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Archaeologists believe they have figured out how a decapitated skull ended up deep inside a remote cave in northern Italy. The remains, estimated to be about 5300 years old, were discovered

in the system of caves known as Marcel Loubens back in 2015, but scientists were perplexed as to how the skull wound up there. Considering no one from that time period would have been able

to access the location, archaeologists couldn't figure out why no other human remains were found in the immediate vicinity of the skull, or why there was no other evidence to suggest

what happened. The skull was first sighted near the top of a vertical shaft approximately 12 metres below a complex system of caves 26 metres underground. It was situated upturned, missing

the lower jaw, in a natural cavity in the shaft that could only be accessed with special climbing equipment. In 2017, archaeologists finally retrieved the skull and today released a paper in

PLOS One theorising how it ended up there. Lead archaeologist Maria Giovanna Belcastro of the University of Bologna in Italy suspects it was flushed into the cave by a flow of water and

mud, likely from the edges of a doline or sinkhole. "The accidental nature of the event is seemingly confirmed by some post-mortem lesions on the cranium," Professor Belcastro said

in the paper. "We focused on investigating the circumstances surrounding the death of this individual, since the cranium shows signs of some lesions that appear to be the results of a

perimortem manipulation probably carried out to remove soft tissues." She said the skull belonged to a young woman aged in her early 30s and the removal of the flesh on her skull, as

bizarre as it sounds, was likely done as part of a death ritual. De-fleshing of the dead was a relatively common prehistoric practice dating back to the Neanderthals. Professor Belcastro and

her colleagues used microscopes and a CT scanner to study the fossil and were able to create a 3D replica. First pharaoh's tomb found in Egypt since Tutankhamun's Their studies

suggest the woman wasn't particularly healthy, suffering from an iron or vitamin deficiency and may have had an endocrine disorder from analysis of her remaining teeth.