Headless bodies hint at why Europe’s first farmers vanished

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?

Known as the Linear Pottery culture (or LBK, after their German name, Linearbandkeramik), these early agriculturalists were direct descendants of the people who began to domesticate plants and animals in the hills of Anatolia around 9000 B.C.E. By 5500 B.C.E., they had reached today’s Hungary. Then they spread westward, farther into Europe. The LBK farmers flourished for more than 400 years, eventually occupying a 1500-kilometer belt of fertile land stretching as far west as the Paris Basin.

Then something went terribly wrong. Vráble and other mass graves across Europe attest to a wave of brutality around 5000 B.C.E., about the same time as hundreds of LBK settlements across the continent abruptly vanished. In the aftermath, parts of the continent remained empty for centuries. Other settlements transitioned peacefully into something else, with people living in the same place and continuing to farm, but building houses and decorating their ceramics in a different way. “The LBK were the first farmers, the first large pan-European culture, and the first time we see these repeated finds of violence,” says Christian Meyer, an independent osteoarchaeologist who has studied human remains from multiple LBK mass graves.

The finds at Vráble and other LBK sites challenge a long-held notion that prehistory was more or less peaceful, with isolated cases of interpersonal violence but no large-scale conflicts or wars. It may also shed light on one of prehistory’s great vanishing acts. “It’s one of the most interesting questions in history,” Fuchs says. “What led to the disappearance of an entire culture?”

A few hundred meters away from a small river, the Vráble site has been productive farmland since the dawn of agriculture in the Neolithic period. Like people all across the LBK, farmers here favored land covered by a type of loose, stone-free soil called loess. Burnt grains in the soil show that at Vráble, they grew early forms of wheat called emmer and einkorn. Piles of cattle, pig, sheep, and goat bones found at the site show meat was on the menu, too.

The bountiful harvest fueled a centurieslong demographic boom. Wherever these pioneers appear, within a few generations “every valley seems to fill up,” says Martin Furholt, an archaeologist at Kiel who leads the work at Vráble.

Perhaps thanks to its rapid expansion, LBK society remained remarkably uniform across an estimated 700,000 square kilometers of Europe, judging from artifacts and, more recently, ancient DNA. Extracted from LBK skeletons, the DNA shows these pioneers were directly descended from early Anatolian farmers, and mostly avoided mingling with local hunter-gatherers they may have encountered as they spread across Europe.

When well-preserved, LBK settlements and cemeteries are easy for modern-day archaeologists to identify. Postholes found by the thousands across Europe suggest these farmers built wooden longhouses with wattle-and-daub walls big enough to house an extended family and their livestock. They typically buried their dead lying on their left sides in a fetal position, and fired pottery decorated with distinctive incised lines.

Archaeologists long believed the LBK era was a sort of early Eden. There are few signs of inequality or competition for resources. People lived on small family farms without social hierarchy or accumulated wealth, using stone axes to clear forests and wood or bone implements to plow fields. The sword wouldn’t be invented for 2000 years. “When you see an agrarian society with no specialized weapons,” Furholt says, “it’s easy to imagine it’s peaceful.”

That idyllic vision began to crumble in the 1980s, when archaeologists in southern Germany excavated a grave containing the skeletons of 34 people, most of them children. The victims’ fractured skulls showed many had been killed with blows to the head. Now known as the Talheim Death Pit, the grave was radiocarbon dated to 5000 B.C.E., coinciding with the very end of the LBK period.

In the decades since, archaeologists have found many more mass graves across Europe, all dating to roughly the same time. Many, like Talheim, looked at first like the results of small-scale raiding or local conflicts.

But as more burials emerged, those easy explanations faded. If conflict was a regular part of LBK life, the graves should appear throughout the culture’s 400-year span instead of only at the very end. And each new LBK massacre site seems to have its own distinct character and particular details that suggest some mysterious constellation of brutal practices, not competition for land or mates. “What we see is different from anything we see before. It’s an indication of an end phase, where people turn to rituals and odd beliefs,” says Leibniz Center for Archaeology archaeologist Detlef Gronenborn. “Then it breaks out in an orgy of violence. Then it stops, but it’s too late.”

At a site in southwestern Germany called Kilianstädten, for example, the 26 victims included 
10 children under age 6. As at Talheim, many of the skulls had been smashed, but the assailants had systematically shattered their targets’ shins, too, either as a form of torture or as a symbolic postmortem maiming. “It was a statement by the perpetrators,” says Meyer, who examined the bones. “They did this on purpose.”

Another site that Meyer helped excavate in Germany revealed violence reminiscent of the Neolithic version of gangland killings. Eight of the nine people tossed in the mass grave were young men. They had fractures on the backs of their head, invariably on the right-hand side—suggesting they had been forced to kneel for a killing blow from behind. “These people were held prisoner and executed,” Meyer says.

At a site in Austria called Asparn-Schletz, archaeologists found the remains of about 200 women, children, and men of all ages in a deep ditch outside a large LBK settlement. At first it looked as though an entire village had been slaughtered at once, presumably wiped out by rivals in an early act of organized warfare. In that scenario, the dead should include many biological relatives. But a study of ancient DNA from Asparn-Schletz published this year showed only two of the people in the ditch were close genetic kin, indicating something far stranger had occurred there.

Perhaps the most bizarre LBK massacre site is a grim spot called Herxheim, now mostly buried beneath an industrial park near Germany’s border with France. The sheer scale of the slaughter is stunning. Between 1996 and 2010, archaeologists excavated more than 80,000 pieces of human bone, including the skull caps of more than 500 people, mostly older children and young adults. Cut marks on the bones indicate they were purposefully dismembered, and shards of pottery and animal bones from feasts are interspersed with the remains. “People at Herxheim definitely didn’t die normal deaths,” says Andrea Zeeb-Lanz, an archaeologist at the Rhineland-Palatinate General Directorate for Cultural Heritage who directs research on the site. “These are special activities, not just villages on the warpath.”

Isotopes of strontium, oxygen, and nitrogen from the teeth, which can reveal geographic origin, show the victims weren’t local. Zeeb-Lanz is convinced they were brought to the site and killed as part of ceremonies that lasted for weeks and included feasting, digging the deep ditches, and even firing high-quality pottery destined to be thrown in the pits days later, along with smashed human bone. “It’s not done in a ritual fury,” she says. “It’s a processing which is done with great care.”

At Vráble, archaeologists hope to trace the forces that drove these curious acts of violence. Sending a drone into the clear sky, Kiel archaeologist Nils Müller-Scheeßel points out where ground-penetrating radar surveys found three massive “neighborhoods” occupied simultaneously at Vráble between 5250 and 5050 B.C.E. Each one is 400 meters across and had 15 to 20 longhouses at any given time, each housing an extended family. Together they amounted to a metropolis by LBK standards, with up to 1000 inhabitants. But each neighborhood maintained its own identity. Different concentrations of animal bones suggest the three neighborhoods specialized in raising sheep, pigs, and cattle, respectively. They even featured slightly different pottery styles and tools.

Previous excavations had shown that around 5100 B.C.E., more than 2 centuries after Vráble was founded, a deep, V-shaped ditch was dug around one of the three neighborhoods and reinforced with an earthen berm. A second, inner ditch completed the structure. The effort required would have been immense. “A double ditch 1.3 kilometers long, with the tools they had back then? It’s crazy,” Fuchs says.

Müller-Scheeßel thinks the village’s size makes the earthworks unlikely to be fortifications against some outside threat. “It’s the largest settlement in the region, so you’d need an army to attack them,” he says.

Instead, the ditch may be a sign that social relationships were splintering inside Vráble itself. The wall had five gates, all facing away from the settlement’s other two neighborhoods. “The entrances cut off other neighborhoods,” Furholt says. “It’s quite a hostile act.” He notes that the three neighborhoods had been distinctive from the start. “We have very individual farms, with strong autonomy, living together as a village,” Furholt says. “You could see how this is a setup that falls apart at some point.”

Then came the killings and decapitations. The bodies were all thrown in the ditch around one of the gates and along the adjacent ditch. And within a few decades, radiocarbon dating shows, the surrounding settlement emptied out and was never reoccupied. “It lasted another one or two generations at most,” Furholt says. “I can see why all these people without heads wouldn’t be good for a community, and might be a cause for abandonment.”

By late August, the team at Vráble has been in the field for 5 weeks, working under a white party tent that sheltered them from both blazing sunshine and rain that turned the surrounding fields to gluey mud. Standing on the edge of a trench 2 meters deep and about 
10 meters long, Müller-Scheeßel gestures at the intermingled bones: “It just doesn’t end.”

So far, the team has identified the headless skeletons of at least 85 men, women, and children. In six seasons of excavation, they’ve found just one head. “Why did they cut off the heads?” Meyer asks. “And what did they do with them?”

The team is now tracing how the massacre unfolded. On one of the excavation’s last days, Fuchs and a team of students crouch among bones they’ve carefully uncovered over the past few weeks, some wearing only socks to avoid damaging the fragile skeletons. They carefully clean soil away from individual bones with brushes and trowels. Exposed for the first time in 7000 years, the remains must be kept moist using spray bottles or they’ll start to crumble. Each individual is placed in a paper bag and stowed in a labeled box. Later, the team will be able to reconstruct the grave digitally, using the hundreds of photos taken during the excavation to locate each body in the pit.

When they found the first headless skeletons, Fuchs and her colleagues weren’t sure whether the bodies had been deliberately decapitated. Neolithic societies sometimes disinterred people and rearranged their bones long after death. Perhaps, they thought, the bodies were allowed to decay after dying naturally, and then the loosened skulls were removed as part of some unknown ritual.

But as more bodies have emerged, it’s become obvious their heads were deliberately removed around the time of death. The skeletons are mostly intact and in anatomical order, down to small bones like fingers and toes—a sign the bodies were not left out for scavengers to pick at, or buried and then moved again after decaying. “They seem to have been covered quite fast,” Furholt says. “This is one mass deposition event, or several in a short period.” And in the Stone Age equivalent of a smoking gun, many of the neck vertebrae bear cut marks. Dozens of people were decapitated using just flint or obsidian knives the length of a finger, in what must have been a messy, strenuous operation.

Over the next 3 years, osteologists will examine each bone for clues to how old the people in the pit were when they died, their sex, and any signs of prior trauma or injury. Forensic examination of any cut marks, meanwhile, could indicate whether they were the handiwork of multiple people or a single perpetrator. “Something very special happened here,” Fuchs says. “Understanding how they did it could tell us who did it and why they did it.”

For the researchers, “not having the skull is very difficult,” Fuchs says. To suss out a skeleton’s geographic origin, they need isotopes in teeth. Ancient DNA, which can point to kinship and deeper ancestry, is best preserved in teeth and a bone in the inner ear. And estimates for bodies’ ages at death are often based on the way the skull knits together over time, or whether wisdom teeth have emerged.

Still, analysis of the bones in the field has yielded some impressions. Both men and women were buried in the trench—along with teens—but young children are underrepresented. And so far, the bones of the people buried appear robust, suggesting a highly active lifestyle.

The Vráble burial has other odd features, such as the fist-size river pebbles found scattered among the bones. The site’s loess soil is free of rocks, so the pebbles must have been brought from the nearby river and tossed in on purpose. Other artifacts—including a dozen human teeth with holes drilled through them, likely worn as necklaces—and fragments of pottery dot the bottom of the ditch.

All are clues to a mystery yet to be solved. Why did violence break out all across the LBK at the same time, and with such lasting consequences? Since the discovery of the Talheim Death Pit, archaeologists have been searching for a convincing explanation. “Are these strange manipulations a reaction to a crisis,” Zeeb-Lanz asks, “or an effort not to let a crisis happen?”

Archaeologists often invoke overpopulation and climate change to explain ancient turmoil. But so far, none of the bones from massacre sites have shown evidence of famine or malnutrition. And even if there was a shift in the region’s climate, “I’m hesitant to point to climate change as a single driver,” says Rick Schulting, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford. “There are all kind of cases where the climate changes and people do not start killing each other in large numbers.”

To him the evidence points to “something of a cultural collapse.” From a demographic point of view, the LBK was a stunning success story. What started as a small core group of pioneering farmers spread and expanded across vast territories in just a few centuries, a population boom with few parallels in human history. But perhaps that growth was unsustainable.

“As LBK people multiply, communication becomes more and more difficult, and society breaks apart,” Gronenborn says.

Zeeb-Lanz thinks sites like Herxheim were ways to reinforce cultural connections in an increasingly unfamiliar world, perhaps through human sacrifices or some other Stone Age bonding rites. “We’re looking at a change in ideology over a generation or two. Social ideas and cohesion aren’t working well,” Zeeb-Lanz says. “And ritualistic violence is a very strong way to bring cohesion in a community.”

Penny Bickle, an archaeologist at the University of York, suggests a culture accustomed to constant expansion might have simply run out of room. Around 5100 B.C.E., the furious pace of the LBK’s territorial expansion slows, then stops, as it reaches the edges of the fertile loess zone. “Maybe the society reaches the limits of the landscape where expansion makes sense. Moving on and making new settlements doesn’t work as a social system anymore, so they start to look inwards,” Bickle says. “There’s a shift in how people are relating to each other.”

Whatever its cause, the LBK’s end has forced archaeologists to grapple with the fact that human beings have always had the capacity to brutalize others. “It’s a basic human thing,” Meyer says. “If there are problems, people try to find a scapegoat.”

Yet Schulting warns against ignoring the centuries when the LBK was a peaceful, flourishing culture, or the many settlements that transitioned into a different way of life without obvious signs of bloodshed. “Vráble and these other sites show violence is always in the repertoire of human behavior. But that doesn’t mean it’s inevitable.”