Here, you can see the knife marks on the surface of two rib fragments. The cuts and incisions indicate that the body was dismembered postmortem. Zombies are hardly the focus of modern people's attention For centuries, people have been worried that the body will climb out of the grave and torture the living. Now, British archaeologists think they have found evidence of ways to stop the dead from walking in the Middle Ages.

Researchers revisited a human remains pit in Wallam Percy, an abandoned village in northern Yorkshire, which dates back nearly 65,438+0,000 years. After death, the body was burned and dismembered. Archaeologists have given two possible explanations: either the condition of the body is due to cannibalism, or the body is dismembered to ensure that they will not come out of the grave. According to the research published in the Journal of Archaeology Science: Report on April 2nd,

Simon Mays, the head of the research and a human skeleton biologist at the British History Museum, said that the view that the bones were "burnt and dismembered to prevent the body from coming out of the grave" seemed to be the most consistent with the evidence. Mace and his colleagues wrote that "zombies" were buried in Percy, Vollam.

It is believed that people with strong vitality may be resurrected if they do evil before death, or if individuals experience sudden or violent death. In order to prevent these bodies from disturbing the living, medieval English literature showed that the bodies would be dug up, dismembered and burned.

When these messy bones were first excavated in the 1960s, they were initially interpreted as earlier tombs, possibly Roman tombs, which were inadvertently disturbed and rebuilt by villagers in the late Middle Ages. After all, these bones were buried in an unburied land near a house, not in an official cemetery.

However, radiocarbon dating shows that these bones belong to the same era as medieval towns, and chemical analysis shows that these bones come from local people.

What happened to the body? The scene after death may be comparable to the scene in the bloody zombie movie.

According to the latest research, Vollam Percy's bones come from at least 10 people between the ages of 2 and 50. The burning pattern of corpse experiment shows that when there is meat on the bone, the corpse will be ignited. Fleshy corpses are considered more threatening than skeletons. Scientists also found cutting marks consistent with dismemberment, which indicated that the bones were beheaded after death.

"If we are right, then this is our first good archaeological evidence about this practice," Mace said in a statement, referring to the safety precautions for zombies. It shows us the dark side of medieval beliefs and vividly reminds us how different the medieval worldview is from our own.

Stephen Gordon, a scholar of medieval and early modern supernatural beliefs, said that he thought this explanation was reasonable, and he was not involved in this research. Gordon told Life Science in an email: "Seven strange ways for human beings to behave like vampires"]