A Comparative Glance: The Burial At Sungir

The Mal’ta burial is extraordinary, but it is not entirely without parallel.

Another burial from roughly the same period — somewhat younger, from a different part of Eurasia — provides a useful comparative perspective.

The Sungir site in Russia, located not far from the modern city of Vladimir, produced a series of remarkable Upper Paleolithic burials dated to roughly 30,000 to 34,000 years ago — somewhat older than Mal’ta, but from a period that helps establish the broader context of elaborate child burials in the Upper Paleolithic.

Among the Sungir burials was a double burial of two children — a boy and a girl, estimated to have been approximately twelve and nine to thirteen years old respectively — buried head to head and accompanied by extraordinary assemblages of grave goods.