Reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd/Nature/José María Gómez et al./Nature19758/13 October 2016 Humans, indicated by the red triangle within Hominoidea, evolved in one of the more murderous bunches. The darker the line, the more violent the species. In 2016, researchers modeled intraspecies violence as an evolutionary trait among different mammal lineages. That’s not at all surprising, says Christian Meyer, an osteoarchaeologist and lead author of a 2015 study of the find: Young women were commonly taken captive. Archaeologists found no remains of women between the ages of 25 and 40 at the site. Thirteen adults and 13 children were tortured, killed and dumped into the settlement’s refuse pit, with arrowheads found among the bones. Discovered during construction of a road in 2006, the roughly 7,000-year-old site documents the annihilation of an entire community. The mass grave at Schöneck-Kilianstädten, on the outskirts of Frankfurt, Germany, may mark the aftermath of one such guerrilla raid. But alpha males of both species can be tempted, as Wrangham puts it, “with dreams of cheap victory.” If they perceive an advantage, such as having greater numbers than another group, they will typically launch a surprise attack. After all, open conflict is risky: It’s safer to stay in your own backyard and mind your own business. When territories are large and numbers few, Wrangham says, both humans and chimps - the living species nearest our own - generally practice avoidance. Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard University who has studied the evolution of human warfare, says the find at Nataruk shows that violent conflict is ancient and primal, a vestige of our pre-Homo ancestry rather than a recent adaptation to life in settled societies. Marta Mirazon Lahr, enhanced by Fabio Lahr Obsidian, a volcanic glass that is relatively rare around Lake Turkana, suggests that the marauders may have come from a different region.Īt Kenya’s Nataruk site, a fractured skull is a clue to even earlier violent human conflict. A few of the victims were bound before death, and some have arrowheads of stone and obsidian embedded in their bones. The captors used blunt force trauma to the head to kill, but other fractures - at the neck, ribs, knees, legs and hands - speak to the brutality of the event. The most complete remains are 12 skeletons found facedown in what was the lagoon. In this Eden-like landscape, aggressors captured and massacred at least 27 people: men, women - one of them pregnant - and children. Although the terrain is arid and desolate now, around 10,000 years ago this was a lagoon near Lake Turkana, surrounded by lush vegetation. The shattered cranium is one of several from a site in Kenya known as Nataruk, where, long ago, a band of hunter-gatherers met its end.ĭescribed in Nature in 2016, the remains are believed to be among the earliest evidence of human warfare. Unmistakable, too, are the signs of a violent death: massive fractures from the blunt force of a weapon wielded by another human.
The skull, though weathered from millennia of brutal heat and scouring sands, is unmistakably human.
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