Stone-age massacre offers earliest evidence of human warfare
Researchers say remains of 27 murdered tribespeople in Kenya prove attacks were normal part of hunter-gatherer relations
by Maev Kennedy
Part of a man’s skeleton found lying in the lagoon. The skull has multiple lesions on the front and left side consistent with wounds from a blunt implement. Photograph: Marta Mirazón Lahr
Some 10,000 years ago a woman in the last stages of pregnancy met a terrible death, trussed like a captive animal and dumped into shallow water at the edge of a Kenyan lagoon. She died with at least 27 members of her tribe, all equally brutally murdered, in the earliest evidence of warfare between stone age hunter-gatherers.
The fossilised remains of the victims, still lying where they fell, preserved in the sediment of a marshy pool that dried up thousands of years ago, were found by a team of scientists from Cambridge University.
The evidence of their deaths was graphic and unmistakable: the remains, which include at least eight women and six children, show skulls smashed in, skeletons shot through or stabbed with stone arrows and blades, and in four cases, hands almost certainly bound.