A 9,500-year-old cremation in Malawi shows early African hunter-gatherers practiced complex funerary rituals.

The earliest known intentional human cremation in Africa is found at a 9,500-year-old cremation site in northern Malawi, suggesting intricate funerary customs among Stone Age hunter-gatherers. There are charred bones and ash from a woman who was probably under five feet tall at the location, which is beneath a rock overhang. There is also evidence of a large, controlled fire that used at least thirty kilograms of wood and grass. Ash distribution and bone damage indicate that the body was burned shortly after death, perhaps with the head removed beforehand. The discovery, which dates to the end of the last Ice Age, disproves earlier theories that such complex customs were exclusive to later food-producing societies and demonstrates sophisticated social and spiritual behaviors in prehistoric African foragers.