8,000-Year-Old Human Skeletons Found In Neolithic Village Of Slatina, Bulgaria

Conny Waters - AncientPages.com - Four Early Neolithic tombs estimated to date back 8,000 years have been unearthed by a team of Bulgarian archaeologists excavating the Neolithic Slatina site in the capital city Sofia.

The tombs belong to three adults and one child. Together with two graves discovered at the Slatina site in 2019, these are the earliest in the region of Sofia.

8,000-year-old human skeletons found at Slatina site, Bulgaria. Image credit: Sofia Globe

Team leader Vassil Nikolov of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences informed that it was the first time in the ritual complex that such extremely rare finds had been made.

Excavations in the area have been going on for more than 30 years and the objects found so far show that the village was inhabited by farmers and pastoralists.

The settlement itself existed for about 500 years, from the end of the seventh to the middle of the sixth millennium BC. It is assumed that the civilization of Europe started from the Neolithic settlement in Slatina, Nikolov said.

The graves date from the beginning of the sixth millennium and very little is known about the rituals of this period. Probably there were houses, which unfortunately were destroyed, archaeologists believe.

During the excavations, archaeologists from the National Archaeological Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences came across a double grave – most likely a man with a child. The other remains are of a woman lying on her stomach and of a man who was laid out in a very special way – one of his hands remained under the skeleton, reports The Sofia Globe 

Researchers from the Institute of Experimental Morphology, Pathology, and Anthropology of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences will perform DNA analysis that may confirm a relationship between the buried people.

Among the new finds uncovered at the Slatina site, there are ceramic vessels, loom weights, a furnace plug shaped like a human image, and a fragment of a spindle.

Written by Conny Waters - AncientPages.com Staff Writer