Just over 78,000 years ago, a three-year-old child was laid to rest in a small pit at the entrance of Panga ya Saidi, a leafy cave located 15 kilometres from Kenya's south-east coast.
Members of the ancient local community folded the child's knees up to their chest and wrapped their body in a shroud.
They then gently placed the child's body on its right side in the freshly dug pit, laying their head on a supportive pillow.
The mourners scattered soil collected from the nearby cave floor over the body, and the burial site was left undisturbed for thousands of years.
Now, an international team of archaeologists have discovered that the child's remains represent the oldest known modern human burial in Africa.
The discovery provides a rare glimpse into burial practices on the continent during the Middle Stone Age, which occurred somewhere between 25,000 to 280,000 years ago.
In 2013, researchers stumbled across some of the bones while doing excavations at Panga ya Saidi, a cave site that had been originally excavated in 2010.
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