Lost Farmers of Neolithic Europe

Andrew Curry in A Headless Mystery on 2025-11-20:

In 2017, archaeologists digging in the middle of a Slovak wheat field uncovered four headless skeletons. The burials, in a ditch dug on the edge of a settlement more than 7000 years ago, belonged to one of Europe’s first farming communities. Burying people in or near settlements wasn’t unusual at the time—but burying them without heads was.

Year after year, the researchers have returned to find more and more headless skeletons on the outskirts of Vráble, a small village 100 kilometers east of Bratislava. “Everywhere we started to dig, we found bones. Everywhere we were sitting or standing, there were bones,” says Katharina Fuchs, a biological anthropologist at Kiel University who has excavated in Vráble every summer since 2021. In the summer of 2022, she and colleagues from Kiel and the Slovak Academy of Sciences’s Institute of Archaeology recovered the skeletal remains of 34 people, piled on top of each other two or three deep in a space about the size of a parking spot. With the exception of one child, none of them had heads.

Each year the team expects to reach the mass grave’s edge. Instead, it finds more bodies. “Every time we think we have a clue, the site shows differently,” Fuchs says. “It’s not stopping. We now have a skeleton layer 45 meters long.”

Vráble’s headless bodies are more than a ghoulish curiosity. They could help answer a decades-old question: What happened to central Europe’s first farmers?

This article is fascinating. While I've heard of the Linear Pottery culture, I hadn't learned much about them. It's stark and uncanny to learn that this culture collapsed in such a brutal, and potentially ritualistic way, and to realize that writing wouldn't be invented for another couple thousand years, leaving their pre-metal artifacts and remains as our only source for understanding.