The gruesome discovery was made by archaeologists in China

Jul 27, 2015 15:57 GMT  ·  By

Archaeologists are all too used to unearthing the occasional bones every once in a while. Digging up human and animal remains is, after all, part of the job. 

Even so, a team of researchers in China had the shock of a lifetime when, while excavating an ancient village in northeast China, they recovered a total of 97 skeletons, all human, from inside just one home.

“On the floor, numerous human skeletons are disorderly scattered,” the research team wrote in a report detailing their work, as cited by Live Science.

“The skeletons in the northwest are relatively complete, while those in the east often have only skulls, with limb bones scarcely remaining,” they went on to detail.

The remains belong to young individuals and to adults between the ages of 19 to 35. They were discovered stacked one on top of the other within the confinements of the house, which covers an area of merely 210 square feet (20 square meters).

It is believed that these people whose skeletons were unearthed by archaeologists stuffed together in just one home died when an epidemic hit this part of present-day China some 5,000 years back.

This epidemic must have been so grave that local communities could not keep up with the ever increasing death toll and, rather than bury their dead, simply piled them together and burned them.

A close-up of the skeletons
A close-up of the skeletons

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97 human skeletons found in just one home in China
A close-up of the skeletons
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