By performing a CT (computed tomography) scan, they were able to determine that the skull had belonged to a young female, who was between the ages of 24 and 35 when she met with her demise. There was no way to tell exactly how her head had become disconnected from her body. But a set of lesions on the cranium revealed that the tissue on her face had been cut and scraped off sometime shortly after she had died.
These scrape marks, plus the separation of the head from the body, allowed the researchers to make a definitive conclusion about the cranium’s origin and the young woman’s fate. They knew that her head had been severed from her body, and the skin and underlying tissue removed from her face, in preparation for an elaborate Neolithic era funeral ritual . Her head would have been buried separately from the rest of her skeletal remains, which also may have been split up and buried in multiple locations.