The oldest burials in the Orenburg region (concerning two graves of the burial mound near Labazy village)
Materials and methods. At the end of the first decade of the 2000s, the Labazy burial mound was investigated in the Orenburg region. Most of those burials belong to the late Bronze and early Iron Age. Among the investigated mounds the No. 4 stood out because of the non-standard rite and the lack of inventory in the burials that made cultural and chronological interpretation difficult. The burials of this mound were radiocarbon dated. Human bones were used as a dating material; they were analyzed in three different laboratories in Russia and the USA. Two burials (No. 2 and No. 3) of the burial mound the No. 4 were dated within the end of the 7th - beginning of the 6th millennium BC and this work is devoted to their analysis. The closest territorial and chronological analogies were proposed for the analyzed complexes. The craniological part of anthropological materials from the specified graves was also studied. Results. It was found that the burials No. 2 and No. 3 of the burial mound the No. 4 of the Labazy burial mound belong to the early Neolithic period, which is of particular research interest since the burials of the Stone Age are extremely rare in the steppe part of the Volga-Ural region. Chronologically and geographically these complexes are closest to the Elshan Neolithic culture. Anthropologically the skulls from the graves No. 2 and and No. 3 are typologically different. People from the analyzed burials belong to the «ancient sublaponoid» and «ancient sub-Ural» types. Conclusion. The burials No. 2 and 3 of the Labazy burial mound representing the most ancient burial complexes on the territory of the Volga-Ural steppe give an idea of the burial's rite of the Neolithic era, increase the base of radiocarbon dates for this period, and also confirm the existence of an independent anthropological substrate on this territory in ancient times.