The skull of a man, found lying prone in the lagoon’s sediments. The skull has multiple lesions consistent with wounds from a blunt implement, such as a club. (Credit: Marta Mirazón Lahr, enhanced by Fabio Lahr) Archaeologists have found the oldest evidence yet of organized conflict, which they say is a precursor to modern warfare. Historians don’t agree on when humans first started waging real, organized warfare against each other. One school of thought says that war is a product of agriculture, with its stored resources and new ideas about ownership, but others argue that the capacity for war is buried much deeper in our evolutionary history. Now, the 10,000-year-old victims of a prehistoric battle in Kenya may provide evidence that war is a much older human habit than previously thought. A team of archaeologists led by Marta Mirazón Lahr discovered the fossilized skeletons of at least 21 adults and 5 children lying partially exposed at a site called Nataruk, a few miles from the present-day shores of Lake Turkana, in Kenya. “None of the bodies at Nataruk had been buried, and the position of the skeletons strongly suggests that we found them where they had fallen, or from where they were too injured to move,” says Mirazón Lahr. At least ten of the skeletons show signs of serious injuries in their final moments: fractures and cuts that hadn’t yet begun to heal when they died.
Evidence of Trauma
The victims were hunter-gatherers who fished and foraged the area around Nataruk during the early Holocene period, about 10,000 years ago. The place where they died would have been a foraging camp, probably only occupied during certain parts of the year. Back then, Nataruk was along the shore of a lagoon, a marshy area surrounded by woodland, offering the perfect setting for hunting and fishing, as well as an abundance of clean drinking water. “The edge of the lake at that time must have been an amazing place to live – but also dangerous, as we have also found several fragments of human fossils at other sites with evidence of having been eaten by carnivores,” says Mirazón Lahr. Carnivores weren’t the only danger. The 27 people whose remains the team excavated at Nataruk died by human hands wielding clubs, knives, and projectiles. They published their findings Wednesday in the journal Nature.
