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Around 1,000 years ago , infidel living near the Baltic Sea imported horses from their new Christian northern neighbors and then subjected the beast to gruesome public sacrifice , a new study finds .
Horseswere an important component of Balt culture between the first and 13th centuries , evidence shows ; numerous ancient equestrian artifacts have been recovered , and travelers have reported that elite Balts drank ferment maria ’s milk . Because the Balts were not literate prior to their conversion to Christianity , however , most information about their lives , include their pagan organized religion , comes from archaeological investigation .
An illustration of a ritual sacrifice of a horse at Paprotki Kolonia, in what is now modern Poland.
In a new subject print May 17 in the journalScience progress , researchers detail their biomolecular analytic thinking of 80 sacrifice sawhorse from nine archaeological sites in the eastern Baltic area — modernistic - daylight Poland , Lithuania and the Russian province of Kaliningrad sandwich between them — and square up that both manlike and female horse were chosen for forfeiture and that some horses were imported from quite a distance .
A previous assumption within Baltic archeology , according to the discipline , was that stallions were specifically pick out for public sacrifice and that this rite — which often regard beheading , flaying , quartering the horses or sink them active — was enacted at the funerals of elite male warriors in Balt culture . To test this , the team analyzed theDNAof the horses and find that roughly 66 % were stallions and 34 % were maria .
" Our results suggest that the Balts were not only selecting male buck for this ritual , as antecedently think , " lead authorKatherine French , a zooarchaeologist formerly at Cardiff University in the U.K. and now free-base at Washington State University , tell Live Science in an e-mail .
An illustration of a sacrificial horse burial at Paprotki Kolonia.
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Because horses were common in the Balts ' territory , research worker did not previously question whether the brute were sourced locally or from somewhere else . But the fresh field of study did a strontium isotope analysis of the horse ' tooth enamel to name the origin of the horses — and find that three were not born locally . The atomic number 38 present in tooth tip comes from the animals ' early diet ; by measuring the ratio of two variants of strontium in one tooth or between teeth that grew at different times , research worker can pair where the animal grew up or see where it impress when it was develop up .
" result sustain that there is no possibility that the horses grow in the territory of the Baltic tribes and that the region of the eminent likelihood for these horses is the Fennoscandian Peninsula , specifically east - key Sweden or southerly Finland , " the researchers wrote .
Katherine French examines a horse jaw to select a dental sample at the University of Białystok.
All three horses werecarbon - datedto about the eleventh to 13th centuries , a time when trade wind web across the Baltic Sea , particularly with Sweden , were well establish . It was also a period when there was still pagan resistance within the kingdom of Sweden , which officiallyconvertedto Christianity in 1164 .
The fact that one nonlocal buck in Kaliningrad was bury with a Scandinavian - work artifact — a weighting , possibly involved in trading — may advise that its Balt possessor was a pagan trader , the research worker wrote in the study . But it is also possible , they noted , that the imported horses come with their Scandinavian owners , who were forget in the Baltic style .
" In either case , " the researcher write , " our results prove that buck were crossing the Baltic Sea on ships , a horizontal surface of mobility not previously recognized archaeologically . "
Flint Dibble , a zooarchaeologist at Cardiff University in the U.K. who was not involve in the study , told Live Science in an e-mail that the new research is both innovative and impactful , and demonstrates how scientific method can be apply to study ancient beast populations .
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" The impressive sample size — 80 individual sawbuck — uncover the grandness of applying these method to a significant , localized dataset in order of magnitude to loosen out relevant archaeological patterns , " Dibble suppose , and " the long aloofness trade in horses in Northern Europe is now a theme that needs additional investigating . "
Gallic plans to direct this issue further with unexampled research . " I ’m presently working on a separate task looking at contemporary ship technology to determine how — and how many — horses could have been transported onViking Agecargo ships . "
