Archaeology is literally digging up the past. Sometimes you find dinosaurs and sometimes you find humans and it is wondrous to know that just bones can tell so much about the past – of how hot the planet was, how green it was, what animals ate millions of years ago, how our ancestors lived. Archaeology is fascinating, and sometimes lucky scientists come across a dig that shocks even the most radical of them, with discoveries that bust myths and shine new light on something we didn’t even think of. The following are some of the spooky digs archaeologists dug up.

Pit full of nothing but severed hands

Egypt is full of sites where you can dig up mummified bodies. In one of such digs in a place called Avaris, the group of archaeologists found a site that looked like burial pits.

As an archaeologist, you expect to find a full pit of mummified pharaohs. But in this case, they found just hands.

That’s right, just hands that were cut off at their wrists. And the creepy part is that they were all right hands; no lefties. There are no other burial pits around them where the rest of the bodies were buried. They concluded that the pits were solely for hands that were cut off from sacrificial customs from 3600 years ago.

Child sacrifice where children went and slept to death on a mountain

Ancient Incan civilisation had some creepy traditions. One of them was child sacrifice. While child sacrifices are not unheard of, this one gets creepier in details. The children, in this case, were killed by freezing them to death. They were sent to frozen mountain tops so that they would literally freeze to death.

The children were quite possibly drugged and sent off in groups to the mountains where they seemingly froze to their deaths. As you can see, their bodies are almost perfectly preserved.