On Sunday I posted about a report that had come out about skeletal remains found in the altar of Zeus on Mt. Lykaion. With the workweek done, various people and news outlets have gotten their shot at giving their opinion on the subject matter and I'd like to go through a few with you today.

Let's kick off with Livescience.com, who wrote:

"Since 2007, these researchers have been excavating a massive "ash altar" containing the remains of drinking cups, animal and human figurines, vases, coins, and a vast quantity of burnt animal offerings, most of which come from sheep and goats. Mount Lykaion in Greece is known to be the site of a sanctuary dedicated to Zeus, Greek god of the sky and thunder.

"Several ancient literary sources mention rumors that human sacrifice took place at the altar, but up until a few weeks ago, there has been no trace whatsoever of human bones discovered at the site," excavation leader David Gilman Romano, a professor of Greek archaeology at the University of Arizona, told the Associated Press.

The ancient writer Pausanias (A.D. 110-180) told of a legend he heard of a king named Lycaon who was turned into a wolf while sacrificing a child. "Lycaon brought a human baby to the altar of (Zeus) and sacrificed it, pouring out its blood upon the altar, and according to the legend, immediately after the sacrifice, he was changed from a man to a wolf," Pausanias wrote in a book on the geography of Greece (translation from a "Description of Greece with an English Translation" by W.H.S. Jones, Litt.D., and H.A. Ormerod, Harvard University Press, 1918).

Archaeologists told the Associated Press that they don't know whether the teenager they found was sacrificed and that much of the altar has yet to be excavated. "Whether it's a sacrifice or not, this is a sacrificial altar ... so it's not a place where you would bury an individual. It's not a cemetery," Romano told the news agency, adding that the upper part of the teenager's skull is missing."

The Christian Science Monitor weighed in on the issue as well (with the lovely headline 'Did ancient Greeks practice ritual murder?'):

"Though the excavators have said it’s too early to speculate how the adolescent boy died, the discovery casts doubt on the belief human sacrifice was only legend in ancient Greece, the cradle of civilization and the birthplace of democracy.

Until now, most studies of human sacrifice in ancient Greece concluded it was probably fiction, Jan Bremmer, a professor emeritus of religious studies at the University of Groningen, Netherlands, and an editor of "The Strange World of Human Sacrifice," told The Guardian. He said that while the ancient Israelites, Romans, and Egyptians performed human sacrifice for religious purposes, modern-day archaeologists have long held that the Greeks did not.

"It nearly seems to good to be true," Dr. Bremmer said, although he questioned if the location of the findings could affect interpretations. Excavator David Gilman Romano, a professor of Greek archaeology at the University of Arizona, noted that up until a few weeks ago, there was no evidence of human sacrifice at the site besides several ancient literary sources mentioning rumors of it. "There been no trace whatsoever of human bones discovered at the site," Dr. Romano said."

Because many of the reports state the same as these three, I'll only add a part of one more, by Yahoo:

"Excavators say it's too early to speculate on the nature of the teenager's death but the discovery is remarkable because the remote Mount Lykaion was for centuries associated with the most nefarious of Greek cults: Ancient writers - including Plato - linked it with human sacrifice to Zeus, a practice which has very rarely been confirmed by archaeologists anywhere in the Greek world and never on mainland Greece.

According to legend, a boy was sacrificed with the animals and all the meat was cooked and eaten together. Whoever ate the human part would become a wolf for nine years.

"Several ancient literary sources mention rumors that human sacrifice took place at the altar, but up until a few weeks ago there has been no trace whatsoever of human bones discovered at the site," said excavator David Gilman Romano, professor of Greek archaeology at the University of Arizona. A very unusual detail, he said, was that the upper part of the skull was missing, while the body was laid among two lines of stones on an east-west axis, with stone slabs covering the pelvis.

The mountaintop in the Peloponnese region is the earliest known site where Zeus was worshipped, and even without the possible human sacrifice element it was a place of massive slaughter. From at least the 16th century B.C. until just after the time of Alexander the Great, tens of thousands of animals were killed there in the god's honor.

Human presence at the site goes back more than 5,000 years. There's no sign yet that the cult is as old as that, but it's unclear why people should otherwise choose to settle on the barren, exposed summit. Zeus was a sky and weather god who later became the leader of the classical Greek pantheon. Pottery found with the human remains dates them to the 11th century B.C., right at the end of the Mycenaean era, whose heroes were immortalized in Greek myth and Homer's epics, and several of whose palaces have been excavated. So far, only about 7 percent of the altar has been excavated, between 2007-2010 and again this year. "We have a number of years of future excavation to go," Romano said. "We don't know if we are going to find more human burials or not.""