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Two years ago, radiocarbon dating of human remains and artefacts excavated from Heaning Wood Bone Cave, near Great Urswick in Cumbria, revealed the site’s millennia-long history of funerary activity. The site was home to burials from the Bronze Age and early Neolithic, as well as a Mesolithic example that represents the oldest human remains yet discovered in northern Britain (see CA 397). This last skeleton was far from complete, limited to fragments of skull and teeth, but newly published aDNA analysis has revealed that they belonged to an early Mesolithic girl who was around 2.5-3.5 years old when she died in c.9290-8925 BC.
Dubbed the ‘Ossick Lass’ (based on local vernacular pronunciation of ‘Urswick’; the name was suggested by Martin Stables, an archaeologist who has led excavations at the cave since 2016), the child appears to have been buried with a number of small beads fashioned from periwinkle shells, though her remains are too fragmentary to say much more about how she may have been laid to rest. The bones show little evidence of exposure, however, indicating that she had been placed in the cave soon after her death.
As the research (published in the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society; see ‘Further reading’) attests, this discovery adds important details to our understanding of the reoccupation of northern Britain at the end of the last Ice Age, and of funerary practices from this time. Mesolithic cave burials are known from only 11 other directly dated sites in Britain, and these are mostly found much further south in Devon and Somerset, as well as in southern Wales. Only one other Cumbrian example has been identified to-date, at Kent’s Bank Cavern, about 13km (8 miles) due east of Heaning Wood, which produced human remains that were radiocarbon dated to c.8430-8240 BC.
The oldest Mesolithic cave burial known in Britain and in wider north-western Europe was found at Worm’s Head on the Gower Peninsula in south Wales, yielding radiocarbon dates of c.9750-7660 BC. The Ossick Lass holds second place in Britain, and is the third oldest yet identified in north-western Europe, making an illuminating addition to a wider picture of this practice that also includes examples from Belgium, France, and Germany.
Further reading:
K Warburton, R Peterson, C Barrington et al. (2025) ‘Farthest north: human remains from Heaning Wood Bone Cave, Cumbria, UK and their European context’, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 91 (Dec): 47-66 (available open-access at https://doi.org/10.1017/ppr.2025.10077).
