It was found in 2015 – an isolated clue to a macabre mystery set in motion thousands of years ago.
This ancient puzzle consists of a single piece: a solitary human skull, discovered by himself, without other skeletal remains around it, resting inside a cave in Bologna, Italy, in the center of a cave depression call the locals Hell’s Valley (The sinking of hell).
It was not an easy thing to find.
The well-hidden skull, lacking the bone of the lower jaw, could only be reached by crossing a difficult cave passage called Meander of wickedness (The Labyrinth of Evil), and then climbing a vertical tree to a height of 12 meters (39 ft), where the skull rested on a rocky edge.
Due to the difficulty of accessing the site, speleologists failed to recover the skull until 2017, when researchers had the chance to study this mysterious, ancient specimen.
The solitary skull turned out to be indeed ancient, dating to radiocarbon, suggesting that the skull belonged to a person who once lived between 3630 and 3380 BC, placing them in the archaeological context of the early Eneolithic period (aka Chalcolithic). from the region.
Other Eneolithic human remains have been found in the general area; not in the sinkhole of Hell, but in a stone shelter about 600 meters away from the cave where the skull was found.
So the larger context makes sense. But how exactly did this solitary skull get so far from its Eneolithic counterparts, positioned high on a ledge, yet buried in a malicious labyrinth of a cave and hidden at a depth of 26 meters (85 ft) below the ground?
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 the team says most likely came from a young woman between the ages of 24 and 35.
Researchers suggest that evidence of various lesions on the sides of the skull is the result of human manipulation of the skull at the time of a woman’s death, probably reflecting ritual acts of removing meat from the skull as part of a funeral custom.
Other injuries to the skull, some considered to have suffered prememortem (before death), could have been due to an injury that killed the woman, and other signs could be evidence of some kind of medical treatment offered by her men. .
Regarding how the skull became so separate 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 it rolled or was pushed forward. along the ground by streams of water or mud, until it somehow reached the edge of the sinkhole of Hell, eventually entering the depression.
Over time, the infiltration of water into the sinkhole could have dissolved the gypsum deposits in the cave, creating the vertical tree next to the safe resting place of the skull.
“The passage of the reactivated cave began to evolve downwards, with the formation of a stream that sinks sideways and the carving of the labyrinth below,” the researchers write in their paper.
“This new reactivation has managed to strengthen about 12 meters of gypsum, connecting to the level of the descent base.”
Various sediments deposited in the cranial cavity provide some support for this argument, suggesting that matter was trapped inside the skull during water runoff or debris, as the skull made its improbable and chaotic journey into the cave. Signs of other head trauma suggest a lot of bumps along the way.
This hypothetical interpretation is not necessarily what happened, of course, which we can never know for sure. But, as researchers point out, of all the parts of a human skeleton, the shape of a skull makes it best suited for making an escape.
“If the skeleton was intact until this sequence of events, other skeletal elements, different in shape and size, could have remained glued elsewhere and dispersed during transport,” the authors suggest.
“The skull would have rolled more easily than other skeletal parts in a stream of water and the flow of debris … During its decomposition and those dynamic phases, it would have been filled with sediment. Therefore, it would have reached the cave. and would stop on the plateau where he was found. “
The findings are reported in Plus one.