Image courtesy of Laffranchi et al. (CC-BY 4.0)
Joel Kontinen
A 2200-year-old burial ground in northern Italy
includes people interred with dogs and horses, perhaps showing they had strong
bonds with their animals.
It seems that dogs and horses were common and used as pets
in the iron age.
“Archaeologists have often suspected that the ancient,
worldwide custom of including animals in human graves was associated with
higher socioeconomic status, beliefs about the afterlife or traditions in
certain families. But after
thorough investigation, researchers are now starting to wonder whether such
“co-burials” were simply an expression of love to a devoted non-human family
member, says Marco Milella at the University of Bern in Switzerland.”
Here is New Scientist
says:
“Milela and his
colleagues revisited the bones excavated from the 2200-year-old Seminario
Vescovile burial ground just east of Verona in Italy, where the Cenomani people
lived in metal-making communities before and during the Roman conquest.
Most of the 161 graves found at the site contained
just the remains of a person, but 16 also included animals, either whole or in
parts. Of those, 12 were
pork or beef products, apparently meant as food offerings to the deceased,
says Zita Laffranchi, also at the University of Bern.
The other four people, however, were buried with dogs
or horses or both of these animals, which weren’t used for food in that
population. They included a middle-aged man with a small dog, a young man with
parts of a horse, a 9-month-old baby girl side-by-side with a dog and – most
unexpectedly – a middle-aged woman with a pony laid on top of her and a dog’s
head above her own.”
Yes, it seems that
dogs and horses were common to these people who lived about 2 200years ago,
Source:
Christa
Lesté-Lasserre. 2024.
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