Ancient child's burial on the Nile.

While excavating an Egyptian Stone Age rock quarry in 1994, a team led by Belgian archaeologist Pierre M. Vermeersch of the Catholic University of Leuven (K.U. Leuven) made an unexpected and poignant discovery. A child's skeleton sat propped against the wall of a shallow pit, its face skyward, legs pulled up, left arm on its hip and right arm behind its back.

This striking find may represent the oldest known burial in Africa north of the equator, and perhaps in the entire continent, Vermeersch and his coworkers report in the September Antiquity. Preliminary work indicates that the child was an anatomically modern human who died roughly 55,000 years ago, between ages 8 and 10, and was intentionally buried.

The skeleton came from Taramsa Hill in the Nile valley, about 250 miles south of Cairo. Prehistoric folk went there to dig up pieces of chert, a flint-like rock that they fashioned into stone tools.

"The location of this find is significant, because it's on a possible dispersion route of modern humans from Africa into Asia and Europe between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago," says anthropologist Christopher B. Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London, a coauthor of the new report.

Much of the skeleton crumbled during recovery, despite painstaking efforts to remove it in a protective layer of compacted sediment. A gaping hole in the youngster's cranium attests to the fossil's fragility. The partial skull, a number of teeth, and several shafts from arm and leg bones survived excavation.

The child's carefully positioned body, which was covered with a coarse sand mixed with stone implements and tool-making debris, was apparently placed in the pit on purpose, Vermeersch says. To estimate the skeleton's age, the researchers measured accumulations of naturally occurring radioactive substances in the sand samples around the body.

The team assigned the child to modern Homo sapiens because of the shape of its brain case, the rounding of its forehead, and the slenderness of the limb bones. However, the child also has a few Neandertal-like traits, such as a relatively large, sloping face and a flattened upper-arm bone shaft.

Vermeersch's group hopes to clear bureaucratic hurdles in Egypt so that the find can be shipped to London's Natural History Museum for a more careful analysis, including dating of its tooth enamel.

"The Taramsa child is probably older than 50,000 years, but the dating needs more work," comments archaeologist Alison S. Brooks of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. "The cranium and teeth are much in line with those of early anatomically modern humans."

There is tentative evidence for older African burials at South Africa's Border Cave, which dates to around 100,000 years ago, and at an approximately 150,000-year-old site in Zambia, Brooks says.