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Inequality drove ancient Peruvians to child sacrifice
New Scientist ^ | December 3, 2010 | Sonia Van Gilder Cook

Posted on 12/06/2010 1:07:46 PM PST by La Lydia

Sacrifice is an age-old ritual, but the inhabitants of 10th-century Peru brought sinister novelty to their rites by slaughtering children. In the Lambayeque valley on the north coast, the earliest definitive evidence of ritual child sacrifice uncovered....

"The scale and sheer complexity of the blood sacrifice of children appears to be something completely new," said Haagen Klaus of Utah Valley University in Orem...

To investigate the role of ritual sacrifice in the Middle Sicán period, researchers examined 81 skeletons at the site, probing their teeth and bones to determine who they were and why they'd been killed. ... 70 per cent of the identifiable victims were anaemic Muchik children, aged 2 to 15, who'd lived out their short lives on an inferior diet of maize and squash.

... each victim had been stabbed repeatedly in the neck or chest with a metal knife, and the chest cavities pried open...Klaus's team also discovered the seeds of Nectandra plants near the skeletons. Since these have paralytic and hallucinogenic properties, Klaus suggests the drug might have been given to the victims before the ritual killing began...

Klaus speculates that the rituals may have been driven by failure of the Moche warrior sacrifices to drive away bad weather brought by El Nino. If adults didn't work, why not try kids?...

But it's impossible to determine whether the people who killed the Cerro Cerrillos children were the same people who buried them, let alone why they were sacrificed. Klaus says that the site nevertheless provides an insight into ancient socioeconomic inequality...

Anthropologist John Verano of Tulane University, doesn't buy a direct relationship between El Nino and Moche sacrifice. "My excavations of a sequence of several hundred years of Moche sacrifices at the Huaca de la Luna found no association with catastrophic weather events."

(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society
KEYWORDS: ancientalgores; diversity; globalwarming; godsgravesglyphs; lambayeque; muchik; sican
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This is horrifying. I posted it, in part, because it shows to what extent the climate change people will go to try to drag their pet issue into other disciplines -- regardless of the face that there is no actual evidence one way or the other, and it is all speculation. Ancient socioeconomic inequality indeed.
1 posted on 12/06/2010 1:07:50 PM PST by La Lydia
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To: SunkenCiv

human sacrifice ping


2 posted on 12/06/2010 1:10:02 PM PST by La Lydia
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To: La Lydia

Ancient Planned Parenthood and very late term abortions.


3 posted on 12/06/2010 1:12:43 PM PST by GeronL
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To: La Lydia
A number of civilizations practiced child sacrifice and "climate change" had nothing to do with it. Sheesh.

I suppose if they mouth the words some idiot foundation or government agency will fund their research, though.

4 posted on 12/06/2010 1:12:55 PM PST by colorado tanker
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To: La Lydia; SunkenCiv

“Inequality”??? Someone had more beaver pelts than you, so you kill your kids??

Makes no sense


5 posted on 12/06/2010 1:15:26 PM PST by GeronL
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To: La Lydia

Agree. . .interesting; hope these same people label themselves as ‘Warmist’ so when their remains are found; there can such speculation as to their life and demise and their species as well.


6 posted on 12/06/2010 1:16:53 PM PST by cricket (Osama - NOT made in the USA. . .and Obama, not made in the USA either. . .)
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To: La Lydia

Agree. . .interesting; hope these same people label themselves as ‘Warmist’ so when their remains are found; there can such speculation as to their life and demise and their species as well.


7 posted on 12/06/2010 1:16:53 PM PST by cricket (Osama - NOT made in the USA. . .and Obama, not made in the USA either. . .)
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To: La Lydia
The moron states "Klaus says that the site nevertheless provides an insight into ancient socioeconomic inequality"

Yet provides not one single piece of evidence to back it up.

8 posted on 12/06/2010 1:17:17 PM PST by Drill Thrawl (TSA - You don't get on 'til we get off)
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To: La Lydia

So they killed a few kids. Big deal.

We’ve been killing 4000 per day since the 60’s.

See how far we’ve come with our advanced technology.


9 posted on 12/06/2010 1:17:31 PM PST by lurk
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To: La Lydia

Who gets the most abortions [child sacrifices] in this country?
The same group - “the socioeconomically oppressed”.

Ecc 1:9
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.


10 posted on 12/06/2010 1:18:56 PM PST by MrB (The difference between a (de)humanist and a Satanist is that the latter knows who he's working for.)
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To: La Lydia

This looks downright civilized when compared to the extent of that American child sacrifice ritual called abortion. Imagine the dispatch when archeologists uncover abortuaries in the future.

Kansas City, January 22, 2520

In a surprise find, archeologists uncovering the ruins of ancient Kansas City discovered what appears to be a shrine of ritual child sacrifice. According to archeologists, at the time, the Americas were covered with primitive peoples who killed their own young. The remains of small children found at the site showed that they were skewered and apparently ripped from the womb piece by piece in a primitive pagan ritual in order to appease an angry deity sometimes refered to as “Convenience” in ancient manuscripts also found at the site. There is evidence also from chemical tests done at the site that the mothers were subject to sedatives before the barbaric ritual was performed. Speaking of the practices of the ancient civilization, one leading archeologists commented, “It’s hard to know what could lead a civilization to murder its own young in such a barbaric way, but ancient peoples like these were less informed and obviously morally inferior to modern peoples.


11 posted on 12/06/2010 1:31:04 PM PST by Juan Medén
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To: GeronL

Watch “Apocalypto” to understand the barbary of the ancient South American race. It is still in their DNA!


12 posted on 12/06/2010 1:38:25 PM PST by cameraeye (A happy kufir!)
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To: La Lydia

Where’s the science?


13 posted on 12/06/2010 1:45:04 PM PST by ari-freedom (Happy Chanuka!)
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To: La Lydia

Sacrifice and cannibalism were widespread among ¨new world¨ aborigines. Even the vaunted Iroquois would chow down on some of their brethren occasionally.

The Noble Red Man, eh?


14 posted on 12/06/2010 1:52:13 PM PST by onedoug
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To: ari-freedom

You might well ask. The science did a pretty good job of analyzing their remains, their injuries and their burial setting. But the rest of it is just PC academic BS and speculation. They don’t know who killed the children, or why (there is absolutely no indication it had anything to do with El Nino). Child sacrifice is not unknown in these Andean cultures, and went on over centuries. A really good book on the subject is “The Ice Maiden.” They don’t know why the children were buried the way they were. They don’t know the “socioeconomic group” of the children, and there is no way they could, nor do they know if those children were malnourished in comparison with their peers, or if all the children in that society were malnourished at that time.


15 posted on 12/06/2010 1:52:29 PM PST by La Lydia
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To: La Lydia

These ancient people were PATHETIC, AMATEUR PIKERS in child sacrifice compared to to Planned Parenthood today.


16 posted on 12/06/2010 2:05:10 PM PST by MrDem (Founder: Democrats for Cheney/Palin 2012)
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To: Drill Thrawl
Yes, exactly. All it provides is insight into their diet. There is no way of telling if it was equal or unequal to the diet of others in their society.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment. - Sherlock Holmes

17 posted on 12/06/2010 2:11:21 PM PST by La Lydia
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Comment #18 Removed by Moderator

To: Yehuda

Those are Mayans, not Moche. :)


19 posted on 12/06/2010 2:51:08 PM PST by La Lydia
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Comment #20 Removed by Moderator


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