Many cultures around the world choose to honor their deceased loved ones with a funeral ceremony. The ceremonies that accompany this ritual are rich in history and tradition and may differ from culture to culture. So when was the first human burial?

There is no definitive answer because not all the tombs have been preserved, let alone discovered and studied. However, the oldest evidence points to the Middle Paleolithic period (about 300,000-30,000 years ago).

“We have human bodies that we believe were intentionally buried at least 120,000 years ago,” Mary Steiner, an anthropology professor at the University of Arizona, told LiveScience.

Stiner did not rule out the possibility of older burials, but said the most convincing early examples of how modern humans buried their dead come from the Middle Paleolithic period. Some controversial research suggests that extinct human relatives buried their dead about 300,000 years ago in what is now South Africa, but this is disputed by the scientific community.

The oldest known anatomically modern human burials date back 120,000 years in caves such as Qafze Cave in what is now Israel. There is also evidence of burials, according to the Australian Museum neanderthals In the same caves from 115,000 years ago. Steiner stated that during the Middle Paleolithic period, people frequently used caves, lived, ate and socialized in them.

Researchers such as Stiner believe that these early cave burials were an intentional human action rather than a natural act such as a cave collapse because the bones were arranged in death poses such as the fetal position alongside human objects. In some cases, it is clear that older sediment deposits were disturbed for burial to occur.

“Someone actually dug a hole and then filled it with a bunch of cultural materials,” Stiner said. “We also saw that these types of events occurred quite frequently in clusters of caves, so people thought, ‘Okay, we’ll do this again with another body.’

The origin of burials is not fully understood, but ancient people had many reasons to dispose of their dead in and out of caves. Humans and many other animals have an “innate aversion” to decay, Trish Beers, curator of the Duckworth Laboratory at the Center for Research in Human Evolution at the University of Cambridge, told LiveScience.

“You know something is wrong when there’s death and decay, and it’s actually a really unpleasant process,” Beers said.

People needed a way to deal with corpses as they rotted, began to stink, and exposed the living to flies, pathogens, and scavengers. At first, funerals or other funeral rites were concerned only with these practical aspects of death, and later they became more complex.

The transition to more complex burial practices was not necessarily linear. A study published in The Oxford Handbook of the Archeology of Death and Burial (Oxford University Press, 2013) found that complex burials in Eurasia came and went during the Upper Palaeolithic (45,000-10,000 years ago) and that the game was simple. It includes objects used in daily life.

The authors of the Eurasia study also write that it is difficult to draw clear conclusions about the nature and significance of Upper Paleolithic burials due to their relatively small number. Additionally, ancient tombs varied by region.

According to Beers, how people buried their dead depended on a number of factors, including the environment and the materials people had. Cremation burials came much later; the oldest was known as Lady Mungo and dated to about 40,000 years ago in Australia.

“One of my favorite things about teaching about death and researching death practices is how diverse they are,” she said.