In the Stone Age, the Chinese made human bones into cups and masks

Skull cups and skeletal masks have been discovered among a 5,000-year-old pile of discarded human bones in China, according to a new study. Carved skulls were found alongside pottery and animal remains, but the purpose of making these gruesome objects has so far remained a mystery to experts. According to the study, which was published on August 26 in the journal Scientific Reports, these bones belong to the Liangzhou culture, which also included the oldest city in East Asia.

The age of this set of bones was determined using the carbon-carbonite method, between 3000 and 2500 years BC, during the Neolithic period of China. A few Liangzhou cemeteries had been discovered in the past, but none of them contained carved bones. Archaeologists recovered more than 50 human bones from canals and ditches at five sites that showed signs of being hand worked, split, pierced, polished or abraded with tools.

“The fact that so many human bones were worked, unfinished, and discarded in canals shows disrespect for the dead,” Junmi Sawada, lead author of the study and a biological anthropologist at Niigata University of Health and Welfare in Japan, told the Live Science website in an email. There were no traces of the bones of people who had died violently, or any signs of the skeletons being disintegrated, he said. This means that the bones were probably used after decomposition.

The researchers discovered that the most common bone used was the human skull. They found four adult skulls that had been cut or split horizontally to be used as cups. The other four skulls were also split from top to bottom to become something like a skeletal mask. The researchers wrote in this study that previously, cups made of human skulls were discovered from the graves of wealthy people in the Liangzhou culture, which may have been made for religious or ritual purposes.

However, mask-faced skulls have no analogues. Other types of discarded worked bones are also unique, including a skull with holes in the back and a deliberately flattened lower jaw. “We suspect that the emergence of urban society and the resulting encounters with larger groups of people may be the key to understanding this phenomenon,” Sawada said. According to the study, which shows a shift in the burial of the dead during the rapidly urbanizing Liangzhou culture, many of the worked bones were left half-finished, suggesting that human bones were not particularly rare or valuable.

The authors of the study believe that when people no longer know all their neighbors or consider them relatives, it may be easier to separate bones from the people they belonged to. “The most interesting and unique thing about the finds is that they were basically trash,” Elizabeth Berger, a bioarchaeologist at the University of California, Riverside, told Live Science. He agreed with the researchers that the unusual handling of the bones may be related to increased anonymity in urban society.

The researchers wrote that the practice of working with human bones appeared suddenly in the Liangzhou culture, persisted for at least 200 years, according to radiocarbon dating, and then disappeared. “The people of Liangzhou came to the conclusion that they saw some human bodies as inanimate raw material, but what caused this and why did this situation last for only a few centuries?” Berger said. Sawada says future research may help answer these questions, particularly by helping to reveal when and how people prepared the bones. This analysis can further help researchers to discover the meanings behind this work and its connection with the change of social relations and kinship during the Neolithic period of China.

Source: LiveScience