Dec 6, 2019, 8:53 AM
There is some debate over whether it happened at all. However, presuming that it did:
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Horses and Dogs were ‘valuable’ and the most common victims of sacrifice.
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defective peoples (dwarves etc) were often killed and buried but no evidence of sacrifice. Same for most burials, where the victims of war and murder were buried.)
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capital punishment was forbidden (restitution mandated)
except for cowardice and adultery. So, the way they got rid of criminals was to sacrifice them. This limits retaliation cycles among high trust peoples. The criminal gets a ‘good’ exit, and the criminal’s family has no reason for retaliation cycles.
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It’s hypothesized that because lindow man for example was sacrificed ritually, he wasn’t a criminal. We don’t know that. My read is that sacrifice of non-criminal ingroup didn’t exist. But I’ll wait for the archeological evidence.
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Stone circles begin in northwest France and spread to England. England had a copper industry second to none and it was a primary export. And England appears to have been more advanced than the rest of northern Europe for a very long time. And we get most of our information from that region.