Mass frog burial baffles experts at iron age site near Cambridge

I've buried a few frogs and it's actually rather addictive. The first time it feels like a silly chore, because your frog died, but then it stays with you and can't wait to bury the next one. Eventually if you're not careful you end up burying lots and lots of frogs and it is completely plausible to me that others have felt similarly and led to events like this.

And since that day, we have known that you can't grow frogs the same way you can grow potatoes.

As they touch upon, it’s more than likely they ended up there accidentally.

I recently dug a series of vertically walled pits in a forest, for a foundation.

It rained. I came back to find several of them absolutely heaving with toads and salamanders, who I of course rescued.

It’s easy to see how, in a past when wildlife was radically more abundant than it is now, a single step sided ditch could have ended up a mass amphibian grave.

Sometimes I wonder how many of our impressions of ancient civilizations were just some dude who got kicked in the head by a horse as a kid and spent his life being eccentric.

That might have been one of these fabled frogs raining down. It does happen occasionally, waterspout drags frogs off a lake somewhere and it later rains with frogs. Most likely explanation IMHO.

Perplexing for sure. I first read this in my fave newsletter Ancient Beat. James manages to break things down into easy-to-digest chunks that I so appreciate. Here's his summary, "Archaeologists have uncovered a huge number of frog and toad skeletons in a 14-meter ditch near an iron age roundhouse in the UK. According to Dr. Vicki Ewens, “To have over 8,000 bones coming from one ditch is extraordinary.” As to why they are there, no one knows. The bones have no cut or burn marks, so they probably weren’t eaten (though they could have been boiled). Many ancient civilizations saw the frog as a symbol for fertility, so it’s possible that it was ceremonial. Or the frogs could have simply been trapped by chance. It’s a mystery. Here's a link to James' substack for more of his curated archaeology news breakdowns https://ancientbeat.substack.com/p/-ancient-beat-16-mass-fro...

What if it was just a pit that a lot of frogs ended up in and couldn’t get out.

It was full of water, they went in and then as the water gradually dried up they realized they couldn’t get out anymore. So they concentrate themselves into the ever drying pool and end up buried together in a very small space.

This happens to fish all the time, with steep enough walls it would happen to frogs too.

The long ditch is argument against a food source as the supply (where the people dumped the bones, etc) - but it COULD be a water ditch or something and they'd throw the frogs in when "weeding" them out of something, but you'd expect the ditch to be deeper or the frogs to show evidence of being crushed or similar before being thrown in.

Athelstan's All You Can Eat Frog Paddy?

Could have been intentional. Some might say the highest honor in the frog kingdom was to be a sacrifice for the great amphibian god. There were only two ways for the kingdom to keep their bog moist - sky water from the great ambition god, or blood.

Maybe it rained frogs (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_of_animals) and people (being very superstitious back then) decided to bury them.

This is the kind of news that gets you jumpy

Might need to rename this event, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Frogs

TL;DR - the frogs may not have been intentionally buried by humans the way we bury dead humans.

Sounds a little bit like an opener to a Lovecraftian story, although the real explanation is in all likelihood way less exciting (but fascinating all the same).

What, you were expecting Stoke-On-Trent?

Frog prince

Maybe a KeK worship?

Or Kek Wars?