The Spine-chilling Tale of the Mid Winter Dog Sacrifice

A Bronze Age rites of passage in the Steppes involved a gruesome ritual

Hercules taming Cerberus, Peter Paul Rubens 1636. The legend is inspired by an old Indo-European tradition of mid-winter dog sacrifice. Image source: Wikimedia Commons.

In the early 1990s, archaeologists, Dr. David Anthony and his wife, Dr. Dorcas Brown, made a shocking discovery in Russia’s Volga region. They found the bones of seven wolves and 51 dogs. There was something strange about them.