Sungir Sungir is the name of an archeological site in Russia, slightly north east of Moscow, that wa

Sungir

Sungir is the name of an archeological site in Russia, slightly north east of Moscow, that was discovered in 1955. The discovery was an accident as local digging from clay pits eventually led to the discovery of an ancient human settlement and burial site. The site has been dated back to somewhere around 33,000BC and is therefore a real treasure trove for researchers researching the lifestyle of early European homo sapiens.

What makes the Sungir site especially fascinating is the discovery of extremely extravagant burials. One example is a buried male, who died somewhere between the age of 35-45. It is not certain how he died but he probably died quite suddenly from an injury in his neck. He was buried with elaborate decorations including 3,000 beads made of mammoth ivory, fox teeth and ivory bracelets. It took early humans about 40 minutes to make just one ivory bead so imagine how much time they spent making 3,000 of them.

Two other richly decorated graves were found, which belonged to two adolescent children. These two were placed together in a grave with an adult femur bone. Both children were also decorated with thousands of mammoth ivory beads, red ochre, bracelets, fox teeth (they would have needed to slay at least 20 foxes for this burial), mammoth ivory spears, disks and pierced antlers.

This site is extremely important because it gives us clues into the spiritual lives of our earliest European ancestors. There has to be of course a reason why these three individuals were buried with such riches. If you count the man-hours of all the found decorations, it would be at least 10,000 hours. Why were these people buried with all of these items?

Several theories about the reason why they were buried like this exists, sadly it is impossible to be absolutely sure about a theory since these ancient people haven’t written anything down. One theory suggests that these individuals were part of an ancient ritualistic sacrifice. Perhaps they were sacrificed to the landspirits for certain blessings, it would explain the extreme amount of jewelry and unique burial style.

Another theory suggests that these three individuals were of a high status, perhaps the adult male was the chief of the tribe and suffered from a hunting injury that ultimately cost him his life, his high status could be the reason why he received so many burial gifts but it doesn’t explain why the two children were also buried with such rich gifts.

It wasn’t until 2017 when scientists finally fully sequenced the DNA of the two children, the adult male and the adult femur bone. All four individuals are male but none of them are direct family members of each other so the children were not the high status offspring of the buried adult male. This would mean that the theory of a possible human sacrifice seems more likely than the theory of high status burials.

One important detail that I want to add is the fact that both the children and the adult male show physical abnormalities in their remains. This might perhaps be the reason why they were part of a ritual, if the ritual theory is correct, and why they were given such an odd burial. Perhaps they were viewed as gifted people thanks to their disabilities. One of the children, a 10 year old boy, has femurs which are unusually short and the other boy, 12 years old, shows an abnormality in his upper jaw.

There is still so much to learn about ancient paleolithic spiritual practices. It is also unfortunately an incredibly hard subject since there is so little evidence and we have to make conclusions based on the lifestyle of modern day hunters and gatherers which is of course not 100% reliable. But piece by piece and through careful research we might perhaps reconstruct bits of ancient spiritual practices of our earliest European ancestors.

Here are images of:
Sungir grave of the adult male,
Sungir grave of the two children,
Bones of the children showing abnormalities<
Bone jewelry found at Sungir