#mtoto

Rose and mtoto

There would probably be some confusion when Red and Beshte are the same height! I even hc that Red would accidentally get dragged onto patrol one time cus of him being in Beshte’s usual spot, and none of the Guard members noticing until either Red speaks up, they turn around to actually look at him, or somebody points it out

Unearthing Africa’s oldest burial Panga ya Saidi is roughly 15 kilometres from the Kenyan coast. Our team first visited in 2010 as part of an archaeological project on the origins of East Africa’s Indian Ocean trade.When we first entered the cave with our colleagues from the National Museums of Kenya, we knew the site was special. The limestone walls towered some 20-30 metres above us, creating a cool microclimate for forest plants to thrive and humans and animals to take shelter. The cave is sacred to the Mijikenda people who occupy the area today.Read more: Ancient eggshells and a hoard of crystals reveal early human innovation and ritual in the KalahariWith permission from the local community to conduct our research, we embarked on what has become a decade-long process of discovery at the cave. We quickly realised the site held far greater significance for understanding human evolution than we originally thought.Our excavations uncovered a deep series of occupation layers bearing thousands of stone tools and animal remains, as well as shell beads and ochre fragments. These finds revealed more than 78,000 years of early human cultural, technological and symbolic activities.But our most exciting find came in our third field season in 2013, when the shallow pit containing Mtoto’s burial was exposed some 3 metres below the cave floor.The remains were so fragile, our team had to cover them in plaster and remove them intact with the block of sediment in which they were buried. The block was sent first to the National Museum in Nairobi, then to our collaborator Maria Martinón-Torres at the National Research Center on Human Evolution (CENIEH) in Spain, who is a leading expert in hominin palaeobiology Martinón-Torres and her team spent months painstakingly excavating and documenting the remains in her laboratory, revealing not only that the remains belonged to a modern human (Homo sapiens), but a small child.Mtoto’s preservation was remarkable. The skull and face bones, including the jawbone, were still articulated. Based on the shapes of the teeth, Martinón-Torres was able to determine that the child was just 2.5–3 years of age.Microscopic analysis of the bones and surrounding soil confirmed that the body was rapidly covered after burial and that decomposition took place in the pit. In other words, Mtoto was intentionally buried shortly after death.Furthermore, the position of Mtoto’s flexed body, found lying on the right side with knees drawn toward the chest, suggests it was a tightly shrouded burial with deliberate preparation. The position of the head and the way it had collapsed in the pit suggested a pillow of some kind may have been used, indicating the community may have undertaken some form of funerary rite.Read more: The revolution that wasn’t: African tools push back the origins of human technological innovationOur next big question was the age of the burial. The bones were too old for radiocarbon dating, which only works well on organic remains from the past 40,000 years or so.We turned instead to a method called luminescence dating, which measures when quartz grains in the sediment were last exposed to light (that is, when they were buried). The luminescence dates securely placed Mtoto’s burial at 78,000 years ago, making it the oldest known human burial in Africa.Implications for human cultural evolutionThe Panga ya Saidi burial is a major breakthrough for understanding how early populations in Africa treated their dead, allowing us to start situating these behaviours alongside what we know about how culture developed in other regions.Child and juvenile burials are not uncommon in the Eurasian record, and now we have definitive evidence for not just intentional burial at 78,000 years ago in Africa, but the burial of a young child. This suggests a kind of special treatment of the young, with complex emotions of mourning linked to complex social behaviours.Interestingly, the burial was not accompanied by any grave goods or personal ornaments, as have been found with early burials elsewhere in Africa and Eurasia.In fact, the earliest symbolic ornaments at Panga ya Saidi, in the form of cone snail shell beads, only appear some 10,000 years after Mtoto’s burial. Associated with the burial, though, is a fragment of Giant African land snail shell that bears evidence of incisions from a pointed instrument or tool. While we cannot interpret this evidence symbolically, it does show some form of human modification.The burial is also significant because of its association with stone tools belonging to the Middle Stone Age tradition, which has been linked to more than one hominin species, including both modern and archaic Homo sapiens. At Panga ya Saidi, we can definitively state that modern Homo sapiens manufactured these stone tools, providing some clarification on the nature of early technology and tool use.Read more: Why are humans unique? It's the small things that count We can also derive new information about the anatomical evolution of our species. A comparison of Mtoto’s teeth with a representative sample of Neanderthal teeth as well as those from recent and fossil Homo sapiens showed that, although they were clearly modern human, they also have some primitive features.This supports recent archaeological and genetic research suggesting our species didn’t evolve from a single population in one region of Africa. Rather, modern human populations living in different parts of Africa looked different to one another and followed different evolutionary trajectories.

The Lion Guard Just Play Series 2 blind bags (2016)

Mtoto: I resent such words!

IM SOBBIGN WH AT   J US TH APPENED