Free Republic

The Slovak Spectator reports that a 5,000-year-old skeleton has been unearthed in eastern Slovakia by researchers from the Slovak Academy of Sciences and the Polish Academy of Sciences. The skeleton belonged to a young man of the Indo-European Pit Grave culture who died between the ages of 16 and 18. The grave was found in the center of a burial mound with a 72-foot diameter, surrounded by a channel measuring more than 12 feet wide. The remains of a charred wooden structure that once covered the grave pit were also identified, said Eva Horváthová of the Slovak Academy of Sciences....

Coinciding with the Pit Grave culture (4200-3600 years before our era), coming from Southern Europe, the Neolithic communities of the north-eastern Iberian Peninsula started a ceremonial activity related to the sacrifice and burial of dogs. The high amount of cases that are recorded in Catalonia suggests it was a general practice and it proves the tight relationship between humans and these animals, which, apart from being buried next to them, were fed a similar diet to humans'... The study analyses the remains of twenty-six dogs found in funerary structures from four sites and necropolises of the Barcelona region, and has...