall. Based on the condition of her remaining bones and in the terms of nomadic hunter-gatherers, they suspect she personally led a sedentary life.
It's hard to deduce motivations in ourselves let alone among prehistoric peoples, but if hers was the only cremation and others was buried regularly, and if indeed the pre-literate people remembered the event and commemorated it by building large fires that they didn't use to dispose of other dead people, likely she was of importance.
Naturally, Sawchuk clarifies, we cannot know if all the fires commemorated the one event, but the team is suggesting that as one interpretation.
Fire in the Jordan Valley
While hers is the earliest known cremation in Africa so far, likely we don't know a lot. The authors note for instance burned human remains in Egypt from 7,500 years ago, but they can't be confirmed as deliberate cremation. Anyway, by the time the Malawian woman died, it's possible that bodies were being burned in Eurasia for tens of thousands of years.
The earliest known "concentration of burned human remains" was a woman at Lake Mungo, Australia, about 42,000 years ago: Her bones were partially burned, partially crushed, burned again, and then buried in a grave that was discovered in 1968. No pyre was found. We just add that a man was discovered at the site who had been buried without burning. Both were ceremonially if controversially reburied by aboriginal locals in 2022.
The oldest evidence for a pyre in situ is about 11,500 years ago, at the Upward Sun River site in Alaska called Xaasaa Na′, where a child of about 3 was burned in a hearth. Beneath that archaeologists found the ocher-stained remains of two baby girls, who had been buried with grave goods: one apparently a stillborn, the other some weeks old.
An aerial shot of the excavation site at Mount Hora, Malawi. Credit: Jacob Davis
An aerial shot of the excavation site at Mount Hora, Malawi. Credit: Jacob Davis
Meanwhile in Israel, at a site called Beisamoun, located 12 km (7.4 miles) south of Kiryat Shmona in the Jordan Valley, a pyre pit cremation was found from about 9,000–8,600 years ago, a few hundred years later than the Malawi case. But while the cremations in central Africa and Israel occurred in a similar time frame, their contexts were vastly different. The Malawians were settled in their shelter but were hunter-gatherers and wouldn't begin to farm for another 7,000 years. We can't say whether the proto-morticians in the Jordan Valley personally grew crops or husbanded animals, but the Neolithic revolution in these parts was in swing.
Note that the Neolithic revolution leading to agriculture all happened within the last 11,000 years, but it emerged at different times in different places. In North Africa, hunter-gatherers rebuffed that Neolithic nonsense for thousands of years, recent research has found. In central Malawi, the agricultural life only became entrenched in the last couple of millennia.
Furthermore: The Malawi cremation was done by open pyre, while the one in Israel was done inside a plaster-lined pit that could retain heat.
A reconstruction of the process to build an open pyre in Malawi. Credit: Patrick Fahy
A reconstruction of the process to build an open pyre in Malawi. Credit: Patrick Fahy
"Being an open pyre matters quite a lot, because it generally takes more fuel and attending of the pyre to accomplish the same effect," coauthor Thompson explains by email. So even though home was under a lovely overhang, the rock shelter offered no spot where one could nurture a fire in peace. The prehistoric Malawians would have had to constantly nurse the flame with wood and grasses as well as "hairy herbaceous leaves", the team says.
Why might cremation only have picked up with the Neolithic? "Societies tend to become more complex, larger and more settled in place, with agriculture," Thompson proposes. "This mortuary trend fits well within the Pre-Pottery Neolithic context of the Beisamoun pyre [in Israel], and cremations also start to occur in Africa during its own Neolithic period. … Either way, this kind of mortuary treatment stands out dramatically in the hunter-gatherer context of this age and part of the world."
Obviously, as any prehistoric cave artist could have told you, we didn't suddenly develop societal complexity when we realized what lentils plus water could do. The early Australians had no agriculture when they cremated somebody 42,000 years ago, and some argue that they never did have a Neolithic revolution there, but retained the foraging life until the modern era. Many Australians find that observation irritating.
