The Sungir burials
Two children buried in Russia with 10,000 ivory beads and spears made from straightened mammoth tusks.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 2 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 2 thousand years
- Era
- Late Pleistocene, Quaternary
At Sungir near Vladimir, around 34,000 years ago, an adult male and two children were buried with extraordinary grave goods: tens of thousands of mammoth ivory beads sewn onto clothing, each requiring perhaps an hour to make; carved pendants; and lances made from mammoth tusks somehow straightened. The labour invested in children's burials implies inherited status rather than earned — some of the earliest evidence of social differentiation.