Short answers, pulled from the story.
Walter Burkert was a German scholar of Greek mythology and cult, born on the 2nd of February 1931 in Neuendettelsau and died on the 11th of March 2015 in Zurich. He was a professor of classical philology at the University of Zurich from 1969 to 1996 and is best known for combining archaeology, epigraphy, and behavioral biology to study ancient Greek sacrificial ritual.
Homo Necans is a 1972 book by Walter Burkert, translated into English in 1983, that argues solidarity among ancient Greeks was achieved through a sacred crime with due reparations, meaning communal animal sacrifice. It is considered an outstanding account of concepts in Greek religion and was notable in 1972 for its consistent application of the interrelationships between myth and ritual.
Walter Burkert received the Balzan Prize for the Study of the Ancient World in 1990. It was among numerous honorary awards he received during his career at the University of Zurich.
Burkert reconstructed the ritual in 1985 as a sequence beginning with the arrangement of a basket of utensils and a bowl of water around the altar. Participants sprinkled consecrated water, threw salted barley corns on the animal, cut and burned a lock of its hair, and poured a libation with prayer; then, after flute music began, the animal was slain, the blood caught in a vessel, and the meat roasted and shared while music and dance continued.
Burkert argued that Greek religion developed within a wider Aegean and Near Eastern context. His 1984 study on the orientalizing epoch in Greek religion and literature, and his 2004 book Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis, traced the reception of Near Eastern and Persian culture in the Hellenic world.
Burkert's three most important works, all considered foundational to the study of Hellenic religion, are Homo Necans (1972, English 1983), Greek Religion (1977, English 1985), and Ancient Mystery Cults (1987), which grew from his Jackson Lectures at Harvard in 1982. These three works were selected from a total output of seventeen books and two hundred essays.