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> Like all their children, the 2-year-old boy was treasured by his people. To honor him, they buried him underneath a rock shelter with great care and love, spr

> Like all their children, the 2-year-old boy was treasured by his people. To honor him, they buried him underneath a rock shelter with great care and love, sprinkling his body with red ochre. Everyone in the community contributed to the toolkit that he would take with him into the afterlife: Some placed carefully flaked finished tools—projectile points, knives, and scrapers for hides—others left the cores that he would need to make new ones. His parents placed carved elk bone rods into the grave to mark his connection to their ancestors. This burial site was honored by their descendants for generations, who paid their respects to the boy every time they passed it. To me it seems like human sacrifice. My guess is that without modern medical care, 2 year olds dying was not uncommon. The fact that his body underwent such elaborate burial routines, and he was buried with a lot of artifacts, and that his burial site was venerated, seems more likely with human sacrifice than if he had just died of natural causes.

SkittyDog 5y ago
"My guess is that..." Would you be able to provide some of the evidence that led you to this guess? Or maybe you could give us your credentials, whatever education and experience you have that qualifies you to make guesses in the field of pre-Columbian Neolithic archaeology? Let me make it simpler: How do YOU know that 2-year-old death was "common" among these people, at this time? What supporting sources to this putative fact? I can understand being skeptical of the article author's conclusion, if they did a poor job explaining themselves... But your counter-hypothesis is just creative writing, without something a little more solid to back it up.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- WalterBright 5y ago
  It'd be surprising if a 2-year-old's death was not common. Before 1900 or so, children in every society died like flies before reaching adulthood. It's why societies are so protective of their children, and why people had large families.
  - jeromegv 5y ago
    The issue isn’t so much about arguing about commonness of 2 years old. Of course it was common. The giant leap is to conclude that it was human sacrifice. You need some credentials or provide more information to arrive to this conclusion. That’s what the argument was about.
  - SkittyDog 5y ago
    But most infant deaths before 1900 were from infectious diseases that didn't even exist in human populations until our ancestors lived in large enough groups to become disease reservoirs. But your response just proves the meta-point I made, in my earlier comment... If you don't have any qualifications in Neolithic anthropology, and you're not citing any evidence from people who DO have those qualifications, then your uninformed speculations are just fairy tales. In not against unqualified speculation... Just don't be surprised when people point out that you have no idea what you're talking about, and that you're probably wrong.
AlotOfReading 5y ago
The author took some poetic license with the narrative bits. The reality is that the anzick site was completely destroyed by amateur collectors. We don't actually know if the artifacts and the bones are associated, nor do we have enough to say much about the cause of death beyond ruling out some basic diseases. However, human sacrifice is incredibly rare historically while natural deaths aren't. The balance of probabilities suggests the latter.
- Amezarak 5y ago
  Human sacrifice was not incredibly rare, it was widely practiced all over the world going as far back into prehistory as we can see.
  - AlotOfReading 5y ago
    It certainly was compared to natural causes and our evidence for particular sacrifice is even more scarce. I've surveyed and excavated many ancient graves, but very few (1, possibly 2) had anything to suggest human sacrifice, both of which were for ideological reasons that don't make sense for Anzick. Quoting Porter's "Mortal Mirrors" from the standard book on archaeology of sacrifice, Sacred Killing: But the evidence for human sacrifice is actually very rare in the period when cross-cultural comparisons suggest it is most likely to occur—the formative stages of complex society—and when it does occur, it is very individual in practice. Dr. Porter goes on to talk about how this is of course the result of our ability to detect and recognize sacrificial activity in the material record and so on. The book is worth perusing if this topic interests you. And of course, in context we should expect it to be essentially irrelevant on a population level because population growth for most of the Paleoindian period is close to flat. A significant difference in infant mortality rates from culturally-specific factors would probably lead to pretty quick population turnover during the millennia of competition with everyone else that has similar technology and resources. So while it did occur, there's little reason to think it occurred at rates anywhere near that of non-sacrificial mortalities.
  - mushbino 5y ago
gumby 5y ago
Could just as likely have been a high status individual, say the child of some other high status people, or someone chosen to have been a religious figure (as happens with Lamas in Tibetan Buddhism), or someone who died in an unlucky way (so a special burial might have been to try to ward off bad luck) or perhaps they had some organic disability that doesn't show up in the bones (as some cultures consider epileptics to have been touched by a god). Impossible to tell today, though anthropologists likely have behavioral clues that makes their conjectures slightly more likely than the random ones I and you thought up.
PuppyTailWags 5y ago
AbrahamParangi 5y ago
People loving their children is a cultural universal. Human sacrifice is a relatively rare cause of death. The probabilities seem in favor of the ordinary explanation rather than the extraordinary.

SkittyDog 5y ago

"My guess is that..." Would you be able to provide some of the evidence that led you to this guess? Or maybe you could give us your credentials, whatever education and experience you have that qualifies you to make guesses in the field of pre-Columbian Neolithic archaeology? Let me make it simpler: How do YOU know that 2-year-old death was "common" among these people, at this time? What supporting sources to this putative fact? I can understand being skeptical of the article author's conclusion, if they did a poor job explaining themselves... But your counter-hypothesis is just creative writing, without something a little more solid to back it up.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
WalterBright 5y ago
It'd be surprising if a 2-year-old's death was not common. Before 1900 or so, children in every society died like flies before reaching adulthood. It's why societies are so protective of their children, and why people had large families.
- jeromegv 5y ago
  The issue isn’t so much about arguing about commonness of 2 years old. Of course it was common. The giant leap is to conclude that it was human sacrifice. You need some credentials or provide more information to arrive to this conclusion. That’s what the argument was about.
- SkittyDog 5y ago
  But most infant deaths before 1900 were from infectious diseases that didn't even exist in human populations until our ancestors lived in large enough groups to become disease reservoirs. But your response just proves the meta-point I made, in my earlier comment... If you don't have any qualifications in Neolithic anthropology, and you're not citing any evidence from people who DO have those qualifications, then your uninformed speculations are just fairy tales. In not against unqualified speculation... Just don't be surprised when people point out that you have no idea what you're talking about, and that you're probably wrong.

AlotOfReading 5y ago

The author took some poetic license with the narrative bits. The reality is that the anzick site was completely destroyed by amateur collectors. We don't actually know if the artifacts and the bones are associated, nor do we have enough to say much about the cause of death beyond ruling out some basic diseases. However, human sacrifice is incredibly rare historically while natural deaths aren't. The balance of probabilities suggests the latter.

Amezarak 5y ago
Human sacrifice was not incredibly rare, it was widely practiced all over the world going as far back into prehistory as we can see.
- AlotOfReading 5y ago
  It certainly was compared to natural causes and our evidence for particular sacrifice is even more scarce. I've surveyed and excavated many ancient graves, but very few (1, possibly 2) had anything to suggest human sacrifice, both of which were for ideological reasons that don't make sense for Anzick. Quoting Porter's "Mortal Mirrors" from the standard book on archaeology of sacrifice, Sacred Killing: But the evidence for human sacrifice is actually very rare in the period when cross-cultural comparisons suggest it is most likely to occur—the formative stages of complex society—and when it does occur, it is very individual in practice. Dr. Porter goes on to talk about how this is of course the result of our ability to detect and recognize sacrificial activity in the material record and so on. The book is worth perusing if this topic interests you. And of course, in context we should expect it to be essentially irrelevant on a population level because population growth for most of the Paleoindian period is close to flat. A significant difference in infant mortality rates from culturally-specific factors would probably lead to pretty quick population turnover during the millennia of competition with everyone else that has similar technology and resources. So while it did occur, there's little reason to think it occurred at rates anywhere near that of non-sacrificial mortalities.
- mushbino 5y ago

gumby 5y ago

Could just as likely have been a high status individual, say the child of some other high status people, or someone chosen to have been a religious figure (as happens with Lamas in Tibetan Buddhism), or someone who died in an unlucky way (so a special burial might have been to try to ward off bad luck) or perhaps they had some organic disability that doesn't show up in the bones (as some cultures consider epileptics to have been touched by a god). Impossible to tell today, though anthropologists likely have behavioral clues that makes their conjectures slightly more likely than the random ones I and you thought up.

PuppyTailWags 5y ago

AbrahamParangi 5y ago

People loving their children is a cultural universal. Human sacrifice is a relatively rare cause of death. The probabilities seem in favor of the ordinary explanation rather than the extraordinary.