It was found in 2015: an isolated clue to a macabre mystery set in motion thousands of years in the past.
This ancient puzzle consisted of a single piece: a lone human skull, discovered alone with other skeletal remains around it, resting inside a cave in Bologna, Italy, in the center of a cave. depression the locals shout Dolina de l’Infern (The mourning of hell).
It was not easy to find.
The well-hidden skull, which lacked its lower jaw, could only be reached by crossing a difficult passage in the cave called the Meander of evil (Labyrinth of Malice), and then ascending along a vertical axis to a height of 12 feet (39 feet), where the skull rested on a rocky ledge.
Due to the difficulty of accessing the site, speleologists were unable to recover the skull until 2017, when researchers had the opportunity to study this mysterious and ancient specimen.
The solitary skull turned out to be ancient, with radiocarbon dating suggesting that the skull belonged to an individual who lived sometime between 3630 and 3380 BC, placing them within the archaeological context of the first period of the twentieth century. Eneolithic (also known as Chalcolithic) of the region.
Other Eneolithic human remains have been found in the general area; not in the basement of Hell, but in a rock shelter about 600 meters (almost 2,000 feet) from the cave where the skull was found.
Therefore, the larger context makes some sense. But how exactly did this lone skull move away from its Eneolithic counterparts, positioned atop a ledge but buried within a malicious maze of a cave and hidden at a depth of 26 meters (85 feet) underground?
According to anthropologist Maria Giovanna Belcastro of the University of Bologna, the first author of a new analysis of the unusual fate of the skull, several factors were at stake.
Belcastro’s team investigated the skull, which according to the team probably came from a young woman between 24 and 35 years old.
Researchers suggest that evidence of various injuries to the sides of the skull is the result of human manipulations of the skull at the time of a woman’s death, which may reflect ritual acts to remove meat from the skull, as part of a custom. funeral.
Other injuries to the skull, some of which are believed to be premortal (before death), may have been due to an injury that killed the woman, and other marks could be evidence of a type of medical treatment provided by her village.
As for how the skull was separated from the rest of its skeleton, the researchers hypothesize that the skull may have been intentionally or accidentally removed from the rest of the body before rolling or being pushed to the ground by streams of water. ‘water or mud, until it somehow reached the limit of the mourning of Hell, finally falling into depression.
Over time, water infiltration into the basement could have dissolved the gypsum deposits inside the cave, creating the vertical axis next to the skull’s safe resting place.
“The reactivated cave passage began to evolve downward, with the formation of a stream that sank laterally and sculpted the labyrinth below,” the researchers write in their paper.
“This new reactivation was able to bury approximately 12 meters of plaster, connecting to the level of the descent base.”
Several sediments housed in the cranial cavity offer some support for this argument, suggesting that matter became trapped inside the skull during the flow of water or debris, as the skull made its improbable and chaotic journey to in the cave. Signs of other traumas to the skull suggest many times along the way.
This hypothetical interpretation is not what necessarily happened, of course, it is something we will never be able to know for sure. But, as researchers point out, from all parts of a human skeleton, the shape of a skull makes it the most suitable for escape.
“If the skeleton was intact at the time of this sequence of events, other skeletal elements, of different shape and size, could have been trapped elsewhere and scattered during transport,” the authors suggest.
“The skull would have rolled more easily than other skeletal parts in a stream of water and waste would flow … During its decomposition and these dynamic phases, it would have been filled with sediment. Therefore, it would have reached the cave and ‘ he would have stopped at the plateau where he was found. “
The findings are reported in PLOS One.