Remains show that an Early Bronze Age community were butchered like animals

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. “We actually find more evidence for injuries to skeletons dating to the Neolithic period in Britain than the Early Bronze Age, so Charterhouse Warren stands out as something very unusual,” said lead study author Rick Schulting, professor of scientific and prehistoric archaeology at the University of Oxford, in a statement. “In addition, a small number of small bones of the hands and feet exhibit fresh bone crushing fractures that are consistent with the flat molars of omnivores, including humans, rather than the sharper punctures caused by carnivores,” the authors wrote in the study, noting that the body parts were buried quickly after being butchered and cannibalized, making scavenging by animals highly unlikely. Instead, the study authors believe cannibalism may have been an extreme form of dehumanizing the victims by “othering” the deceased, or eating their flesh and mixing their bones with cattle bones as a way to liken the victims to animals, the researchers said. Innovations in weaponry, like daggers, suggest that interpersonal violence was occurring at the time in Early Bronze Age Britain, said Barry Molloy, an associate professor in the school of archaeology at University College Dublin.