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A discovery in eastern France shows the violence that took many lives around 6000 years ago.

Excavations of a 2-meter-deep circular pit in Bergheim revealed seven human skeletons plus a skull section from an infant strewn atop the remains of seven human arms, say anthropologist Fanny Chenal of Antea Archéologie in Habsheim, France, and her colleagues.

Two men, one woman and four children were killed, probably in a raid or other violent encounter, the researchers report in the December Antiquity. Their bodies were piled in a pit that contains chopped arms and legs. The pit also contains scattered hand bones.

It is unclear who owns the arms. All the Bergheim skeletons have both their arms except for a man with skull damage caused by violent blows. His skeleton lacks a left arm, the researchers say. They have been unable to determine whether that arm ended up in the pit.

The researchers don't know what happened to the chopped left arm. It could have been used as war trophies.

The bones were discovered to date 6000 years ago, during the Neolithic period which is the one of the many ways of disposing of the dead in farming communities throughout Central and Western Europe was in circular pits.

Unusual deposits in Neolithic circular pits, such as attack victims and severed limbs at Bergheim, "may have been more common than previously expected," says biological anthropologist Silvia Bello of the Natural History Museum in London, who did not participate in the new study. She suspects, for instance, that closer inspection of human bones previously found in circular pits elsewhere in Europe will reveal additional instances of violent deaths from a time when armed conflicts occurred between some communities.

Many researchers regard these pits as remnants of storage silos that were put to other uses, possibly as receptacles for the bodies of people deemed unworthy of formal burials.