Defleshed and disarticulated bones found during excavations of Scaloria Cave's upper chamber in the late 1970s. [UCLA]
Posted on 03/29/2015 4:21:21 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
About 7000 years ago in Italy, early farmers practiced an unusual burial ritual known as "defleshing." When people died, villagers stripped their bones bare, pulled them apart, and mingled them with animal remains in a nearby cave. The practice was meant to separate the dead from the living, researchers say, writing in the latest issue of the journal Antiquity...
Robb and his team examined the scattered bones of at least 22 Neolithic humans -- many children -- who died between 7200 and 7500 years ago. Their remains were buried in Scaloria Cave, a stalactite-filled grotto in the Tavoliere region of southeastern Italy, where Robb says that they provide the "first well-documented case for early farmers in Europe of people trying to actively deflesh the dead."
The cave -- sealed off until its discovery in 1931 -- was uniquely able to preserve the human remains, which were mixed randomly with animal bones, broken pottery, and stone tools. This level of preservation is unusual...
Neolithic communities typically buried their dead beneath or beside their homes or on the outskirts of settlements. But in this case, farmers from villages as far as 15 to 20 kilometers away scattered the defleshed bones of their dead in the upper chamber of Scaloria Cave...
The results showed that few whole skeletons were present in the cave -- only select bones had been interred. Some of the bones had light cut marks, suggesting that only residual muscle tissue needed to be removed by the time of defleshing. That meant the remains were likely deposited as much as a year after death.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.sciencemag.org ...
Defleshed and disarticulated bones found during excavations of Scaloria Cave's upper chamber in the late 1970s. [UCLA]
Disgusting! Why?
Sounds to me like they watched too many episodes of The Walking Dead!
Or...It just might have been a clan of cannibals that liked long pig for a change of pace.
Not ever skeleton was a religious sacrifice nor was every skeleton buried with weapons and personal effects a king or priest.
Well, that’s gross.
Defleshing is still done occasionally in Italy, although the mobsters who did it most recently are in custody now.
It may not have gone down as they’re saying here — these may be the remains of vanquished enemies / prey, so this is the evidence for a bar-b-q.
Eeeew.
Waste not, want not.
Yuck
GMTA.
“Uncle Guido is joining us for dinner, but don’t bother to set place”?
Cannibalism would definitely make this worse.
I’ve often wondered how the ritual of burying or cremating the dead started, or in this case, throwing the remains of the dead into a sealed cave.
The only thing I could think of was that it had to do with dreams. Neanderthals dreamed, right? I mean, even dogs dream. And Neanderthals probably understood what dreams were about just as well as present-day dogs do — that is, they didn’t understand where dreams came from at all!
So what if you were a Neanderthal and just killed your rival because you wanted to take his stuff. You left his dead body in some far away cave and went home to get a good night’s sleep. But then in the middle of the night, while you were sleeping, you saw the dead guy come into your cave, take back his stuff, and hover over you brandishing his Neolithic knife, ready to kill you!
You sit bolt upright under your deer skin, and try to fight him off. But he’s not there. But he was just there!
You’re up for the rest of the night guarding your cave against the dead guy. You vow that the first thing you’re going to do in the morning is go back to the dead guy and make sure he can never visit you again.
And what’s the best way to do that? Bury the guy’s body under six feet of earth or torch it over a very big fire!
What do you think on this slow Sunday night? Is this a plausible theory of the origins of burial and cremation of the dead? Do you have a more compelling theory?
I guess they can know what they did. I cannot figure out how they can figure out the why. Perhaps they were just not very bright.
Actually it claims most of the remains were children.
Seems to me to make much more sense that times were difficult for some reason and they ate their own children’s flesh and bones(for the marrow).
Whatever bones remained afterwards were deposited in the cave. Almost as if...they did what they had to do to survive, but still harbored some level of remorse.
But maybe it came from love. Your wife or child had died of a fever, and the next thing you know, a hyena walks past, munching on your loved one's head.
You might decide that keeping the dead away from such desecration makes you feel better. That is, if you have anything like human emotion.
Yes , that’s a very good theory. It presupposes that these folks had the human emotion of love and weren’t motivated by self interest and fear alone. I suppose we will never know.
But I like my theory of the dream sequence better. It’s more sexy, ha ha! (As my history professor used to say.)
It’s not uncommon for people to leave the departed ones bodies on a peak or hillside for the critters to de flesh the bones, returning the loved one to nature. Then they gather what’s left and, in Tibet at least, deposit the bones in an ancestors’ tomb. This however is a bit harder to figure. What happened to the flesh?
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