Discovery of ancient 'headless' burial site could finally solve 7,000-year-old mystery

The discovery of a burial site populated with a series of headless skeletons has provided more information on an ancient civilisation that lived 7,000 years ago.

Researchers investigating Vráble-Veľké Lehemby, a site located in Slovakia, found dozens of human skeletons with a majority of them missing their heads.

The Slovakian site was, about 7,000 years ago, an early Neolithic settlement with clusters of houses and a ditch around it, telling us how people thousands of years lived and organised themselves.

Various tools have been found at the site but one of the most fascinating discoveries is the mass grave which contains a number of bones of those long dead whose heads are not located near the rest of their remains.

Researchers who published their findings in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society believe they know what happened to these buried bodies, suggesting they did not die by violence as one might expect with a pile of headless corpses.

Many bodies were found without their heads, the skulls haven't been located (Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society)

Instead, the researchers believe that the bodies laid to rest are actually evidence of the burial customs of this ancient settlement of people.

The bodies found were not posed in any correlating manner, which had led researchers to wonder if they had been massacred and dumped in a mass grave, but instead an examination of the bodies found the heads had been carefully removed with sharp tools.

The removal of the head appears more like a careful removal than a vicious chopping, so it was unlikely to have been done by an enemy or as evidence of some ancient zombie apocalypse.

While this would appear to point towards a solution for the mystery of why all these bodies were buried in a mass grave and had their heads removed, it doesn't give us a clue of what happened to the heads.

While some other human civilisations had separate storage places for human heads that were removed, nobody has been able to find out what the people of Vráble-Veľké Lehemby several thousand years ago did with theirs.

The bodies were initially thought to have been massacred, but further investigation indicates it was a burial ritual (Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society)

Further DNA analysis will need to be done to shed further light on what the people living back in those times were doing and exactly who they were, but now we seem to know more about their burial customs.

Removing the heads of the dead seems to have been an important part of the burial ritual for this Neolithic settlement, even if we don't know what they then did with those heads after they were carefully removed.

The discovery of animal bones and further studies of the area found that these people had a good farming system going, with lots of people living there and building homes on the Slovakian site.

They were born, they lived, they died, their friends removed their heads and now millennia later you're learning about it.