Via a friend…  From the Daily Mail…this is just an amazing image:

Locked in an eternal embrace
Their loving embrace has lasted an eternity – well 5000 years to be precise

It is the city where the exiled Romeo dreamed he died and Juliet’s kisses breathed life back into his body…Yesterday at Mantua, in an amazing echo of that heartrending story, archaeologists revealed the discovery of a couple locked in a tender embrace, one that has endured for more than 5,000 years.

The find was unearthed by experts digging at a neolithic site at a less than romantic industrial estate

… 

"They are face to face and their arms and legs are entwined and they are really hugging."

Five thousand years ago the area around Mantua was marshland and criss-crossed by rivers and the environment has helped preserve the skeletons in their near perfect state.

The tribes of the area thrived through hunting and fishing and travelled along the waterways in boats but even then the simple hunter gatherer lifestyle was being replaced by livestock rearing, weaving and pottery.

There’s a bit more detail on the Daily Mail site, including a completely unnecessary linkage to the story of Romeo and Juliet.  We don’t know how these lovers died or why.  The archaeologist opines that the female was sacrificed after the man was killed, but they died of arrow wounds in random places and that suggests to me that it was some sudden violence that got them.  Perhaps tribal warfare or thieves.  But look at the position of the two bodies, and in particular their faces.  Those bodies were not posed for burial.  They died holding onto each other.  And thousands of years later, we understand perfectly what they meant to each other.  Even if we never know another thing about these two, we know that.  Love lives on.