Stone Age · c. 7500 BC · Hora 1, Mount Hora, Northern Region, Malawi
9,500-year-old hunter-gatherer cremation pyre in Malawi is Africa's oldest
An adult woman was burned on a large, tended pyre some 6,000 years before Africa's next known cremations, and people lit fires on the spot for centuries afterwards.
Peer-reviewed paper
Hora 1, Mount Hora, Malawi Hunter-gatherers at the foot of Mount Hora in northern Malawi cremated an adult woman on an open pyre around 9,500 years ago (about 7500 BC). The finding comes from a study published in Science Advances. It is the earliest evidence of intentional cremation in Africa. It is also the oldest known pyre anywhere in the world that is still in place and contains an adult's remains.
Jessica Cerezo-Román, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma, led the study. Elizabeth Sawchuk of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History co-led the work. The team includes researchers from Africa, Europe and the United States.
The senior author is Jessica Thompson of Yale University. She runs a long-term research project at the site with Malawi's Department of Museums and Monuments.
Before this find, the first definite cremations in Africa came from Kenya, around 3,500 years ago. Pastoral Neolithic herders made them. Cremation is more common among food-producing societies than among foragers.
Outside Africa, burned human bones at Lake Mungo in Australia are around 40,000 years old. But the oldest known pyre still in place is at Xaasaa Na' (Upward Sun River) in Alaska. It dates to about 11,500 years ago and held a child of about three.
Cremation is very rare among ancient and modern hunter-gatherers, at least partially because pyres require a huge amount of labor, time, and fuel to transform a body into fragmented and calcined bone and ash.
Jessica Cerezo-Román, associate professor of anthropology, University of Oklahoma
A single cremation at a site of whole-body burials
The site, Hora 1, lies under a rock overhang at the base of a granite inselberg. An inselberg is a large isolated rocky hill. This one rises several hundred feet above the surrounding plain.
Excavations in the 1950s showed that hunter-gatherers buried their dead there. They did not show when. Thompson's work since 2016 has shown that people first lived at the site about 21,000 years ago. They buried the dead there between about 16,000 and 8,000 years ago, and every one of those individuals was buried whole.
The pyre was part of an ash feature about the size of a queen bed. It held the heavily fragmented remains of one person. There is no evidence that anyone else was cremated at the site, before or after.
The 170 bone fragments are mostly from the arms and legs. They come from an adult woman aged between 18 and 60 and under 1.52 metres tall. The colour and fracture patterns of the burned bone show that her body was cremated before it began to decompose. That probably happened within a few days of death.
Cut marks on several limb bones suggest that parts of the body were defleshed or removed.
Surprisingly, there were no fragments of teeth or skull bones in the pyre. Because those parts are usually preserved in cremations, we believe the head may have been removed prior to burning.
Elizabeth Sawchuk, bioarchaeologist and Curator of Human Evolution, Cleveland Museum of Natural History
Cerezo-Román said there are many possible reasons for cutting flesh from bones and removing the skull, even though both "sound very gruesome". "There is growing evidence among ancient hunter-gatherers in Malawi for mortuary rituals that include posthumous removal, curation, and secondary reburial of body parts, perhaps as tokens," she said.
Many people gathered fuel and tended the fire
The team estimates that people gathered at least 30 kilograms of deadwood and grass for the pyre. The researchers take this as a sign of communal effort. Dead wood was the main fuel. The evidence is carbonised remains of Ganoderma, a wood-rotting fungus, and traces of termite tunnels.
Microscopic study of the ash and bone indicates that people disturbed the fire as it burned. They kept adding fuel and held temperatures above 500°C.
Stone tools lay in the pyre, including pointed tools found only with the cremation. They may have been placed as funerary objects. They may also have been lying with the body.
Sediments show that large fires burned at the same spot about 700 years before the cremation. Within 500 years after it, people lit several more large fires directly on top of the pyre. The team reads this as evidence that people remembered where the pyre was and treated the place as significant.
Not only is this the earliest cremation in Africa, it was such a spectacle that we have to re-think how we view group labor and ritual in these ancient hunter-gatherer communities.
Jessica Thompson, assistant professor of anthropology, Yale University
Why the woman was cremated is unknown. "Why was this one woman cremated when the other burials at the site were not treated that way?" Thompson said. "There must have been something specific about her that warranted special treatment."
The research at Hora 1 is continuing with Malawi's Department of Museums and Monuments.
Sources
- Oldest intentional cremation in Africa discovered: a 9,500-year-old funerary pyre in a rock shelter in Malawi (La Brújula Verde)
- Africa’s oldest cremation: 9,500-year-old pyre reveals Stone Age rituals in Malawi (Archaeology News)
- Large Hunter-Gatherer Pyre Discovered in Central Africa (Archaeology Magazine)
- Africa’s oldest cremation pyre and complex ritual practices (Archaeology Wiki)
Paper: Jessica I. Cerezo-Román et al., "Earliest evidence for intentional cremation of human remains in Africa", Science Advances 12, eadz9554 (2026). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adz9554
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