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It was found in 2015 – an isolated clue to a grisly mystery set in motion thousands of years in the past.
This ancient puzzle consisted of one piece: a solitary human skull, discovered on its own, with no other skeletons around, resting in a cave in Bologna, Italy, in the center of a cavernous depression the locals are calling Dolina from Hell (The abyss of hell).
It was not an easy thing to find.
The well-concealed skull, missing its lower jaw, could only be reached by walking through a difficult cave passage called the Meander of wickedness (Labyrinth of Malice), then climbing a vertical tree to a height of 12 meters (39 feet), where the skull rested on a rock ledge.
Due to the difficulty in accessing the place, cavers were unable to recover the skull until 2017, when researchers were fortunate enough to study this mysterious ancient specimen.
The solitary skull was found to be ancient indeed, with radiocarbon dating suggesting that the skull belonged to an individual who lived between 3630 and 3380 BCE, placing them in the archaeological context of the early Eneolithic period (a.k.a. chalcolithic) of the region.
Other Eneolithic human remains have been found in the general area; not in the abyss of hell, but in a rock shelter about 600 meters (nearly 2,000 feet) from the cave in which the skull was found.
So the larger context makes sense. But how exactly did this lone skull stray so far from its Aeneolithic counterparts, positioned high up on a ledge, but buried in a malicious labyrinth of a cave, and hidden at a depth of 26 meters (85 feet) below ground?
According to the anthropologist Maria Giovanna Belcastro of the University of Bologna – the first author of a new analysis of the unusual fate of the skull – a number of factors were at play.
Belcastro’s team investigated the skull, which the team said was likely from a young woman between the ages of 24 and 35.
The evidence for various lesions on the sides of the skull is likely the result of human manipulations of the skull at the time of the woman’s death, the researchers suggest, possibly reflecting ritual acts aimed at removing flesh from the skull, in the part of a funeral custom.
Other lesions on the skull, some of which were said to have been suffered antemortem (before death), could be due to an injury that killed the woman, and other marks could be evidence of a type of medical treatment administered by his people.
As to how the skull was so separated from the rest of its skeleton, the researchers hypothesize that the skull may have been intentionally or accidentally removed from the rest of the body, before rolling or being pushed along the ground. by water or mudslides, until he somehow came to the brink of hell, finally falling into depression.
Over time, water seeping into the sinkhole might have dissolved gypsum deposits in the cave, creating the vertical rod next to the skull’s safe resting place.
“The reactivated cave passage began to evolve downward, with the formation of a side-flowing stream and the maze carving below,” the researchers write in their paper.
“This new reactivation enabled about 12 meters of gypsum to be driven in, connecting at the lowering base.
Various sediments lodged in the cranial cavity provide some support for this argument, suggesting that material got stuck inside the skull during the flow of water or debris, as the skull performed its improbable and chaotic journey into the cave. Signs of other head trauma suggest many bumps along the way.
This hypothetical interpretation is not necessarily what happened, of course, which we can never really know for sure. But as the researchers point out, of all the parts of a human skeleton, the shape of a skull makes it the most suitable for a runaway.
“If the skeleton was intact at the time of this sequence of events, other parts of the skeleton, of different shape and size, could have gotten stuck elsewhere and scattered during transport,” suggest the authors.
“The skull would have rolled more easily than the other parts of the skeleton in a stream of water and debris flows… During its decomposition and these dynamic phases, it would have been filled with sediment. Therefore, he would have reached the cave and would stop on the plateau where he was found. “
The results are reported in PLOS One.
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