Free Republic

Stone Age babies buried with love By Roger Highfield Last Updated: 1:28am GMT 16/11/2006 The image of Stone Age man as a heartless brute will have to be revised after the discovery of an ancient grave where babies had been carefully buried and ritually decorated. Although childhood mortality may well have been high more than 20 millennia ago, the use of red ochre, as well as the grave gifts — a chain of ivory beads — shows that babies were even then considered full members of society. The burials in Krems-Wachtberg in Lower Austria are the first findings of such...