The aftermath of an “exceptionally violent” attack in early Bronze Age England suggests that at least 37 people may have been “systematically dismembered” and eaten, new research has revealed.
The attack, which took place around 4,000 years ago, reveals a case of cannibalism and “the darker side of human prehistory,” according to the study published Monday in the journal Antiquity.
Over 3,000 bones were excavated from a 50-foot pit in Charterhouse Warren, around 20 miles south of the city of Bristol in southwest England.
The bones, which were chosen for analysis because of the “sheer number of cutmarks,” were first discovered by cavers in the 1970s, researchers said.
They had more violence inflicted on them then what would normally be seen "in a butchered animal bone assemblage,” Rick Schulting, the study's lead author, told NBC News in an email Monday.
Schulting, a professor of scientific and prehistoric archaeology at Britain's University of Oxford, said that the archeology at the site is “exceptional.”
“The most surprising thing is the sheer extent of the violence carried out on the bodies," he said. "They were killed with blows to the head, and then systematically dismembered, defleshed, bones smashed apart."
Tuesday, December 17, 2024
The Fundamental Goodness of Man; the Noble Savage
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Oh, yes, the Noble Savage. The primitive man, the spiritual American Indian who trod lightly on the Earth and found every natural phenomenon to be a spirit or a brother to be worshipped and respected. "The cold wind is your brother. You have been treating it as an enemy." When the men went out to hunt they purified themselves in sweat lodges so they would be worthy of taking the spirit of the buffalo or the deer, and after they killed the animal the thanked the animal and the Great Spirit for giving the animal to him.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile these same primitive people routinely killed and ate the members of the tribe just over the hill, in spite of the fact that they looked like them, dressed like them, stole each others' women and thought the other tribe talked funny.
They worshipped in a religion that prized hallcinations, psychosis, psychotic breaks, vision, and dreams.
They killed, tortured, dismembered and ate the members of other tribes with brutal abandon; The Comanche and the Hurons (from the French word for "the rough ones", or so I have read.
I dread the widespread return to this interpersonal ethical standard if this impulse towards de-Christianizing American Society continues