France is home to many ancient caves whose war shelter once protected ancient humans from the elements.
Several breakthrough discoveries have been made at caves like the world-famous Lascaux.
But another cave, Grotte de Cussac, previously caught headlines after the remains of prehistoric hunter-gatherers were found inside its intricate system of tunnels.
Located in the southwest of the country, the remains were some 30,000 years old and offered archaeologists yet more vital clues about how our ancestors lived and died.
More intriguing, however, was the way in which many of the remains were found, in what appeared to be man-made “nests”.
The skeletons belonged to members of the Gravettian culture of the European Upper Paleolithic and were originally found by amateur speleologist Marc Delluc in 2000.
Shedding fresh light on the burial rituals of Paleolithic humans, the group are believed to have appeared on the continent around 33,000 years ago.
The culture has become famous among archaeologists for its distant artwork and styles, cave paintings portraying voluptuous female figures and elaborate burial rituals are regularly found where the Gravettian culture once lived.
Researchers studied the cave and published their study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020, with an international team analysing the remains found in the cave using photographs and 3D rendering.
They concluded that the site provided a “unique” setting for the dead in the Paleolithic, building on the work of previous papers that had reported the presence of human remains inside.
The latest study, however, is the first to provide a detailed description of all of them and a comprehensive analysis of the mortuary behaviours that led to the particular distribution of the bones.
Because contact with the cave’s surfaces is prohibited due to conservation efforts, researchers had to use indirect examination techniques, soon reporting that the cave contained two distinct areas of human remains.
The first included the skeleton of a young adult male in a shallow depression that was previously a bear’s nest, alongside the fragmentary remains of at least two other individuals spread across two other former bear nests.
The second area which sat deeper inside the cave contained the remains of at least three individuals—two adults and an adolescent—in hollows along a wall, which appeared to be sorted largely by lower and upper anatomy.
Some of the bones and underlying sediments featured a red pigment that the researchers linked to the remains, and many of the burials were similar to traits discovered in other Gravettian sites.
Yet, the scientists said a number of characteristics appear unique to this ancient culture.
“These human remains are located deep in the cave, which is a unique finding for this period—all previously known Gravettian burials are located in open-air sites, rock shelters, or cave entrances,” Sacha Kacki, with the French National Center for Scientific Research, told Newsweek.
He added: “The Grotte de Cussac is not only a burial place, but also a decorated cave. It is quite rare that Gravettian human remains are found close to (cave) art, and the Grotte de Cussac is the first discovered cave where the mortuary rites and the art are very likely contemporaneous.”
According to the authors, the findings reveal yet more details about the burial practices of Gravettian hunter-gatherers, providing evidence of significant social complexity during the Upper Paleolithic (roughly 50,000 to 12,000 years ago.)
Mr Kacki said: “Most of the human remains in Cussac are disarticulated due to human manipulations of bones or body parts after or during decomposition.
“Although post-mortem manipulations of human remains have been previously documented for other Gravettian sites, some types of manipulations at Cussac are unknown elsewhere, including the removal of crania and the deliberate commingling of the remains of several individuals.
“These observations indicate diverse and complex mortuary behaviours during the Gravettian, which provides a window onto the social complexity of human groups from the Upper Paleolithic.”
