The discovery was made by archaeologists and students from the Kemerovo State University. The head of the archaeology department at the university, Vladimir Bobrov, told Interfax that common opinion in archaeological circles is that these kinds of burial mound, called kurgans and associated mostly with the Scythians, appeared in the Bronze Age, “after the discovery of the alloy.” The mound in Vengerovsky region, however, has been dated to between the sixth or fifth millennium BCE, in the Neolithic. Earlier finds have suggested that Neolithic people buried their dead in individual graves or at most buried two people in the same grave, which was no more than a hole in the ground, Bobrov explained.
This mound, however, was completely different. For one thing, it resembles a house rather than a grave. For another, it contains the remains of no less than nine people: men, women, and children, plus a stone axe and a horn-tipped arrow. To make things even more fascinating, the researchers working at the site found that the people had not all been buried in the kurgan simultaneously. Some of the occupants were laid to rest there originally, but others were initially buried elsewhere and only later moved to the mound.