Funeral Fruit

Cremation grave, Vlasac, Serbia

Nearly 9,000 years ago, Mesolithic foragers living along the Danube gathered Cornelian cherries on the edges of a dense oak forest surrounding their settlement. They used cherry wood as kindling and might also have extracted oil from the pits for fuel. A team led by archaeologist Dušan Borić, now at the Sapienza University of Rome, excavated several burials at the settlement. Beneath one, they unearthed a small earlier grave dating to the mid-seventh millenni