Those celebrity Natufians -- Always in the News!

Earliest Evidence of Flower-Lined Graves Found in 11,000-Year-Old Site

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2013/07/01/earliest-evidence-of-flower...

Very cool!

Publicity hounds!

Next they will have Twitter @Natufians

I'm interested in the mention of these graves being 'filled with flints, stones and butchered animal bones', especially the latter. Were people actually living and eating in these caves when the graves were made, I wonder, or would the bones be the remains of some ritual feast? If the former, you have to wonder if the aromatic herbs were simply an attempt to ameliorate the smell of the rotting corpse.

I assume the reference to 'flints' means just that, and not flint tools? Otherwise the next question would be were the animal bones simply that or the remains of joints of meat buried with the dead, along with some handy tools - well-providing the deceased for the afterlife, Egyptian-style?

Some later people buried their dead underneath their living space, e.g. Çatal-Huruk in Anatolia.

5 > Or John Wayne Gacy.

>6 PhaedraB: Next we'll have Natufian refrigerator burials.