The grave goods included about 5,000 perforated ivory beads which had probably been sown into caps and clothing.
"Each ivory bead would have required the work of a specialist and would have taken more than a hour to make. This implies that the grave goods were ready when the two children died, raising the question of whether this ceremony was foreseen long in advance," Formicola said.
Another elaborately decorated, multiple burial was found at Dolni Vestonice in Moravia, Czech Republic. It contained the remains of three individuals, their age ranging from 16 to 25 years.
One was a teenager — thought to have been female — whose skeleton showed evidence of severe deformity, likely the result of a rare genetic disorder.
The teenager was lying between two adolescent males, with the hands of one male placed on her ochre-covered pelvic region.
The third burial, at Romito Cave in Calabria in southern Italy, featured the skeleton of an adolescent male dwarf, buried resting on the chest of an adult female. The bodies lay beneath a large stone with a beautiful engraving of a bull.
"These findings point to the possibility that human sacrifices were part of the ritual activity of these populations. Disabled may have been feared, hated or revered . . . we do not know whether this adolescent received special burial treatment in spite of being a dwarf or precisely because he was a dwarf," Formicola said.
Anthropologist David Frayer of the University of Kansas agrees that Upper Paleolithic multiple burials may point to ritual human sacrifices.
"There is no evidence – such as unhealed head wounds or flint projectiles — that any of the individuals in the Upper Paleolithic graves were sacrificed. However, it is also unlikely that multiple, simultaneous deaths were all accidental in the Upper Paleolithic," Frayer told Discovery News.
