Subscribe now

Life

Shattered Stone-Age bones expose world's oldest mass torture

By Andy Coghlan

17 August 2015

New Scientist Default Image

A Stone-Age child’s skull, showing the death blow to the forehead region, possibly made using an adze (Image: Christian Meyer)

Whoever the assailants were, they probably arrived at dawn. Catching their victims unawares, they hacked the shinbones of as many villagers as possible to prevent them escaping, then bludgeoned them all to death with blows to the head before dumping them in a mass grave.

Though no one can be sure exactly what happened to the 26 people whose bodies were found in a Stone-Age mass grave, this is the most likely scenario, according to Christian Meyer of the University of Mainz in Germany. His team has analysed the bones, unearthed at Schöneck-Kilianstädten, near Frankfurt, in 2006.

He dates them to between 5207 and 4849 BC, the early Neolithic period by which time farmers had spread through most of mainland Europe from the south-east, forming a culture known as the Linearbandkeramik, or LBK.

The find is the third known massacre site from this period, and suggests that despite the popular image of peaceful harmony among Europe’s pastoral inhabitants, friction between communities was building up, perhaps because of crop failures, overcrowding or pressure for land.

Meyer says that evidence for individual cases of attacks and torture in ancient times have been found before. “But this is the first time we have almost a complete village put to death in a mass grave with this pattern of destroyed leg bones,” he says.

The shinbones all bear evidence that the bones were fresh when broken. “They have butterfly motifs, the hallmarks of freshly fractured bones,” Meyer says.

Half the victims were children and half adults, the two eldest – over 40 years old – being the only women. No teenagers were found, suggesting that they fled or were taken by the assailants.

This area was the site of what were at the time most advanced human settlements. Alongside the two earlier LBK massacres – one in Germany and the other in Austria – the find suggests that tensions were starting to spill over into violence.

Previously, Europe had been populated by hunter-gatherers who bore few possessions and could resolve disputes simply by moving away. “Hunter-gatherers were highly mobile, and so couldn’t amass much material, and had no permanent settlements,” says Meyer.

The farmers were the first to invest heavily in permanent sites – clearing forests and erecting buildings, for example. “For the first time, farmers wanted their descendants to inherit both the agricultural plots and the technology to manage them,” he says.

It also meant that unlike hunter-gatherers, they were seldom able or willing to avoid disputes by moving away.

“It was the first time in history our descendants were faced with this problem,” says Meyer. “It meant they were stuck to their settlements without being able to escape what fate threw at them, whether it was droughts, climate stress, or disputes with neighbours.”

The site of the massacre is on a “border” between two loose networks – based on differences in pottery and other artefacts found there – and so may have been targeted or raided by the rival “network”, Meyer suggests.

The most likely trigger, Meyer thinks, is that there was some kind of climate stress that made the crops fail, leaving people starving and desperate enough to steal food – even if it meant murder.

Alternatively, the victims may have been targeted because the rival group blamed them for the loss of food, maybe through witchcraft.

“It seems quite clear that these cases are showing farmer-on-farmer violence,” says Peter Bogucki of Princeton University.

In those times there were no leadership structures beyond the group – no central government – so conflicts were intensely personal and hard to defuse, he says. “There were probably codes of honour, respect and revenge that structured interactions, with the result being that things could get nasty quickly.”

“Finds like the one at Kilianstädten show us that early farmers had many things to worry about,” says Bogucki. “But even though things sometimes ended unpleasantly, they were not killing each other all the time.”

Other researchers say that the mass violence could have been a step towards formation of potentially successful in-group loyalties and cooperation.

“Inter-group warfare could have had very substantial effects on both cultural and biological evolution of social behaviours,” says Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. “Most prominent among these effects would be the diffusion of within-group cooperation through success in warfare.”

Meyer says that injuries to the victims’ skulls suggest they were killed by blows with an adze, a hammer-like tool used in agriculture but which could double up as a weapon. Not till the Bronze Age 2000 years later would humans begin designing artefacts explicitly for warfare, such as swords and shields.

“Then came proper warfare, with real weapons and real warriors,” he says. “But it’s disturbing and shocking that violence was also evident in Neolithic times.”

Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1504365112

Topics:

Sign up to our weekly newsletter

Receive a weekly dose of discovery in your inbox! We'll also keep you up to date with New Scientist events and special offers.

Sign up