BASEL, SWITZERLAND—Children’s skulls have been found at the edges of the palisades surrounding Bronze Age villages built on stilts at Alpine lakes in Switzerland and Germany. Some of the skulls showed signs of ax blows or other head traumas, but Benjamin Jennings of Basel University and his colleagues don’t think that the children were offered as human sacrifices. The children’s irregular wounds were probably inflicted during battle, and their remains were moved long after their initial burial, perhaps intended to ward off the regular flooding of the lakes. At one site, the bones had been placed at the high-water mark of the floodwaters. “Across Europe as a whole there is quite a body of evidence to indicate that throughout prehistory human remains, and particularly the skull, were highly symbolic and socially charged,” Jennings told Live Science.
