14 DAY TRIAL // Until recently, archaeologists were quite convinced that humans had taken up the habit of burying their dead with flowers and other plants not long ago. By the looks of it, they could not have been more wrong.
Archaeological evidence collected in Raqefet Cave in Mourt Carmel, Israel, indicates that the practice of placing flowers on graves has been around since at least 14,000 years ago.
Thus, researchers carrying out excavations in this regions have come across a burial pit containing the impressions of several aromatic plants like mint and sage.
ScienceMag explains that this ancient burial pit was built by the Natufians, who lived in this area many millennia ago.
They were hunter-gatherers, and many archaeologists and historians consider them to be the forefathers of the first farmers ever to walk the face of the Earth.
The Natufian people was one of the first to bury their dead close to the places where they lived.
What's more, they were well known for their preference for setting up cemeteries rather than simply disposing of corpses by putting them to rest in burial pits scattered all across the regions they inhabited.
At least from this standpoint, it makes sense that they were also among the first to think about laying flowers on the graves of their deceased loved ones.
The same source reports that the burial pit inside which these flower and plant impressions were found housed the remains of an older man and those of a relatively young boy.
The floor of their final resting had been covered in mud by the Natufians, and the grave flowers were later pressed into this mud lining.
“[This discovery] is the oldest example of putting flowers and fresh plants in the grave before burying the dead,” Dani Nadel, an archaeologist presently working with the University of Haifa in Israel, commented on these findings, as cited by Live Science.
The archaeologists are presently unable to say why the Natufian people decided to bury their dead with flowers and aromatic plants.
Hopefully, future investigations will help shed more light on this mystery.