This is why the discovery of 27 foragers who were killed in a massacre some 10,000 years ago is as unique as it is important.
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One man’s skeleton was found with a sharp blade made of a volcanic glass called obsidian still embedded in his skull.
One of the research team, Australian Professor Rainer Grun from Griffith University, said the discovery broadened our knowledge of human behaviour.
Among the remains were 10 to 12 more-or-less-complete adult skeletons, which showed signs of having been wounded by arrows or clubbed to death. Partial remains of 15 other people belong to victims of the same attack. It consists of the fossilized remains of 27 individuals near Lake Turkana in Kenya. Another male took two skull-crushing blows, one above the right eye, the other at the left side of the skull. One of these victims was a female in the final months of pregnancy as evident by the fetal bones discovered within her abdominal cavity. Some experts see it as deeply rooted in evolution, pointing to violent confrontations among groups of chimpanzees as clues to an ancestral predilection.
The killing ground was once the shore of a lagoon in Kenya, off of Lake Turkana, at a place called Nataruk. There was also a small body of water in it. The skeletons were found in the sediment.
“This would extend the history of the same underlying socio-economic conditions that characterise other instances of early warfare: a more settled, materially richer way of life”. This has led to a dispute among anthropologists regarding the origins of human warfare. He said this find “shows warfare occurred before the invention of agriculture”. According to the researchers, the massacre is the earliest record of rivalry and violence between different groups of prehistoric hunter gatherers.
“The Nataruk massacre may have resulted from an attempt to seize resources – territory, women, children, food stored in pots – whose value was similar to those of later food-producing agricultural societies, among whom violent attacks on settlements became part of life”, said Cambridge’s Dr Marta Mirazon Lahr, who led the Nataruk study, published in the journal Nature. Researchers attribute the time of that “battle” to about 13,000 years ago, although this evidence is questionable. “Then I saw the back of a skull”, which turned out to have major injuries.
Researchers believe the position of the hands (above) suggests they were bound. The position of the bodies showed no effort at burial. The researchers believe her hands were bound when she died. “Whether [the teenagers] managed to escape, or were taken, we will never know”, Miraozn Lahr told Reuters. Since obsidian was hardly found in the region, it could be reasonably supposed that the murderous group was from outside the area.
The perpetrators are thought to have been a group of competing foragers. Or the attackers may have been after captives. It also may have been a raid for resources-be it for food, women or children-the latter suggested as the scene is lacking in the remains of older boys and girls, although there was evidence of children under the age of six, with only one possibly teenaged subject revealed.
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Naturuk therefore challenges our views about what the causes of conflict are.
