Kenya burial site shows community spirit of herders 5,000 years ago

Large-scale cemetery in Africa points to shared workload without social hierarchy

Herders in east Africa 5,000 years ago lived in peaceful communities that shunned social hierarchies, communicated intensively and worked together to build massive cemeteries, new research by archaeologists has revealed.

Work by a team of US-based experts on a remote site near Lake Turkana in Kenya contradicts longstanding beliefs about the origins of the first civilisations. It suggests that early communities did not inevitably develop powerful elites or compete violently for scarce resources, but may have worked together to overcome challenges instead.