Mystery of frozen cemetery full of empty graves finally solved after decades

A Stone Age cemetery in the Arctic contains a baffling mystery.

The site, located in Tainiaro, Finland, was rediscovered in 1959 when workers found stone artefacts, and archaeologists believe that the site may have once been an enormous graveyard.

There's just one problem, however - there are no bodies there.

Getty Stock Images

The first question here is if there are no bodies, how do we know it's a cemetery?

Well, a study by a team led by archaeologist Dr Aki Hakonen from the University of Oulu compared the findings of trenches at the site with others.

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These included known Stone Age burials in Finland, and they found similarities between them.

In total, the team identified around 200 potential graves, though none of them are visible from the surface.

They were spotted because they contained evidence of burning, as well as red ochre, which is a natural pigment that is often found in Stone Age graves, though the precise reason for its use is not known.

Finnish Heritage Agency

There have also been a lot of stone artefacts, fragments of pottery, and burnt animal bones found at the site.

So, that's how we know it was probably a graveyard, but it doesn't explain where the bodies went.

One possible explanation for that lies in the soil itself, which is particularly acidic.

Dr Hakonen told Metro: "There are next to no limestone deposits in Finland and most of Northern Fennoscandia. Thus, the soil tends to be very acidic.

"In a thousand years or so organic material including bones and wood decompose so badly that they lose all structure and often become only gooey mass.

"In two thousand years they become mere shadows in the soil, visible as slightly darker patterns. In six and a half thousand years, as seems to be the case with Tainiaro, there is practically nothing left of bodies."

Aki Hakonen

So, there you have it. It's possible that the soil is so acidic that the bodies have simply been melted away since they were buried some 6,500 years ago.

But that doesn't mean that there's nothing that modern archeology can recover.

For a start, the bodies may be gone but there are a lot of artefacts left over - excavating and examining these could tell us more about the people who were buried there so long ago.

Not only that, but finding such a large cemetery so far north could also change our idea of ancient civilisations, though the findings have yet to be verified.

Dr Hakonen said: "The research on Tainiaro shows that apparently large cemeteries also existed near the Arctic Circle.

"In the future, all research on this era in the north needs to be re-evaluated to some extent because these societies may not have been as small as previously thought."

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