Bones from across Europe suggest Stone Age ritual killings by slow strangulation

Amazing but horrible stuff! What a nasty way of killing a human! One may appreciate the form of humor of forensic scientists.

"A method of killing used by the modern-day Italian Mafia may have been widespread across Stone Age Europe. In what is called incaprettamento, victims are placed on their stomachs with a rope around their ankles and neck, and the weight of their legs slowly strangles them. “It’s really a horror,” says forensic anthropologist Eric Crubézy.

In a paper published yesterday in Science Advances, Crubézy and his colleagues argue that the unusual postures of two women at a 5600-year-old site in France called Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux indicate they died in this way—and that the killings were part of a larger pattern of ritual violence among Europe’s early farmers. From studying excavation reports from Poland to the Iberian Peninsula, the team found 20 more examples of skeletons in incaprettamento -style positions. All were buried during the Neolithic, between 5500 B.C.E. and 3500 B.C.E., and many of the sites also held evidence of fertility rituals.

Crubézy and his co-authors think the graves record human sacrifices and testify to a belief or ritual shared across cultures in the Neolithic. Some colleagues are skeptical of a common belief system—or even that the burials necessarily indicate human sacrifice. Whatever the nature of the ritual, it seems to have gone out of style by 3500 B.C.E., when Neolithic farmers turned their energies to building massive stone monuments like Stonehenge."

From the abstract:

"In the Rhône Valley’s Middle Neolithic gathering site of Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux (France), the positioning of two females within a structure aligned with the solstices is atypical. Their placement (back and prone) under the overhang of a silo in front of a third in a central position suggests a ritualized form of homicidal ligature strangulation. The first occurrence dates back to the Mesolithic, and it is from the Early Neolithic of Central Europe that the practice expands, becoming a sacrificial rite associated with an agricultural context in the Middle Neolithic. Examining 20 cases from 14 sites spanning nearly two millennia from Eastern Europe to Catalonia reveals the evolution of this ritual murder practice."

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A ritual murder shaped the Early and Middle Neolithic across Central and Southern Europe (open access)

Fig. 5. Decision tree [???].

When dealing with an individual in a prone position with bent knees, a decision tree that takes into account the positioning of the feet and upper limbs, as well as the presence or absence of compression on the head or thorax, allows us to contemplate [???] a scenario resembling homicidal ligature strangulation.  ...

Fig. 4. Location and description for the studied sites.