The graves of people who died 12,000 ago rarely contain a woman’s skeleton pinned down in an unusual position by large stones, accompanied by a menagerie of animal remains and another person’s foot. Yet that’s what archaeologist Leore Grosman of Hebrew University of Jerusalem and her coworkers recently discovered in a small Israeli cave called Hilazon Tachtit.

Closer analysis shows that this grave holds a shaman, one of the earliest ever excavated, the researchers report in an upcoming