The bones were found in a 15-meter-deep well.

An analysis by researchers at Oxford University has revealed evidence of a bloody massacre linked to cannibalism in prehistoric times.

Archaeologists say a group of human bones discovered 50 years ago in a Somerset pit is evidence of the most violent massacre known in British prehistory and cannibalism in the Bronze Age.

According to the British newspaper, The Guardian, a number of people were killed sometime between 2200 BC and 2000 BC, and their bodies were thrown into a deep well at Charterhouse Warren, near Cheddar Gorge.

The first scientific study since the bones were discovered in the 1970s concluded that after their deaths, their flesh was eaten.

Evidence of violence:

The massacre is the most violent in Early Bronze Age Britain or at any other time in British prehistory, according to Rick Schulting, lead author and professor of scientific archaeology and prehistory at the University of Oxford.

“For the Early Bronze Age in Britain, we have very little evidence for violence. Our understanding of the period is mostly focused on trade and exchange: how people made pottery, how they farmed, how they buried their dead,” he said.

“There’s been no real discussion of warfare or large-scale violence in this period, just because of the lack of evidence.”

Unusual:

Schulting said cannibalism on this scale was also unusual.

“If it was in any way normal, you would expect to find some evidence of it at other sites,” he said. “We have hundreds of skeletons from this period, and you don’t see things like this.”

“When he and his colleagues at Oxford began to re-examine the bones, they quickly realised that this was a much larger assemblage than anyone had really expected,” Schulting said. “Nearly half of the bones were children, suggesting that an entire community had been wiped out in a particularly brutal event.” The Guardian stresses that the full circumstances of what happened will never be known, but Schulting and his colleagues speculate that this may have been an example of “performance violence”, where the perpetrators intended to terrorise and warn the wider community. The scalping, butchering and eating of victims had a similarly chilling effect.