Artefacts hint at human sacrifice

Researchers in Mexico announced that they have found blood cells and fragments of muscle, tendon, skin and hair on 2,000-year-old stone knives, calling it the first conclusive evidence from a large number of stone implements pointing to their use in human sacrifice. Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History said the finding clearly corroborates accounts from later cultures about the use of sharp obsidian knives in sacrificing humans. Other physical evidence such as cut marks on the bones of ancient human skeletons had previously offered indirect proof of the practice. Researchers in Mexico had noticed what they believed were fossilised blood stains on stone knives as long as 20 years ago. But the institute said it took a methodical examination using a scanning electron microscope to positively identify the human tissues on 31 knives from the Cantona site in the central Mexico state of Puebla. The collection of stone knives is from the little-known Cantona culture, which flourished just after the mysterious city-state of Teotihuacan. Cantona preceded by more than 1,000 years the region's most famous human sacrifice practitioners, the Aztecs. The...