Archeologists Find Mysterious 12,000 Year Old Female Burial

Unlike the others at the site, this woman's grave included the remains of wild animals that roamed the banks of the Tigris River

Hiya!

Many scientific fields teach us magnificent things about our physical, external, shared reality — from the composition of the stars to quantum activity. Archeology is one of my favorite fields, though, because every discovery reveals a bit more of our collective story — and we all know how much we humans love stories, especially about ourselves. And lately, archeologists have been finding so much that I can barely keep up.

For instance, many burials and skeletal remains have been discovered in the Upper Tigris Basin in Turkey, which has kept archeologists busy for the last few years. Among them is a mysterious grave of a 12,000-year-old woman who might have been something similar to a shaman. If so, she may represent one of the earliest known examples from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period.

Pre-Pottery Neolithic A

During her 1950s excavations of Jericho, located in the Palestinian Territories, British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon was the first to define the Pre-Pottery Neolithic periods (PPN) — known as A, B, C, and so on.

For instance, the discovery I’ll tell you about in a moment dates to PPNA, the first and earliest stage of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic periods. PPNA includes the early Levantine and Anatolian Neolithic cultures and dates from about 12,000 to 10,800 years ago, or 10,000 to 8,800 BCE.

You may recognize Jericho as a city mentioned in the Bible, but it’s also one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on Earth. Archeological evidence suggests people settled there as early as 10,000 years ago during the start of the PPNA period.

Kenyon’s initial impression of the PPN people was that they were still simple hunters and gatherers, like their ancestors, since pottery had yet to be invented. However, modern archaeologists disagree after discovering evidence suggesting that the PPNA people were more advanced and complex than previously thought.

Experts have unearthed sophisticated tools, large monuments and other community structures, and elaborate settlements at sites such as Jericho and the ancient Göbekli Tepe in Turkey.

So far, there are known sites dating to PPN periods scattered throughout the Fertile Crescent and into today’s Turkey, Cyprus, and Israel, leading some archeologists to believe there could have been inter-regional information sharing and early agricultural practices that may explain the nearly simultaneous invention of farming in the region a few thousand years later.

In a March 2024 study published in Antiquity, archaeologist Ergül Kodaş of Mardin Artuklu University and his colleagues found personal items from a PPNA site in Boncuklu Tarla, Turkey, including a 26-inch (65-centimeter) long human statue dating back 12,000 years. The site also revealed the remains of an 11,800-year-old sewer system, which may be the earliest known sewer in the world. 

Yet, that’s not all Kodaş has found.

More recently, about 150 miles (241 km) from Göbekli Tepe and a mile (1.6 km) from Boncuklu Tarla, Kodaş and his team found a curious burial of a PPNA woman.

The Discovery