9,000-year-old ritualised decapitation found in Brazil

• Researchers have unearthed a 9,000-year-old case of human decapitation in an archaeological site in Brazil which may be the oldest case of ritual decapitation in the New World.
• It is a skull of a man found in a rock shelter in Lapa Do Santo, located in east-central Brazil where amputated hands laid over the face of the skull arranged opposite to each other and v-shaped cut marks on the jaw and sixth cervical vertebra.
• According to researchers, the decapitation was not the result of a murder but probably a burial practice during the culture’s early Archaic period.
• The skull is more than 3,000 years older than previous known evidence of decapitation in South America. The remains were found in 2007, but recently the testing results appeared in the journal – PLOS ONE.
• Andre Strauss from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology,Germany and colleagues have dated the remains, named Burial 26, back to approximately 9,000 years ago using accelerator mass spectrometry.