Life on the European Ice Age was extremely tough and hardness can trigger extreme behaviors in humans.

A new research investigated multiple Ice Age graves, discovering that those ancient European hunter-gatherers could have practiced ritual human sacrifice.

This practice was previously linked just to complex, stratified societies, and new emerging information from different paleonthological sites reveals that the social complexity reached by distant groups of hunter-gatherers was significantly higher than that encountered in many modern tribes of hunters-gatherers.

Tombs from the European Upper Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) (26,000-8,000 BC) come with a lot of data on ideological beliefs determining funerary behavior linked to their number, preservation state, richness, and abundance of grave goods.

The research made by Vincenzo Formicola (University of Pisa, Italy) points to a significant occurrence of multiple burials, commonly connected to simultaneous deaths caused by natural disasters or diseases.

But a detailed analysis showed that some of the multiple burials could have been selective. The skeletons in these graves present a sex and age correlation and in some of the most relevant sites skeletons belong to severely deformed individuals which apparently suffered from congenital malformations, like dwarfism or bone bowing.

Many of these multiple graves are also much adorned, like the remains of an adolescent dwarf in Romito Cave (Calabria, Italy) encountered next to a female skeleton under a complicated bull engraving.

The skeletons of a pre-teen boy and girl found in the Sunghir double burial (Russia) are wrapped by roughly 5,000 ivory beads, each of them requiring an hour to be made. "These findings point to the possibility that human sacrifices were part of the ritual activity of these populations and provide clues on the complexity and symbolism pervading Upper Paleolithic societies as well as on the perception of "diversity" and its links to magical-religious beliefs. These individuals may have been feared, hated, or revered . . . we do not know whether this adolescent received special burial treatment in spite of being a dwarf or precisely because he was a dwarf.", said Formicola.