2,500-year-old skeletons with legs chopped off may be elites who received 'cruel' punishment in ancient China

(Image credit: Qian Wang/Texas A&M University)The skeletons — along with objects such as copper belt hooks, stone tablets and pottery — were excavated from an ancient graveyard in Henan province.

The men's wounded tibias and fibulas had healed by fusing together and forming a bony bump, and lacked cut marks indicative of repeated blows from a clumsy job.

This meant that the two men were possibly low-ranking officers of the Zhou dynasty, according to the study, which was published March 16 in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.

(Image credit: Qian Wang/Texas A&M University)Based on the men's social status and the Zhou penal code, the researchers suggested that the most plausible explanation for the missing legs was the yue punishment method.

The Zhou penal code prescribed punitive amputations for myriad felonies, "including deceiving the monarch, fleeing from duties, stealing, and so on," Wang said.

"What's interesting is that there's clearly healing and recovery, and good archaeological context to suggest that they were not poor people," Kate Pechenkina, professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Queens College, City University of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.