While digging at rock a shelter in Brazil, scientists have found human decapitation evidence that dates back to more than 9,000 years. This is the oldest proof of human decapitation ever seen in the New World.

The researchers detailed their findings in the journal PLOS ONE on Wednesday. They believed that rather than a gruesome murder, this belonged to mysterious burial practice of the hunter-gatherers that passed through a settlement called Lapa do Santo. Prior to this, the oldest case of decapitation took place around 4,000 years ago in South America.

Andre´ Strauss from Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, who led the international team that made the discovery and has been working on the site since 2004, said that the ritualized case of decapitation from Lapa do Santo is a proof of the early sophistication of mortuary rituals among hunter-gatherers in the America. It seems that in the absence of wealth goods or elaborate architecture, inhabitants used the human body to reify and express their cosmological principles.

While taking about the body, which was among the 37 skeletons found at the site, he said that the discovery from Lapa do Santo has doubled the chronological depth of the decapitation practice in South America. He added, "Geographically, it expands the known range of decapitation in more than 2,000 kilometers, showing that during the early Holocene this was not a phenomenon restricted to the western part of the continent as previously assumed".

An investigator from Max Planck, Domingo C. Salazar-Garci´a, who performed the isotopic analysis on the bones, said that the evidence has pointed towards a more complex explanation than the result of war.