An Eternal Embrace

The world has just learned, coincidently just before Valentine's Day, of the discovery in Italy of a 5,000 - 6,000 year old grave of two young adults locked in each other's arms. Labeled Eternal Embrace, by the press, the grave appears to date from the Neolithic period or New Stone Age. This was a period in pre-history when people began using stone tools on a regular basis and were beginning to settle into villages and develop farming.

Like us, the people of this period were homo sapiens, but they were just beginning to use more sophisticated stone tools and take the first steps toward establishing a settled society upon which to our civilization was built. Just as teenagers have a difficult time imagining their parents having ever experienced the feelings of love and romance that they are now feeling, we too find it difficult to imagine these ancient peoples, struggling to survive in the wild and untamed world of those days, finding time to engage in love and form relationships like we now experience. Part of this is due to our limited and hazy knowledge of these peoples and part due to the portrayals of stone age peoples, or cave men, we see depicted in art, movies and museum displays.

Yet, here we have not only evidence of a young couple engaged in a loving hug but preserved for the last 5,000 – 6,000 years in that embrace. Not only did this couple apparently experience love as we know it, but the society around them, privative as they may have been by our standards, honoring that love by burying them together locked in each other's arms.

Archaeologists, tell us that this period was one in which people were also beginning to look beyond themselves and began to conceive the concepts of religion. Having advanced to the point where, in good years they could grow enough crops and raise enough livestock to be able to feed themselves and still have a little time left over, they begin speculating on things outside of their immediate sphere. Who were they? How did they come into this world? What happened after death? Where do these feelings of care and concern for another come from? The same questions that we continue to speculate on ourselves.

Reports from the grave site indicate that, given the condition of their teeth, they were young, probably in their early twenties. Preliminary examination did not reveal any sign of violence thereby ruling out some sort of ritual sacrifice. While further tests, will have to be made, the archaeologists are fairly certain that the tests will show them to be a young man and a young woman. Also, the fact that they are embracing suggests that they died together and were buried together, thereby eliminating the possibility that this was a case of the husband dieing and the wife being buried alive next to him (archaeologists say that in those cases the couple is usually found lying side by side in the grave rather than in an embrace).

Further adding to the aura of romantic love surrounding the discovery, is the fact that the site is not only located in Italy, home to two of the three saints named Valentine, but in the Italian city of Mantua which is located about 25 miles south of Verona which was the setting for Shakespeare's romantic play Romeo and Juliet in which the two young lovers are finally united in death.

While we will have to await further details, it is somehow comforting to know that love, the belief that love between two people is eternal and families and friends honoring this love by taking the time to carefully bury the two lovers together in a loving embrace, existed so far back in time. In their grief, their families were obviously comforted by the thought that there was some sort of afterlife and, if only in spirit, the couple and their love would continue through eternity. What these ancient families did not know was that the evidence of this couple's love for each other would touch the hearts of their descendants some 6,000 years later and just before Valentine's Day.