(Image: Danilo Bernardo)

Whoever the man was, he was probably important in some way to the people he lived with more than 9000 years ago in east-central Brazil.

The decapitated skull of a middle-aged man has been found with his two detached hands covering the face in a mysterious way, one pointing up and the other down.


“We’re convinced it’s a mark of respect, of reverence,” says André Strauss of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “This ritual involved veneration and respect, and was not murder or punishment.”

His team found the skull in 2007 in an ancient graveyard at Lapa do Santo, around 100 kilometres from the Atlantic Ocean. The site has previously yielded the oldest evidence of rock art on the continent – an engraving of what appeared to be a man with a large phallus, which the media dubbed “the little horny man”.

The oldest evidence before now of decapitation in South America is a skull around 3000 years old, found in Peru. The latest find is also a first for the eastern side of the continent: previous evidence of decapitation and human sacrifice came from the west and Central America, from places like Peru, Mexico and Bolivia, and were connected with well-known civilisations including the Nazca, the Chimus, the Inca and the Wari.

Such actions were often associated with establishing status and power – Incas would decapitate important enemies, for example, turning their heads into trophies and drinking vessels.

“This is a skull no one would have expected to find in Brazil,” says Strauss.

Cosmological view

Cut marks on the skull, hands and neck vertebrae suggest that the head was removed around the time of death. “It was while soft tissue was still present,” says Strauss. The care with which the skull and hands were positioned suggests respect rather than punishment. “We think he was already dead when decapitated, and that decapitation was not the cause of death.”

Isotopic analysis of other specimens from the site suggests the head’s owner was from a local group.

His peers would have had only simple tools such as stone flakes available, so would have found the job of beheading quite difficult. It’s likely therefore that the head was only removed after death. There were no signs of the holes that are bored into “trophy” skulls to allow the victor to suspend and display them, which is common in western areas.

Instead, Strauss and his colleagues think that the arrangement was an attempt by the people of the time to express a cosmological view of death, through symbolic display of body parts, and that the ritual itself might have helped with the social cohesion of their community. It also highlights the sophistication of their mortuary rituals and their ability to express themselves, they say.

“The arrangement of bones may be following very specific rules,” says Strauss. The reverse direction of the hands might reflect some philosophical aspect involving dualism, or opposites, he speculates, but adds that it is impossible to be sure since there are no known comparators.

Specific message

“The head has often been of special significance in very diverse human cultures, and we have ample evidence for decapitations from prehistoric to modern times, carried out for a variety of reasons,” says Christian Meyer of the University of Mainz in Germany. “The placement of the hands adds a further dimension this time, and although the exact interpretation remains elusive, we can safely assume that someone created this arrangement with a specific message in mind.”

“The finer details of the message are certainly lost now, several millennia after the events, but we can easily recognise the deposit as charged with symbolic meaning,” adds Meyer, who earlier this year reported evidence for the oldest known case of mass torture.

Journal reference: PLoS ONE, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0137456