Linear Pottery culture

And one of the most disturbing examples appears around 5000 BCE at Herxheim, in what is now southwestern Germany.

Herxheim belonged to the final phase of the Linear Pottery Culture, or LBK, one of the earliest major farming traditions of central Europe.

Archaeologists uncovered elongated pits forming an enclosure around the settlement, but those pits were filled with something far stranger than ordinary domestic refuse.

Enormous quantities of deliberately fragmented human bone alongside pottery, stone tools, and other objects.

This is one of my favorites.

It's called the Linear Pottery Culture, or Linear Bahn der Keramik, LBK in German.

And this is one of the first widespread farming societies in Europe, and it rips itself apart after this extraordinary period of growth where the people belonging to this culture can be found everywhere from Normandy, to the Black Sea coast of what's now Ukraine, you can find these people all over there.

And then within about a century, this entire society rips itself apart.