Evidence of torture, massacre, mutilation found in neolithic mass grave

Twenty-six skeletons found in a mass grave in central Germany show signs of a brutal attack, including severe blows to the head and broken legs that could indicate that the victims had been tortured before being killed and having their bodies dumped into a burial pit.

The remains were found at Schöneck-Kilianstädten near Frankfurt back in 2006, and as BBC News, New Scientist and other media outlets reported Monday, the discovery is the latest entry in what appears to be a growing pattern of widespread violence occurring in the Early Neolithic period. Similar mass graves have been found elsewhere in Germany and in Austria.

“This is not the first massacre site that has been analyzed from this specific culture in the Early Neolithic of Central Europe. We have good evidence from two other sites, which basically show the same cranial injuries as we found in the ‘new’ skeletal material,” anthropologist Christian Meyer from the University of Mainz, lead author of new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), told redOrbit via email.

While the Kilianstädten site “has been known to the scientific community,” Meyer noted “in addition to the extensive lethal cranial injuries” and what appears to be injuries resulting from arrow wounds, that he and his colleagues found that “the long bones of the lower legs” of the victims “have almost systematically been smashed. This pattern is a new discovery here [and] could possibly signify torture, or mutilation of the bodies.”

“Methodologically, we cannot differentiate between that, so we can only speculate what was going on. But the fractures have been made to ‘fresh’ bones, so both is actually possible,” the anthropologist added. “This site is now the third from the same archaeological culture which shows evidence for lethal collective violence… So we really start to see a pattern here, which of course allows us to develop more far-reaching and more robust conclusions.”

First mass burial site with pattern of shattered leg bones

The remains in this mass grave, which have been dated to between 5207 and 4849 BC, belonged to an agricultural culture known as the Linearbandkeramik (LBK). While evidence for individual instances of torture or murder during ancient times have previously been discovered, the authors explained to New Scientist that this marks the first time that an almost complete village had been put to death in a mass burial site with this pattern of shattered leg bones.

Half of the victims of the mass killing were children, while the other half were adults, none over the age of 40 (both of which were women). No teenagers were found, indicating that they could have fled or been captured, and because the LBK people left behind a rich archaeological record, the discovery of a pit filled with haphazardly-dumped bodies and with no valuable artifacts to be found anywhere strongly suggests that the victims were done in by a rival culture.

“The find becomes most significant when combined with previously discovered gravesites similar in nature to this more recent one,” Meyer told redOrbit. “While a single site may be a spectacular discovery, scientifically more important are the patterns emerging from the comparison of several sites.” While “the archaeological record is very patchy and incomplete,” he added, “if you have three sites at hand that give you similar results from the same later phase of this first farming culture in Central Europe… you really start to see this pattern emerging.”

As the study authors told BBC News, the bodies were surrounded by various waste objects, as well as arrowheads likely used as weapons in the attack. Nearly two-thirds of the shinbones had been broken as a result of blunt-force trauma, and the injuries indicate that there was likely some sort of conflict between different farming communities. The exact cause of that conflict remains unclear, Meyer said, though it may have been the result of there being too many people living in too small an area, or that climate change may have hampered agricultural production.

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