The oldest human remains found in northern Britain belong to a young girl who lived about 11,000 years ago. Her bones were discovered in Heaning Wood Bone Cave in Cumbria, and DNA tests show she was a female between 2.5 and 3.5 years old when she died.
The discovery was led by local archaeologist Martin Stables and later studied by a team from the University of Central Lancashire. Alongside the child’s remains, they found artifacts hinting that this was not just any burial.
The cave seems to have held spiritual importance for early hunter-gatherers, showing that even 11,000 years ago, people thought carefully about how they laid their dead to rest.
A Landmark Discovery in European Prehistory
Three years after the initial discovery, an international team of researchers successfully extracted DNA from the remains. The analysis revealed the child’s age and confirmed she was a girl, something rarely possible for such old remains. Dr. Rick Peterson, who led the research, noted that:
“It is the first time we have been able to be so specific about the age of a child whose remains are so old and be certain that they are from a female.” And the jewelry found with her, dated to the same period, makes it clear that the burial was intentional.
Caves like this were often seen as entrances to the spirit world. Peterson pointed out that the careful way the Ossick Lass was placed, along with beads and deer tooth, shows the community treated her death with attention and ritual, similar to other Mesolithic sites in northern Europe.
Clues to Spiritual Practice
The girl has been nicknamed the “Ossick Lass,” using the local dialect for “Urswick girl,” connecting her to the village near the cave.
Martin Stables, a self-taught archaeologist who began digging the site in 2016, says working on the site has been like traveling through time, uncovering Bronze Age and Neolithic remains before reaching the Mesolithic level.
“Ultimately, reaching the Mesolithic Period has obviously become the highlight of the excavation and something that’s particularly poignant to myself. Effectively, I was the first to bear witness to the obviously caring burial of someone’s child that occurred over 11,000 years ago,” he said in a release published by the University of Central Lancashire.
The cave contains at least eight individuals buried across three different periods: Early Bronze Age, Early Neolithic, and the earliest Mesolithic. Stables points out that the repeated use of the cave shows it was an important place for rituals over thousands of years.
Why Caves Mattered to Early Britain
Before this find, the oldest known human remains in the north were about 10,000 years old, found in Kent’s Bank Cavern. Researchers from the University of Central Lancashire say the Ossick Lass now sets a new benchmark for the earliest humans in northern Britain.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society Journal, also shows how rare northern Mesolithic remains are. Stables said that the team hopes to uncover more details about burial practices and everyday life.
“The publication of this research paper is an important stage, that in due course, allows us to reveal further information about this unique site of national importance. My journey continues, but in the present as this is just the beginning and there is much more we plan to tell.”
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