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posted by chromas on Sunday October 14 2018, @07:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the 2spooky4me dept.

Fifth-Century Child's Skeleton Shows Evidence of "Vampire Burial" :

The "Vampire of Lugnano" had a rock in its mouth to keep it from rising from grave.

Archaeologists have discovered the skeleton of a 10-year-old child at an ancient Roman site in Italy with a rock carefully placed in its mouth. This suggests those who buried the child—who probably died of malaria during a deadly fifth century outbreak—feared it might rise from the dead and spread the disease to those who survived. Locals are calling it the "Vampire of Lugnano."

"This is a very unusual mortuary treatment that you see in various forms in different cultures, especially in the Roman world," says Jordan Wilson, a graduate student in bio-archaeology at the University of Arizona who studied the remains. He added that this could "indicate a fear that this person might come back from the dead and try to spread disease to the living."

Pretty much every culture on Earth has some version of a vampire (or proto-vampire) myth. Chinese folklore has the k'uei, which are reanimated corpses that rise from the grave to prey on the living; one type has sharp fangs, the better to bite into the neck of said prey. Russian, Albanian, Indian, and Greek folklore have similar undead monsters. Russian villagers in the Middle Ages often drove stakes into the bodies of suspected vampires upon burial to keep them from rising again.

The most-likely explanation is that the locals did this to ensure the dead child stayed that way. Prior excavations amidst the human remains in the Cemetery of the Babies unearthed various items commonly associated with magic at the time: raven talons, toad bones, and bronze cauldrons filled with ash. The oldest remains found previously were those of a three-year-old girl whose hands and feet were weighed down with stones.

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble...


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  • (Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday October 15 2018, @02:13PM (1 child)

    by Alfred (4006) on Monday October 15 2018, @02:13PM (#749036) Journal
    Move inland. You won't miss the coastal cities much once they are gone. That said there is only so much ice cap to melt and it ain't enough to get Colorado wet let alone submerged.
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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday October 15 2018, @02:27PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 15 2018, @02:27PM (#749046) Journal

    LOL, this is prehistoric. If all the ice in the world suddenly melted, and flowed into the sea, there isn't enough to make it go up all that very far. Most of the lowlands were flooded before our oldest cultures started keeping records. That would be China, India, Egypt. Sumeria, which apparently predated all of those, is long gone, and no one knows how to read what little history might remain.