- A new study suggests that the ground literally swallowed the missing bodies.
Old graveyards and other ancient burial sites are treasure troves for archeologists in every sense of the word. Both the human remains and the goods they were buried with can tell us a lot about our ancestors.
The Tainiaro gravesite in northern Finland is one of the largest and northernmost Stone Age burial grounds. As such, it should be a hot spot for archeological research — but there’s just one problem.
There are no corpses in the graves.
Tainiaro has puzzled archeologists for decades. Every other feature of the site points to it being a graveyard, but they haven’t found any human remains.
What’s going on? Is Tainiaro not a graveyard after all? Did the ancient Finnish cadavers get sick of the cold and move elsewhere?
New research may have finally solved the puzzle. According to analysis, the soil at the site is so acidic that the ground may have quite literally digested and swallowed all human remains.
Let’s take a closer look at the mystery of Tainiaro’s empty graves.
Where Are the Bodies?
First, a little bit of background info. The Tainiaro site lies on the banks of the Simojoki river in Finnish Lapland, only a few dozen miles from the Arctic Circle.
The first graves at the site were discovered in 1959, but nobody paid them much attention at the time. It took three decades before archeologists finally arrived to do proper research in the area.
Their efforts were well rewarded. Between 1984 and 1991, archeologists recovered thousands of artifacts, ranging from natural and unworked stone to pieces of ancient pottery.
In addition, they found 127 6,500-year-old pits that looked a whole lot like graves. In these depressions, the researchers discovered ash and red ochre, both substances that are closely associated with Stone Age burials.
Yet, there weren’t any human remains, not even a single scattered bone.
That was quite bizarre, considering that the place carried all the other hallmarks of an ancient graveyard. But if it was a graveyard, surely there would be at least a few corpses around?
Due to the lack of human remains, the archeologists at the time shrugged and determined that the place wasn’t a graveyard after all. They didn’t know why ancient Finns would’ve dug the holes and prepared them like graves, but the researchers figured they served some other ceremonial purpose that had been lost to time.
They Were There, After All
With that, the maybe-or-maybe-not graves of Tainiaro lay undisturbed for yet another 30 years. Now, however, new research suggests that the site is indeed a graveyard.
A team led by Aki Hakonen, an archeologist from the University of Oulu, re-evaluated the research done in the late ‘80s to discover where the now-forgotten graves were located. They then went and did some further excavations, unearthing even more of the mysterious pits.
This time, however, the archeologists went further than their predecessors three decades ago. They took samples of the soil, hoping to find some clues about the missing corpses.
And that they sure did. Their tests indicated that Tainiaro’s soil is very acidic — so acidic, in fact, that it could dissolve human bones over a sufficient length of time.
According to Hakonen, this discovery strengthens (if not necessarily confirms) that Tainiaro is a graveyard. The ground at the site has simply eaten up the residents of the graves over thousands of years.
Stones and pottery, however, are much harder to dissolve than human bones. This would explain why the corpses disappeared, while the grave goods remained.
“Even though no skeletal material has survived at Tainiaro, our review of the available evidence supports an interpretation of the site as a cemetery,” Hakonen and his team wrote.
The researchers also suggest performing further tests on the soil samples to see if any human DNA has remained in them. If any were found, it would largely confirm that people were once buried in the now-empty pits.
Life in the North
The Hakonen team’s results are significant due to the number of graves at Tainiaro. If the site were confirmed to be a graveyard, it would be one of the largest Stone Age burial sites in northern Europe.
It would certainly be the most remote and northern of such places. That, according to Hakonen, could lead to historians and archeologists reevaluating their ideas of Stone Age life in northern European wilds.
According to current understanding, Finland’s northern regions around 5000-4000 BCE were little more than largely uninhabited, inhospitable wilderness still recovering from the last ice age.
In such a scenario, it would be unlikely that whatever people wandered in the woods would have buried their dead at a single site in large numbers. Tainiaro seems to challenge that idea, particularly as the ground surrounding the graves shows signs of at least short-term settlement.
“Many questions about Tainiaro remain unanswered,” Hakonen’s team writes.
“For the time being, however, the notion that a large cemetery seems to have existed near the Arctic Circle should cause us to reconsider our impressions of the north and its peripheral place in world prehistory.”