A series of small thin pendants unearthed from a Stone Age burial on a Russian sea island more than 80 years ago have been re-examined after archaeologists reanalyzed the findings using medical fingerprinting techniques.
“We were surprised to see that some of the material in these samples turned out to be human bone,” archaeologist Kristina Mannermaa of the University of Helsinki in Finland and her colleagues wrote in their published paper.
Mannermaa was part of a team that oversaw another landmark study of Stone Age culture, unearthing the remains of a child whose upper grave – in what is now Finland – was covered in feathers and fur.
This recent case of ancient burial goods reveals another aspect of Stone Age life preserved in death; it shows that people who lived thousands of years ago considered their lives as important as the animals around them.
The bones were found on Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov, an island in the Onega Sea in northwestern Russia, which has the largest cemetery in northern Europe from the end of the Stone Age, with 177 recorded sites.
Archaeologists excavated the graves in the 1930s, but it is only with this recent analysis that researchers have identified the source of the bone fragments fashioned into pendants found in six graves among the decorated teeth of elk, beaver, and even brown bears. .
For more than 80 years, researchers investigating burials on the island of Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov ignored the ossuary because they were too arrogant.
With one or two dents carved into the end of the bone, archaeologists were drawn to teeth that were easy to identify from species based on their appearance.
Twelve of the 37 specimens submitted for review were found to be made from human bone – not animal, while two others were questioned as possibly human and six were unknown.
Using mass spectrometry, the researchers analyzed the proteins stored in the burial ornaments to show the third part was cut from a human bone; the rest was made of cowhide and bones.
Dating back more than 8,200 years, human bone markers are part of the history of the first people to make jewelry from bone.
The oldest evidence of human bones for fashion jewelry is a series of tooth drills found in France, dated 35,000 years ago, which were probably left by the Aurignacians who migrated to Europe at that time. Recent human dental implants have also been found in Denmark, Germany, Turkey, Latvia, and the Czech Republic.
Although the Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov bone markers were poorly preserved, chipped, and worn at the edges, the bone fragments indicate that they were made from new bones rather than old burials.
As far away as Mexico, remains of musical rasps made from human bones have been found with cut marks on the bones to show that they were taken from fresh corpses, perhaps sacrificial victims. No such evidence of cannibalism was found on the bones of Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov, nor can it be ruled out.
The human bone artifacts were also not decorated in any way; they were finished and obscure and made of animal bones until this recent research revealed their true origin.
The fact that human bone was treated as an artifact like anything else may indicate that animals and humans were closely related in the minds of Stone Age people, Mannermaa says.
If the bone used to make the sky was not very important, then the people who carved it felt that there was very little difference between humans and animals.
“Using the bones of animals and people together in jewelry or similar clothes may have shown that people can transform into animals in their minds, in addition to the belief that animals can take on human bodies,” says Mannermaa.
“We know that such distortions of form and boundaries have been and still are part of the indigenous world.”
This study was published in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.
