Every human culture has a special way of laying its dead to rest. Some cremate the remains, some lay them beneath the open sky, and others place them in the ground. Regardless of its form, that final ritual implies an understanding of our own mortality, one of the things that seems to clearly set humans apart from other animals. Along with art and jewelry, deliberate burial is one of the few ways that we can trace the evolution of human thought using the archaeological record.

But it’s hard to objectively determine what’s a deliberate burial and what’s an accidental collection of bones. Now, scientists have attempted to hand off the task to an impartial judge: a machine-learning algorithm. Its analysis indicates that possible signs of burial in other hominins are more likely to be the result of chance.

Grave or not?

Archaeologists are very interested in figuring out when humans started burying our dead. At the moment, the best candidates for the oldest-known burials of modern humans come from Skhul and Qafzeh Caves in Israel, where people appear to have been interred with ochre and other items around 100,000 years ago.