According to recent study, at least 37 persons may have been systematically dismembered and devoured in the wake of an extraordinarily violent attack in early Bronze Age England.
The study, which was published Monday in the journal Antiquity, claims that the attack, which occurred approximately 4,000 years ago, exposes a case of cannibalism and the darker side of human prehistory.
A 50-foot dig in Charterhouse Warren, southwest England, some 20 miles south of Bristol, yielded more than 3,000 bones.
According to researchers, cavers initially found the bones in the 1970s, and they were selected for examination because to the large number of cutmarks.
The study’s lead scientist, Rick Schulting, told NBC News via email on Monday that they had been subjected to greater violence than would often be observed “in a butchered animal bone assemblage.”
The archeology at the site is remarkable, according to Schulting, a professor of scientific and prehistoric archaeology at the University of Oxford in Britain.
The extent of the violence committed against the bodies is what surprised me the most,” he stated. “They were killed with blows to the head, and then systematically dismembered, defleshed, bones smashed apart.”
According to academics, the violence occurred most likely in a single incident between 2210 and 2010 B.C., and they also note that “nothing else on this scale has been recorded in Britain.” This makes it a unique instance of extreme violence in Early Bronze Age Britain.
But according to Schulting, the severe violence was probably not a singular occurrence in the UK at the time. He noted that there would have been consequences as the victims’ friends and family sought retribution, which would have resulted in violent cycles in the area.
One of the most challenging tasks in archeology, according to Schulting, is figuring out the motivation behind an attack. However, in the investigation, he and his team writers came to the conclusion that the slaughter was most likely the result of a vicious cycle of retaliation inside or between Early Bronze Age tribes.
According to Schulting’s email, tensions may have started out as relatively harmless things like theft or accusations of witchcraft before spiraling out of hand.
According to Schulting, the victims may have been eaten in order to degrade and treat them like animals, although this was not the case for a small number of people. There must have been many aggressors involved, based on the quantity of victims and the amount of time it would have taken to dismember them.
Although they haven’t been thoroughly investigated yet, the paper stated that the bones were discovered with faunal assemblage, or animal fossils, that also revealed preliminary signs of butchery.
Given that the bone fragments were discovered with these animal bones, suggesting there was enough food, the authors do not think the assailants were motivated to consume the human remains out of hunger.
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