Failed brain surgery and possible human sacrifice revealed in Stone Age burial

Live Science ^ | 30 September 2020 | Stephanie Pappas

[BenLurkin]

The skull, which may have belonged to an adult woman, dates back to approximately 4800 B.C. to 4550 B.C. Archaeologists found the skull deep inside Dehesilla Cave on the Iberian peninsula, alongside a second adult skull....and the remains of a young goat....

Dehesilla Cave is a set of caverns in Spain's Baetic Mountains. Stone Age artifacts were found near the mouth of the cave in the 1970s, but the new discovery comes from Room 4, one of the deepest caverns in the system.

There, a 2017 excavation revealed two jawless skulls, buried alongside stone tools, bits of pottery and most of the skeleton of a sheep or goat that was likely less than 10 days old at death. The cave also contained a stone altar and an ash-rich circle, apparently the remains of a 7,000-year-old fire.

On the upper left side of the possibly-female skull, archaeologists found something strange: a depression or divot, about 0.7 inches (19 millimeters) wide showing signs of later bone growth and healing. There were no cracks radiating from this divot, leading the researchers to conclude that the woman had been the subject of a Stone Age brain surgery called trepanation.

Trepanation was the practice of drilling or scraping a hole through the skull into the brain; hundreds of Stone Age skulls have been found with trepanation holes in them.

Whatever the reason, the trepanation carried out on the skull was incomplete; the hole did not go completely through the skull. The person likely lived for years after the procedure, the researchers wrote, and the trepanation may have had nothing to do with the woman's strange postmortem fate. Cut marks on the skull indicate that her head had been removed from her body soon after death, while there was still flesh on the bones.

[BenLurkin]

"They may have died naturally, or one may have died naturally and the other may have been a human sacrifice laid to rest with them. Or both may have been deliberately killed."

[GOP Poet]

Really covering their bases here. lol.

[Seruzawa]

[immadashell]

Is this maybe Biben’s?

[Red Badger]

Anyway they are not only merely dead, they are really most sincerely dead..................

[grey_whiskers]

Sounds like the Democrats were very busy that night!

[blueplum]

‘stone age’ ?? Aren’t the dates and regions not smack dab in the middle of Phoenician culture?

[alexander_busek]

‘stone age’ ?? Aren’t the dates and regions not smack dab in the middle of Phoenician culture?

From the article:

dates back to approximately 4800 B.C. to 4550 B.C.

That would be just prior to the Chalcolithic Age.

The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) ISBN 0-19-861263-X, p. 301:

"Chalcolithic /,kælkəl'lɪθɪk/ adjective Archaeology of, relating to, or denoting a period in the 4th and 3rd millennium BC, chiefly in the Near East and SE Europe, during which some weapons and tools were made of copper. This period was still largely Neolithic in character."

Regards,