CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND—The bones of at least 22 Neolithic people, many of them children, have been identified in Italy’s Scaloria Cave. The cave, located in southeastern Italy, is filled with stalactites and offers “the first well-documented case for early farmers in Europe of people trying to actively deflesh the dead,” John Robb of the University of Cambridge told Science Magazine. The human bones had been randomly mixed with animal bones, broken pottery, and stone tools. Robb’s new study shows that few whole human skeletons had been deposited in the cave, and the bones only had light cut marks on them. This suggests that the selected bones may have been put in the cave as much as a year after death, since only residual muscle tissue had to be removed from them. Robb and his international team of scientists think that the defleshing process could have been part of a long, multistage burial plan that ended when the cleaned, stone-like bones were put in the cave along with other discarded items. The cave’s stone-forming, dripping water and stalactites may have had special spiritual power for the Neolithic Italians. To read about an unusual and poignant Neolithic burial in Italy, see "Eternal Embrace."
