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Comment by IncRnd | Hacker News Reader

Why is the implication a religious activity when bones are found? Was the idea of an abattoir considered?

In a few thousand years, if there are even remains from today's slauterhouses, will rival cults be discussed? The cult that only killed chickens and the cult that only killed cows?

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The article says that heads and heads alone were found:

> They've uncovered large numbers of cattle, goat and wild gazelle skulls and horns in small chambers in the heads of the mustatil, but found no indication that these were kept for domestic use. Since no other animal's body parts were found, it led the team to deduce that these were sacrificial. It further suggested that the animals were sacrificed elsewhere.

Whatever it was, that doesn't sound like an abattoir.

Bones were valuable primitive tools but the skulls might have been used as representive forms of currency or wealth tokens such as the stones on Easter Island. Or tributes to the animals' sacrifice.

Good points.

That's sort of what I was describing, that the first guess regularly seems to be that something unknown today served a religious purpose then. Eight thousand years later we don't know why those bones are in a chamber.

What is said in the article is a non-sequitur, "Since no other animal's body parts were found, it led the team to deduce that these were sacrificial."

My first thought is that perhaps they chop the head off, butcher the animal, and all body parts containing meat would be removed and end up deposited somewhere else. The heads, presumably having no useful meat, get dumped near the abattoir.

But heads do have useful meat. You might have heard of smoked tongue? Or sheep's head soup?

There have been other huge bone boards found in Saudi Arabia and those have been attributed to multi generation bone dumping grounds by hyena.

I feel sorry for anyone who has to dig up our current civilization. Imagine digging up nuclear waste and hoping it is some grand sarcophagus or treasure. Worse yet all the landfills.

This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

"Zahi Hawass quotes an example of a curse: 'Cursed be those who disturb the rest of a Pharaoh. They that shall break the seal of this tomb shall meet death by a disease that no doctor can diagnose.'" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_the_pharaohs#Tomb_cur...

Good point, if those who will dig it out are anything like us, it will only instigate even more curiosity.

Imagine all the adult toys that would be dug up. Fertility cult or something.

Most of the archeological sites we have are pretty much just ancient landfills.

Some sites are middens, but I wouldn't say most. Artifact scatters (discovered through survey) and residential sites (what we're typically looking for and may themselves contain middens) are probably the most common.

theyd probably unironically think that there were anime fandom cults that worshiped small plastic toys

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