Stone Age farmers in Italy cut the flesh from the bones of their dead before burying them, a new study has found. Researchers at the University of Cambridge have discovered cut marks on 7,000 year old human remains buried in a cave in Puglia, south eastern Italy. These cuts and scrapes, made with stone tools, suggest the skeletons had their flesh carefully removed in rituals before being placed in the cave. Many bones, such as this fibula, found in the Scaloria Cave showed fine cut marks made with stone tools . Archaeologists leading the research believe cleaning of the dead was probably the culmination of a protracted multi-stage burial process. Dr John Robb, a reader in European prehistory at the University of Cambridge, and his team say it might have been a way of returning the bones to their stone like origins. In 3,800BC a young couple were buried together in a final embrace that was hoped to keep them together for all eternity. Now the remains of the man and woman - who are said to have died in their twenties - have been uncovered in the Diros Caves in the Peloponnese region of Greece. An archaeologist leading the excavation of the ‘underworld’ cavern described the find as ‘stunning’ and said it is possibly the oldest grave ever found in the country. The remains were initially unearthed in 2013 and have now been analysed using radiocarbon dating. The results of the analysis showed the bones belonged to a man and a woman, both aged between 20 and 25, dating back almost 5,800 years. The cavern is known as Alepotrypa - or 'foxhole' - and was found in the 1950s. Experts believe hundreds of people lived inside Alepotrypa before the entrance collapsed burying everyone alive. They say that many of the stalactites in the cave resemble bones themselves and the floor of the cave is littered with long, thin broken stalactites. Farmers from villages up to 12 miles away are thought to have brought their dead to the Scaloria Cave in the Tavoliere region of Italy. Writing in the journal Antiquity, Dr Robb and his colleagues said: 'Neolithic people at Scaloria Cave engaged in a varied range of funerary practices including primary burial, skull removal and redeposition, and defleshing and secondary deposition. 'If we suppose that stalactites were understood as equivalent to bones on a stone-like plane of existence, then cleaning bones and returning them to the stalactite-filled cave may have been understood as returning the bones to an eternal place where they came into being, the conclusion of a cycle of temporal incarnation. 'Conversely, the water that formed 'stone bones' in the cave (stalactites) and hence bones in the living may have been understood as spiritually powerful or nourishing.' Scaloria Cave stretches deep underground and is composed of at least two main chambers. It was completely sealed off until its discovery in 1931, when human remains, stone tools and broken pottery were discovered inside. The lowest section of the cave is only accessible though a narrow and steep passage that can only be crawled through. There Neolithic people placed pottery vessels where dripping water from the stalactites collected. Scaloria cave is a deep multi-caverned grotto in Tavoliere region of Puglie, in southeastern Italy, shown above . The delicate stalactites in the cave (left ) resemble bones as can be seen in the image on the right where a collection of bones recovered from the cave and stalactite fragments found among them on the cave floor . Archaeologists found more than 40 pots encrusted into the stalactites themselves. The upper chamber is more than 260 feet (80 metres) long and around 6 feet (2 metres) high. This area was occasionally inhabited and used to keep livestock but was also were farmers from the surrounding area placed their dead. In 1978 the fragmented remains of between 22 and 31 individuals were discovered in the chamber, around half of which were children. In one case one child aged between five and seven years old that dated to 5463-5221 BC had been buried complete but the skull had been later removed. An isolated adult skull was also found in a small stone niche in the cave. Dr Robb and his colleagues, which include Dr Ernestine Elster at University of California Los Angeles and researchers from the University of Rome and the Italian Institute of Experimental Archaeology, examined the bones, which have been lent to the University of Cambridge by the Archaeological National Museum in Manfredonia. The bones were found among pieces of broken pottery in the Scaloria cave during excavations in 1971 . They found no evidence of gnawing or damage caused by animals and few of the bones had been broken. However they did find that the bones were covered in small, barely visible cut marks made using flint or other stone tools. They found no heavy chop marks and instead it appears they had been cut using controlled, fine incisions. They said they found cut marks through out the skeletons they found, particularly around major joints or tendon attachments. Dr Robb and his colleagues conclude that the cutting technique was not aimed at removing major muscles in butchery. They wrote: 'Instead it seems to have been aimed at removing residual ... muscle tissue by working down the shaft and pulling or cleaning with the hands until some particularly tenacious bit required a few slices to free it. 'We have called this technique 'nick and strip'.' They added that the absence of violence and butchery suggests the flesh was not removed for cannibalism. Instead they believe the remains were brought from the farming settlements surrounding Scaloria where any remaining flesh was removed, the skeletons were dis-articulated and then strewn on the cave floor. They say some of the remains may have been previously buried before being brought to the cave. The ritual could have been similar to the Huron Feast of the Dead in North America, where the buried remains of dead relatives were dug up, cleaned and then reburied when the village moved location. Dr Robb and his colleagues said it appeared there may be a link between the pottery placed in the lower cave the ritual burials in the upper chamber. They said disposing of bones in this way may have marked an end to the mourning. Speaking to Mail Online, Dr Robb said: 'They had a remarkable variety of burial practices, which often created prolonged interactions with the dead. 'In this case, the paradoxical thing is that they seem to have cleaned the bones and then immediately disposed of them. 'It seems likely that producing clean bone was the end point of a longer ritual of mourning. 'Here at Scaloria people deposited both bones from elsewhere and whole bodies, and they seem to have cleaned the bones within less than a year after death, when some soft tissues were still on them. 'But it probably was an occasion for the community to come together and remember the dead.'
Bones of up to 31 Neolithic farmers found in Scaloria Cave, in Puglia Italy . Archaeologists found delicate cut marks from stone tools on the bones . They believe the bones had been stripped of flesh as part of a burial ritual . The bones may have been scattered in the cave to 'return them to stone'