The French archaeologists call it the Massacre at Achenheim, a brutal act carried out 6,000 years ago by a Neolithic war party, reports The Washington Post.
“We found six bodies in a pit, a silo for grain,” archaeologist Philippe Lefranc said in a phone interview with The Washington Post. The researcher had just returned from the dig site in northeastern France, although it was earlier than he had planned. Like much of the country, the ancient compound — despite the remains of a fortification around it — is currently flooded.
Although six bodies might seem sparse for a massacre, for its time it is, proportionally, a lot of death; 6,000 years ago the human population likely numbered in the low millions. Lefranc considers this to be more evidence that war — or, at least, conflict between different groups — has existed just as long as human society. “There was no lost paradise,” he said.
In the area where Lefranc and another archaeologist, Fanny Chenal — both of the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research, or Inrap — are examining the bones, the ground is pockmarked with 300 circles, each carved about eight feet wide. In one circle, the archaeologists recently discovered the bodies heaped together in a pile. Next to the mutilated skeletons are four lopped-off left arms, one limb from an individual not yet full-grown.
This is not the first time ancient bodies have been found in 6,000-year-old circles in France. Lefranc believes the circles are the remains of silos that once held grain or other foodstuffs, only ritualistically used to house the bodies from enemy warring factions. But other archaeologists speculate the pits were meant to be graves for important individuals and their relatives, as Science News noted in late 2015, or perhaps as sites for sacrificial offerings to their gods.
It is unlikely these men were residents of the village where they died, Lefranc says, because the six skeletons are all male. In other Neolithic mass graves, like the 7,000-year-old group of 26 victims recently described by bioarchaeologists in Germany, remains consisted of adults as well as very young children. The mixed demographics, the bioarchaeologists say, is evidence the villages had been raided.
Based on the single sex and the arrangement of the remains, Lefranc hypothesizes these ancient Frenchmen had been captured, ritualistically killed and their bodies dumped. (It is impossible to tell someone’s sex from just an arm, but Lefranc believes those once belonged to men, too.)
Given the long history of turning body parts into trophies — a practice that refuses, unfortunately, to die — Lefranc believes the lone left arms were taken as mementos. Achenheim is not the first location in France to show the strange practice.