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Science sleuths lift veil on prehistoric mass murder
By Mariëtte Le Roux 5 hours ago
Paris (AFP) - About 10,000 years ago, a small band of men, women and children were captured by a rival clan before being tied up, shot with arrows and bludgeoned to death.
Their shattered remains fell into a lagoon, and were preserved in sediment for millennia.
On Wednesday, scientists presented them as evidence of the oldest-known human massacre, a finding that adds to the debate about why humans make war.
The bloodshed occurred when our prehistoric ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers, on the cusp of the agricultural revolution that saw early humans settle down to till the land.
Unearthed at Nataruk, near Kenya's Lake Turkana, the battered bones provide "conclusive evidence of something that must have been an inter-group conflict," Cambridge University anthropologist Marta Mirazon Lahr explained.
"Evidence for that, before you have sedentary societies, before you have villages and cemeteries, that is very unique."
Lahr led a study published in the journal Nature.
There is other fossil evidence of violence against even older individual humans, but none of clashes between groups.
Lahr and her team dug up 12 skeletons, more or less intact, in what would have been fertile land on the edge of a lagoon 10,000 years ago, but is now barren semi-desert.
Ten bore the marks of a violent death -- embedded in some of the skeletons were arrow heads made from a black rock called obsidian.................
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http://news.yahoo.com/science-sleuths-lift-veil-prehistoric-mass-murder-192813455.html
