Researchers Find 5,600 Years Fragments of Human Bones in 'Mega-Sites in Ukraine', Say Fire Likely Killed Stone Age Humans
In 2024, archaeologists published their findings on Neolithic Europeans living during the Stone Age in present-day Ukraine. The group on which this research focused was possibly living in a settlement boasting a population of around 10,000 to 15,000 people, Popular Science reported. Past studies have also claimed that this site witnessed a fatal accidental fire five millenniums ago that took many lives. Findings regarding the settlement and the fire have been published in PLOS ONE.
The group of people that were treated as subjects in the study were connected to the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture. This culture was famous for its pottery and lived in present-day Eastern Europe from somewhere between 5500 and 2750 B.C.E. Along with their artifacts, this set also has the honor of being the first farmers in the area. "They knew how to cultivate the environment, grow cereals and legumes, exploit the woodlands, and breed their livestock. They are also known for their beautiful pottery, which they produced in a really high amount. Additionally, the settlement structures suggest early, quite complex sociopolitical systems to organize life in such mega sites," Katharina Fuchs, a study co-author and biological anthropologist and archaeologist from Kiel University in Germany said.
Before the finding, experts had not found any human remains associated with this culture. All of this changed when in 2004 this research team unearthed around 50 human bone and tooth fragments from a prehistoric house near Kosenivka. On examination, it was confirmed that the 50 specimens belonged to seven individuals in total. As per the study, these individuals could have been the inhabitants of the house.
Four of the individuals on the site were heavily charred. "We can only speculate whether there was a connection between the fire and the act of deadly violence, i.e. killing the people in the house, leaving their corpses, and setting the house on fire," Katharina Fuchs, a biological anthropologist at Kiel University in Germany, and colleagues explained. For the human remains of three individuals located lying outside the house, researchers believed that they could have also been harmed due to the consequences of fire.
The team analyzed the remains to confirm these speculations. Fuchs and the coauthors determined that the bodies were burnt after the death. Furthermore, amongst the seven individuals, two adults had suffered head trauma just before their demise, as per Live Science. Radiocarbon dating unveiled that six individuals died between 3690 and 3620 B.C., but an unburnt adult lying outside the house took his last breath around 130 years later. Though the experts still believe the fire to have some link with the deaths of the individuals inside the house with factors like carbon monoxide poisoning being chief candidates for the ones placed outside, they believe more research is required to conclude.
Researchers speculate that the house and six stone age bodies were surrounded by soil and debris in a matter of months. A century later for some reason, a skull was placed on top of the burial place. The isolated skull could have been put above the burials as part of a custom while the burning could have been facilitated as a complex, multistage tradition, as per some experts. "It seems reasonable that the individuals recovered from Kosenivka were killed during a raid and that their house was lit on fire during the conflict," Jordan Karsten, an archaeologist at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh who was not involved in the study hypothesized while presenting another theory. "Previous explanations [for burned CTS houses] have focused on ritual house destruction through intentional burning, but these results suggest that intergroup conflict might better fit the data."
The remains did not indicate clearly how these individuals died but did give a good enough picture of how they lived in terms of their diet, according to Popular Science. As per examinations the seven individuals primarily ate grains and plant fibers. "These Trypillian societies relied mainly on a plant-based diet and keeping cattle was not for meat production, but for milk production and to fertilize the fields," Fuchs explained. At present, researchers are struggling to protect these invaluable sites from military offensives taking place in Ukraine.