A pregnant woman with her hands and feet bound. A man with an obsidian blade embedded in his skull. Men and women with arrow wounds to the head and neck.
That’s the grisly scene archaeologists describe at Nataruk, in modern-day Kenya, where they say they’ve uncovered unique evidence of violence in prehistoric, nomadic hunter-gatherer communities.
The massacre they’ve uncovered is striking, they say, because it pushes back against a theory that warfare didn’t become a feature of human culture until communities settled down.
Archaeologists from Cambridge University excavated the remains of 27 people, including at least eight women and six children, in a region that was once the edge of a lagoon, near modern-day Lake Turkana. The remains included 12 skeletons that were fairly complete, “preserved by the particular conditions of the lagoon,” the researchers write in Nature.
Source & further reading:http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/21/463835225/discovery-of-ancient-massacre-suggests-war-predated-settlements
Paper:http://www.nature.com/articles/nature16477.epdf
That’s the grisly scene archaeologists describe at Nataruk, in modern-day Kenya, where they say they’ve uncovered unique evidence of violence in prehistoric, nomadic hunter-gatherer communities.
The massacre they’ve uncovered is striking, they say, because it pushes back against a theory that warfare didn’t become a feature of human culture until communities settled down.
Archaeologists from Cambridge University excavated the remains of 27 people, including at least eight women and six children, in a region that was once the edge of a lagoon, near modern-day Lake Turkana. The remains included 12 skeletons that were fairly complete, “preserved by the particular conditions of the lagoon,” the researchers write in Nature.
Source & further reading:http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/21/463835225/discovery-of-ancient-massacre-suggests-war-predated-settlements
Paper:http://www.nature.com/articles/nature16477.epdf
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