7,000-year-old mass grave in Slovakia may contain human sacrifice victims!
Archaeologists investigating an early Neolithic settlement in Slovakia have discovered the tortured remains of about 35 people, discovered many of them have been teenagers, who appear to have been sadly beheaded and then thrown into a hole nearly 7,000 years ago. The location of the eerie discovery this summer and the positions of the skeletons suggest that the victims were dumped there deliberately, possibly as human sacrifices with the intention of magically strengthening the defensive wall built over the moat, according to researchers. "I think it has something to do with magical ideas about how to define and determine a settlement," project co-leader Martin Furholt, a professor of protohistoric and social archaeology at the University of Kiel in Germany, told Live Science. "We have a moat around a place where people live, and then we put the people in the moat - whether they were killed intentionally or died a natural death - because there were probably ideas about the magical or symbolic power that these [dead] people had," he said. Furholt and his colleagues from the University of Kiel - formerly known as the Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel - have been working since 2012 at the Vráble site in Slovakia, near that country's borders with Austria and Hungary, together with scientists from the Institute of Archaeology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAV). The site is an ancient settlement ascribed to the early Neolithic LBK culture, named after the German term "Linearbandkeramik", which means "linear banded pottery" and refers to the type of pottery they made. Furholt said the ancestors of the Vrable people appear to have crossed into present-day Greece from Anatolia (present-day Turkey) about 1,500 years earlier. The LBK culture spread from there to several parts of Europe, and they may have been the forebears of the first Neolithic settlers in Western Europe who built megalithic structures such as Stonehenge in England and Carnac in France, he said. The ancient mass grave is near one of the entrances to the Vrable settlement, and several aspects suggest that the people dumped there were intentionally killed, probably by beheading.
“On the ground, we did not register any clear signs of trauma or clear pathological changes,” Zuzana Hukeljová, an anthropologist at SAV involved in the excavation, told Live Science in an email. “However, the bodies did not have skulls, and we are still not sure how and when the heads were removed.”
Most of the dead appear to have been young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 when they were killed, and some appear to have been between the ages of 25 and 35.
However, there were no adults or elderly people, and there was only one baby, who was the only person buried with their skull.
