Cavemen were just as afraid of zombies as we are – and had a unique way of stopping them

Zombies are not just a horror film invention, they are something people have feared for thousands of years.

Archaeologists have found that people in the New Stone Age created ‘revenant’ graves to prevent individuals from coming back from the dead as a spirit or animated corpse. 

The ‘extremely interesting burial’ saw the body of a 40- to 60-year-old man pinned down by a stone that was one metre long, 50cm wide and 10cm thick. 

A recent Facebook post by Germany’s State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology of Saxony-Anhalt revealed a zombie grave was recently found in the village of Oppin.

The team wrote: ‘It must be assumed that the stone was placed there for a reason, possibly to keep the dead in the grave and prevent his resurrection.’

The man is thought to have been buried around 4,200 years ago. The State Office believes the man belonged to the Bell Beaker culture, a Bronze Age group that emerged around 2800 BCE and dispersed across Western Europe and parts of northwestern Africa.

He was uncovered laying crouched on his left side, with his body facing east and his head facing north. Nothing else was uncovered with the body. 

‘Based on the position of the person buried it can be assumed that the grave was built in the Bell Beaker culture at the end of the Neolithic,’ the team added. 

There is little recorded about the Bell Beaker culture, so this discovery could help provide a deeper insight into the superstitions of the people at that time. 

Susanne Friederich, an archaeologist with the state office and project manager for the excavations told Newsweek: ‘We know that already in the Stone Age people were afraid of revenants.

‘Back then, people believed that dead people sometimes tried to free themselves from their graves.

‘Sometimes, the dead were laid on their stomachs. If the dead lies on his stomach, he burrows deeper and deeper instead of reaching the surface.’

Revenant graves have been found throughout Europe, and date back thousands of years. They are identified by measures people took to stop any form of resurrection, such as piercing bodies to fix them to the ground. 

Most of these graves date back to the Middle Ages, but some have originated from prehistoric times.