Monday, Oct. 19, 1953

Lament for 40 Virgins

The familiar cave girl of the cartoons--dragged toward a cave by a club-lugging male--is usually smiling, as if well pleased with her prospects. This cheerful view of history got a setback last week from evidence unearthed in Germany.

Near Bamberg in Franconia is a smallish cave with a hollow in front of it. In that hollow, in ancient times, a wicked duke cornered three virgin princesses and, when they resisted him, cut off their heads. Every October since then, says Bamberger legend, the three determined virgins gallop out of the cave by the light of the harvest moon. Headless and dressed in transparent robes, they charge around the woods on three white horses.

Beckoning Mouse. The cave is accordingly called the Cave of the Virgins' Hollow. It has traditionally been shunned by most, but not by old Farmer Johannes Engert, who figured that the princesses may have stored treasure there. He defied their ghosts and dug in the cave. One night, while Engert was digging by candlelight, a red mouse came out of a hole, sat down on its haunches and beckoned to him. He told the neighbors about this unnerving event and thereafter they left him alone in his nocturnal diggings.

Farmer Engert found no treasure, but he did find fragments of pottery, stone implements and bone, which he showed to the schoolteacher in the village of Tiefenellern. The relics eventually got to Dr. Otto Kunkel, curator of the prehistoric department of the Bavarian National Museum. Dr. Kunkel suspected their importance and encouraged a thorough exploration of the cave where the red mouse beckoned.

Enthusiastic members of Bamberg's Prehistoric -Society, led by Dr. Bruno Miiller, did the actual digging. Six feet below the modern floor of the cave, they found a jumbled mass of human bones. Sorted-out and carefully studied, the bones proved to be the remains of not three but 40 young women, none of them more than 20 years old. They may or may not have been virgins, says Dr. Kunkel. but "the skulls and bones are of such fine structure and regular proportions that they must have belonged to girls who, even today, would be considered beautiful."

Worse than Death. It was not necessarily the girls' beauty that brought their bones to rest in the Cave of the Virgins' Hollow. Among their remains the diggers found fragments of many small pottery bowls. When they also found an enormous pottery cauldron three feet in diameter, they began to suspect that the 40 beauties had met a fate in the cave that was really worse than death. Further study of the skeletons confirmed the suspicion. Each shapely skull had a hole in it, and conical stone axheads found in the debris fitted the holes exactly. Most of the larger arm and leg bones had been broken to extract the marrow. That settled it. The 40 lovely girls, agreed learned Bambergers, had been eaten in the cave.

.Reconstructing the goings-on, in the cave, the diggers concluded that it was a kind of restaurant. The pottery proved that its patrons were "Danube Culture People," a crude neolithic type that flourished in Central Europe some 5,000 years ago. But the bones of the 40 young girls. were much finer and more delicate. Dr. Kunkel suspects that they belonged to a different race,whose settlements were raided periodically for edible young women.

The find in the Cave of the Virgins' Hollow, says Dr. Kunkel, is the first solid scientific proof that early Europeans were cannibals. The feasts may have had some religious significance, but Dr. Kunkel is not sure. "It could be," he admits, "that the men were just hungry."

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