It turns out we’ve been preparing to battle the walking dead for a long, long time.

For the longest time our species has held a fear of the dead rising and dragging us into their graves.

The idea that we could become the walking dead, shambling husks of meat reduced to only our basest instincts to consume and destroy, is one which seems to stick in our psyche.

It turns out that such an existential fear goes back even further, as an excavation of a burial site in Germany found that a dead fellow who was aged between 40 and 60 at the time of death had a stone placed over the legs.

Assuming the stone was placed over the dead body for a reason, it may have been to prevent the dead from rising again.

Cursed be he that moves this stone, because then the zombie will get out you pillock. (Facebook/Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte Halle)

This is how the cavemen avoided falling victim to a zombie apocalypse, the living dead can try as much as they like but they’re not going to be rising out of their graves if there’s a ruddy big stone in the way.

It’s a fascinating look into burial cultures from times long gone – with the common thread of making a ritual out of death.

Of course, we owe much to these prehistoric anti-zombie measures, otherwise our species would have turned into shambling corpses and devoured each other long, long ago.

The corpse was found lying on the left side and nothing else was found with the dead man, while the experts believe the body dates back to the end of the Neolithic period as a part of Bell Beaker culture.

According to Newsweek, prehistoric people were afraid of ‘revenants’, which were dead people coming back to life and wreaking havoc upon the living.

Not this time, zombies… (Getty Stock Photo)

Archaeologist Susanne Friederich said that people believed that the dead sometimes tried to free themselves from their graves, meaning they were either zombies or buried slightly too early.

Sticking a massive rock over the legs would have been one way to keep them in their graves, while she said that, in other cases, the dead were laid to rest on their front so they’d only dig themselves deeper should they reawaken.

This is just a fear and concern that humanity has had to tackle over the years, so it’s good to know that our ancestors knew how to keep the zombies away.

On the other hand, it really could just have been people pronounced dead much too early.

Even with our advancements in modern medicine, we’ve had people declared dead and sent to the morgue when they were actually alive.

Very occasionally a person is only mostly dead instead of completely dead, and they’ve woken up to find themselves in some very distressing situations.

Featured Image Credit: Getty stock / Facebook/Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte Halle