Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

Archaeologists then discovered an even more interesting tomb. It contained two skeletons, buried head to head. One belonged to a boy aged about twelve or thirteen, and the other to a girl of about nine or ten. The boy was covered with 5,000 ivory beads. He wore a fox-tooth hat and a belt with 250 fox teeth (at least sixty foxes had to have their teeth pulled to get that many). The girl was adorned with 5,250 ivory beads. Both children were surrounded by statuettes and various ivory objects. A skilled craftsman (or craftswoman) probably needed about forty-five minutes to prepare a single ivory bead. In other words, fashioning the 10,000 ivory beads that covered the two children, not to mention the other objects, required some 7,500 hours of delicate work, well over three years of labour by an experienced artisan! It is highly unlikely that at such a young age the Sungir children had proved themselves as leaders or mammoth-hunters. Only cultural beliefs can explain why they received such an extravagant burial. One theory is that they owed their rank to their parents. Perhaps they were the children of the leader, in a culture that believed in either family charisma or strict rules of succession. According to a second theory, the children had been identified at birth as the incarnations of some long-dead spirits. A third theory argues that the children’s burial reflects the way they died rather than their status in life. They were ritually sacrificed – perhaps as part of the b...