The baby girl was born roughly 10,000 years ago, after the end of the last Ice Age in what is now Liguria, northwestern Italy, but didn’t survive more than two months. After she died, she was given a proper burial honouring her as a fully fledged person in her society - a remarkable testament to female equality in Mesolithic times.
That's the conclusion drawn today by a team of archeologists including Université de Montréal's Julien Riel-Salvatore and Claudine Gravel-Miguel, UdeM doctoral student Geneviève Pothier Bouchard and scientists in the U.S., Italy and Germany, in a study led by researchers at the University of Colorado and the University of Genoa, and published in Nature Scientific Reports.
Because the sex of infant skeletons is usually difficult to determine, the team’s multidisciplinary analysis is unique, the scientists say: it reveals the oldest definitive instance of a burial of an infant girl ever documented in Europe, and the discovery opens a window into gender and inclusiveness in prehistory, say the scientists, who have nicknamed the girl ‘Neve.’
"The way prehistoric people buried their dead gives us insights into how they thought about themselves and their universe,” said Riel-Salvatore, a co-author of the study, who helped excavate the archeological site called Arma Veirana, a cave in the Ligurian pre-Alps, where the burial was discovered in 2017.
“Buried children, especially, provide a unique window into the age at which people in the past were considered full members of their societies. This discovery shows that in this Mesolithic group, even newborn girls were treated with the consideration afforded other people of their group.”
Added Gravel-Miguel: “While archaeologists of prehistory usually deal with material remains that have accumulated over long time periods, burials provide very rare snapshots of the life of a few individuals, which is priceless to understand how they lived and how they perceived death.”
