Maria Martinon He boarded a regional train in Germany and sat with a box on his knees, not knowing that there was a dead child inside. It was March 15, 2018. Martinón had picked up the package at a German scientific center and was on his way to Burgos, to the National Center for Research on Human Evolution, of which she is director. The expert only knew that she was carrying a block of Kenyan soil, from which two teeth that did not look like a monkey's were sticking out. After three years of investigation, the contents of that box are revealed to the world this Wednesday on the cover of the magazine Nature, the temple of world science: they were the remains of a child who died and was carefully buried about 78,000 years ago. It is the oldest known tomb in Africa and one of the most striking evidence of one of the most specifically human behaviors: caring for the dead.
