During excavations at the necropolis of Abusir, Egyptologists discovered an unusual funerary monument embedded in an Old Kingdom mudbrick mastaba tomb dating to the 4th Dynasty (ca. 2575–2465 B.C.). The recently uncovered stela, however, dates to the first half of the 5th Dynasty (ca. 2465–2323 B.C.) and memorializes a scribe of the treasury named Sekhemka and his wife Henutsen. “Sekhemka was probably a rather low-level official and died much younger than expected,” says Egyptologist Martin Odler of Charles University. This may be why an older tomb was reused.

The white limestone stela is 3.5 feet tall and 1.5 feet wide and depicts the couple standing in a doorway. In a relief atop the doorway, the pair is seated at an offering table covered with 12 loaves of bread. Hieroglyphic inscriptions around the table indicate that Sekhemka and Henutsen should fare well in the afterlife. These inscriptions suggest they would ideally be buried with lighted incense, 1,000 pieces of alabaster, 1,000 pieces of linen, 1,000 loaves of bread, and 1,000 jars of beer, as well as seven sacred oils, including the “best cedar oil” and other, less easily identifiable substances such as “festive oil.”

The offering scene, doorway, and hieroglyphs surrounding the figures were all once painted in rich shades of red, yellow, blue, green, and black. A surprising amount of the pigment survives. Aside from the rarity of preserved paint, Odler explains that the stela is significant because it combines well-known elements of funerary monuments in a completely unique way. “The stela shows that our knowledge of the Old Kingdom is limited,” he says. “We can still find unexpected artifacts that make Old Kingdom Egyptians more human and more creative than expected.”

Inhabited as a colonial city by Macedonian soldiers in the third century B.C., the hilltop settlement of Blaundos in western Anatolia is surrounded by a deep canyon on all sides into which its inhabitants carved hundreds of burial chambers. Although the necropolis has been known for centuries, it is only recently that a team led by archaeologist Birol Can of Uşak University has begun to systematically investigate the unexplored tombs.

In 2021, the team documented around 400 burials dug into the canyon walls. According to Can, the chambers were initially built as single rooms and some were expanded over the generations to make room for sarcophagi holding additional family members. Some eventually held as many as 30 burials. Coins and pottery fragments found in the tombs, as well as the style and iconography of frescoes covering many of their walls and ceilings, indicate that the burials date to the Roman period, from the second to fourth century A.D. The intricate, colorful frescoes, which depict plants and flowers, animals such as birds and dogs, and mythological characters, have deteriorated over the centuries due to causes including illegal excavations, water damage, and fires set by shepherds who used the chambers to house their animals.

There are hundreds of additional tombs still to be excavated, including many that likely date to earlier in Blaundos’ history. “The fact that the whole city was surrounded by the tombs of the Blaundians’ ancestors must have given them spiritual confidence,” says Can. “We can guess that people regularly visited the necropolis during the period when it was used.” For additional images, click here.

When the skeletal remains of more than a dozen hominins were first uncovered in the Dinaledi chamber of South Africa’s Rising Star cave system in 2013, researchers believed they had discovered a species that lived around two million years ago. The species, which scholars named Homo naledi, shared characteristics with early hominins such as Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), including a wide-flaring pelvis, apelike shoulders adapted for climbing, and a brain around one-third the size of a modern human’s. But it also exhibited some traits that are very much in line with modern humans, such as the feet and long legs typical of a biped and hands and wrists suited to making tools. Dating of H. naledi remains in 2017 determined that these hominins actually lived between 335,000 and 236,000 years ago—at least a million and a half years later than initial estimates—a period when modern humans also lived on the African continent.

Newly uncovered remains of H. naledi individuals from other chambers deeper within the Rising Star system have now led researchers to conclude that the H. naledi population may have deliberately interred their dead in the caves, challenging conventional notions of the behavior of early humans with small brains, who are presumed to have had limited cognitive abilities.

Paleoanthropologist Juliet Brophy of Louisiana State University says there is no evidence that H. naledi lived in the Rising Star caves—no domestic sites tied to the hominins have been discovered there. It’s likely, she says, that a population of H. naledi lived nearby and knew the caves. The team has now discovered H. naledi specimens in three cave chambers within the system, including at least 15 individuals in the Dinaledi chamber and three in another known as the Lesedi chamber. Among those in the Lesedi chamber was an adult male whom the team named Neo. According to Brophy, Neo’s remains were concentrated in a small area of the chamber and appear to have been placed there deliberately after his death.

In a third chamber, called U.W.110, the team discovered the skull of a young H. naledi female they named Leti, who died between the ages of four and six. This chamber is more than 260 feet from the entrance to the cave system and is so cramped that the cavers had to excavate upside down. Brophy says there is no evidence on Leti’s skull, or on any H. naledi remains, indicating that the hominins were victims of attacks by predators, such as tooth or gnaw marks, or that any of the fossils were brought into the cave system by flooding. “Someone went to a lot of trouble to deposit this skull in a really remote area,” Brophy says. “When we first told people in the field that we thought H. naledi was deliberately depositing their dead in Rising Star, we were met with resistance, but this is very compelling evidence that they went to a lot of effort.” H. naledi, Brophy says, visited these caves over an extended period to bury multiple generations of their dead, some of whom were as young as one or two and couldn’t possibly have found their way deep into the cave system on their own.

The notion that H. naledi developed a culture of burying their dead has been met with incredulity by some who have questioned whether, with their small brains, the hominins could have developed a concept of an afterlife. Both Brophy and her colleague John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, however, believe this is unnecessary to explain the behavior the team has observed. “Every culture on Earth has mortuary behavior, whether or not their burial practices are related to religion or an afterlife—even nonhuman social mammals undergo emotional and social changes when they encounter a dead individual,” says Hawks. “The appearance of mortuary practices and special behavior around the dead goes back much further in our evolution than any set of beliefs that exists in the world today.”