In Slovakia, archaeologists have uncovered a site some 7,000 years old with dozens of human skeletons - all of them headless. At the site near Vrable, in two ditches, nearly 80 decapitated skeletons were found, and over a hundred individuals have been identified in total. That number, researchers say, will likely grow.

The site belongs to the Linear Pottery culture - one of the earliest farming communities in Europe, which spread across Central Europe around 7,500 years ago. The settlement near Vrable had hundreds of houses arranged into quarters; only one, ringed by two ditches, served a different purpose than the usual graves beside the homes. There, instead of pottery and sacrificed lambs, lay bodies without heads - with a single child as the only exception among the adults.

The first instinct is to think massacre. But the science is more cautious. „This is not violent decapitation, but the skilled removal of the skull," says biological anthropologist Katharina Fuchs of the University of Kiel. The study's lead, Martin Furholt, adds that these were „social practices" with limited signs of conflict, not a bloody event.

In other words - our ancestors, seven thousand years ago, had rituals that look macabre to us today but made their own sense to them. Headless skeletons have turned up at several Neolithic sites across Europe, pointing to a widespread practice, perhaps tied to a cult of ancestors or deities. Nearly 160 meters of the ditch system are still unexcavated. Maybe there, somewhere, the missing skulls are waiting - and with them, one more reminder of how little we actually know about those who came before us.