Archaeologists find young woman buried with fetus in a Swedish cave; remains may be up to 9,500 years old

On a small island off the coast of Sweden, a tragedy lay buried for thousands of years, hidden in the depths of a cave. Buried under ancient sediment, were the bones of a young woman and a fetus, estimated to be around 32 to 34 weeks of gestation.The shocking discovery was made by archaeologists in Suder Vagnhus cave on the island of Lilla Karlso, a nature reserve in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Gotland, uninhabited by humans. If archaeologists' estimates are correct, the bones may have been resting there for the past 8,000 to 9,500 years. And that could rank the find among the oldest known burials of a pregnant woman with fetal remains still in place.Interestingly, this is not the only discovery that was awaiting on the island. While the island is home to only wildlife now, experts think the woman and fetus may not have been buried there alone. "We do have one or possibly two more individuals identified in the cave (at least one young child), though only from a few individual bone elements, indicating that the cave had been used as a burial site or something similar," archaeologist Alexander Sjöstrand of Uppsala University in Sweden told ScienceAlert. "This also corresponds wit...