Very recommendable, but a long and grim article about our very distant ancestors in Europe!
Was it some kind of doomsday orgy across Europe among the LBK culture?
"Wave of mass brutality accompanied the collapse of the first pan-European culture"
Caveat: I did not read the entire, very long article.
"... Then something went terribly wrong. ... mass graves across Europe attest to a wave of brutality around 5000 B.C.E., about the same time as hundreds of LBK (Linear Pottery culture (or LBK, after their German name, Linearbandkeramik)) settlements across the continent abruptly vanished. In the aftermath, parts of the continent remained empty for centuries. Other settlements transitioned peacefully into something else, with people living in the same place and continuing to farm, but building houses and decorating their ceramics in a different way. ...
The finds ... challenge a long-held notion that prehistory was more or less peaceful, with isolated cases of interpersonal violence but no large-scale conflicts or wars. It may also shed light on one of prehistory’s great vanishing acts. ...
That idyllic vision began to crumble in the 1980s, when archaeologists in southern Germany excavated a grave containing the skeletons of 34 people, most of them children. The victims’ fractured skulls showed many had been killed with blows to the head. Now known as the Talheim Death Pit, the grave was radiocarbon dated to 5000 B.C.E., coinciding with the very end of the LBK period.
In the decades since, archaeologists have found many more mass graves across Europe, all dating to roughly the same time. Many, like Talheim, looked at first like the results of small-scale raiding or local conflicts. ...
And each new LBK massacre site seems to have its own distinct character and particular details that suggest some mysterious constellation of brutal practices, not competition for land or mates. “What we see is different from anything we see before. It’s an indication of an end phase, where people turn to rituals and odd beliefs,” says Leibniz Center for Archaeology archaeologist Detlef Gronenborn. “Then it breaks out in an orgy of violence. Then it stops, but it’s too late.” ...
“They did this on purpose.” [smashing skulls] ...
Perhaps the most bizarre LBK massacre site is a grim spot called Herxheim, now mostly buried beneath an industrial park near Germany’s border with France. The sheer scale of the slaughter is stunning. Between 1996 and 2010, archaeologists excavated more than 80,000 pieces of human bone, including the skull caps of more than 500 people, mostly older children and young adults. Cut marks on the bones indicate they were purposefully dismembered, and shards of pottery and animal bones from feasts are interspersed with the remains. ...
Isotopes of strontium, oxygen, and nitrogen from the teeth, which can reveal geographic origin, show the victims weren’t local. Zeeb-Lanz is convinced they were brought to the site and killed as part of ceremonies that lasted for weeks and included feasting, digging the deep ditches, and even firing high-quality pottery destined to be thrown in the pits days later ...
village’s size makes the earthworks unlikely to be fortifications against some outside threat. “It’s the largest settlement in the region, so you’d need an army to attack them,” he says.
Instead, the ditch may be a sign that social relationships were splintering inside Vráble itself. The wall had five gates, all facing away from the settlement’s other two neighborhoods."
The Linear Pottery culture is easily recognized by its distinctively patterned pots.
Stone tools were used to kill young and old, as shown by the angled hole in this child’s skull from the Talheim Death Pit.Christian Meyer
Biological anthropologist Katharina Fuchs has also unearthed individuals buried nearby with their heads attached.Vráble excavation team
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