People in One of World's Oldest Cities Colored The Bones of Their Dead

The ruins of an ancient human settlement in what we now know as Turkey are very similar to the modern metropolis. Over the course of thousands of years, times have changed.

It was one of the largest Neolithic settlements in Anatolia and provided a home for up to 8,000 people at its peak.

The city of the past is similar to modern urban centers, but there are striking differences.

There is a hand print on a wall. The research project was done by the person named "jason Quinlan".

One of the most obvious is that there were no streets. The only way to get into buildings was to climb down from the rooftop of the dwellings.

Even if nobody was around, you were not alone. Beneath the floor, the people buried their dead.

A team of researchers, led by first author and archaeo-anthropologist Eline Schotsmans, found that adults were most often placed in a flexed position beneath the northern and eastern platforms of the central room.

Babies were buried in more variable locations within the house.

The skeletons of some people were painted before they were buried, but much is unknown about the specifics of the pigments used.

Schotsmans and other researchers examined the skeletons of over 800 people who have been excavated since the early 1990s.

A male has a cinnabar stripe on his head. The man is Marco Milella.

About 6 percent of the individuals studied here were directly treated with pigments, while 11 percent of grave items featured some kind of color.

Red is the color of the cranium and is the most common color for the bones. More males than females received direct treatment, and adults were more likely than children to be painted.

The social identity of the dead seems to have reflected the social identity of the males, with cinnabar (a red form of mercury sulfide) reserved largely for males, and either directly painted onto bone, or absorbed from red headbands the men wore while alive or buried after death.

The blue and green colors on burial items were limited to females and children.

The researchers note that the limited sample size of the colorants found so far limits their ability, although they say that the colors have been associated with concepts of growth, fertility, and ripeness.

There is a link between the number of burials within a dwelling and the layers of painting found on the walls above the grave.

"This means that when they bury someone, they also painted on the walls of the house," says Marco Milella, a senior researcher and anthropologist from the University of Bern in Switzerland.

There is a Geometric wall painting inside the building. The research project was done by the person named "jason Quinlan".

Not everyone in the area was buried in the same way. Some of the human remains found in the ancient city have been undisturbed since Neolithic times, while others have been interfered with by Neolithic activity.

The bones of dead people could be dug up in ancient times and used to serve as a symbolic role in the community before being buried again.

Other individuals, either as complete bodies or loose bones, remained in the community.

The creation of architectural paintings may have been linked to the deposition of these circulating skeletal elements in secondary or tertiary deposition contexts.

It is not clear what purpose this served, but the researchers say the continued use of excavated human remains within the community could have been a way of keeping the memory of those people alive.

According to socio-cultural anthropologists, collective memory is handed down from generation to generation through repetition of past actions and by direct object-to-memory association.

Intramural burials may have been a part of processes of memory retention with each interment contributing to communal memory by keeping the deceased close to the daily rhythm of household activities.

Scientific Reports contain the findings.