Massive monumental cemetery built by Eastern Africa’s earliest herders discovered in Kenya
Mon, Aug 20, 2018
The 5,000-year-old cemetery near Lake Turkana is the earliest and largest monumental cemetery in eastern Africa and was built by an egalitarian society of mobile pastoralists.
MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—An international team, including researchers at Stony Brook University and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, has found the earliest and largest monumental cemetery in eastern Africa. The Lothagam North Pillar Site was built 5,000 years ago by early pastoralists living around Lake Turkana, Kenya. This group is believed to have had an egalitarian society, without a stratified social hierarchy. Thus their construction of such a large public project contradicts long-standing narratives about early complex societies, which suggest that a stratified social structure is necessary to enable the construction of large public buildings or monuments. The study, led by Elisabeth Hildebrand, of Stony Brook University, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
https://popular-archaeology.com/article/massive-monumental-cemetery-built-by-eastern-africas-earliest-herders-discovered-in-kenya/
