A skull thousands upon thousands of years old recently unearthed in Brazil depicts the earliest known New World instance of decapitation.

According to Discovery News, the site where the skull was found was first excavated in 2007 and was determined to be a grave dating back to the early Holocene period. About 9,000 years old, the skull was apparently buried with severed hands covering different halves of the face: the right hand pointing toward the chin and the left facing the other way.

The researchers published a study on the skull in the journal PLOS One.

"Examining the skull, we saw fractures consistent with hyper extension of the head and rotation," Sue Black, a professor at Dundee University, told BBC News. "There would also have been cutting but the fracturing of the neck bones indicated a violence to the region."

Dubbed Burial 26, the skull was not a "trophy" from someone else's kill, as was fairly common in ancient South America. Such skulls typically have holes drilled into them and are not buried immediately after being removed. The skull apparently belonged to a member of the community and there was not a delay in its burial.

"Trophy-heads are usually curated for long periods after being obtained, while Burial 26 was interred not long after death," study co-author André Strauss, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, told Discovery News. "Moreover, strontium signature does not point to the individual being an outsider, thus representing an enemy.

"Geographically, it expands the known range of decapitation by more than 2,000 kilometers, showing that during the early Holocene this was not a phenomenon restricted to the western part of the continent as previously assumed."