Member-only story
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.
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.
