A team of archaeologists recently made an amazing find in Ukraine: a 6,000-year-old temple, first discovered in 2009, may have held sacrificial rituals involving killing animals. The researchers studying the temple found signs of altars with remains of charred animal bones, indicating that they were used for ritual sacrifices.

Nataliya Burdo and Mykhailo Videiko, two of the researchers involved with this project, recently presented these findings at a meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists in Turkey.

The temple was once part of a larger settlement of people, most likely pagans. The temple pre-dates written language, and is very large, clocking in at 197 by 66 feet. The temple was once two stories tall.

Researchers recently uncovered eight altars made of clay. Charred lamb bones were found on one of the altars, and there were more lamb bones strewn throughout the yard in front of the building.

The research team did a geophysical study to estimate the size of the settlement that once lived around the temple. The community surrounding the temple was once almost 588 acres large, according to research by the archaeologists studying the area. This massive settlement is larger than the National Mall in Washington, DC. There were approximately 1,200 buildings in the settlement and about 50 streets. The site is located near Nebelivka, a city in Ukraine.

This temple and the settlement around it were part of a culture dubbed "Trypillian." There are Trypillian sites throughout Eastern Europe. The name stems from the Ukrainian town Trypillia, where a site of this nature was first discovered. Researchers found signs that this temple and the settlement surrounding it were burnt. Other Trypillian sites in Eastern Europe showed signs of being burnt as well. The temple

A team of researchers is currently studying the Trypillian culture by looking into old sites. The team said that Trypillian culture is a rich source of future research, still mostly unexplored.

"Many of the individual features (pits, unburnt houses, house-pits, ditches) are ripe for future excavation, with the prospect of genuinely novel information," the team wrote in a research paper published in March of this year.