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Ancient space war5/4/2023 ![]() The position of the hands suggests her wrists may have been bound. This female skeleton was found reclining on her left elbow, with fractures on the knees and possibly the left foot. In the paper, the researchers describe “extreme blunt-force trauma to crania and cheekbones, broken hands, knees and ribs, arrow lesions to the neck, and stone projectile tips lodged in the skull and thorax of two men.” Four of them, including a late-term pregnant woman, appear to have had their hands bound. Twelve of the skeletons were in a relatively complete state, and ten of those showed very clear evidence that they had met a violent end. The site also contained the partial remains of six children. Of the 27 individuals found, eight were male and eight female, with five adults of unknown gender. It's not clear that anyone was spared at the Nataruk massacre. The fossilized bodies were dated by radiocarbon dating and other techniques, as well as from samples of the shells and sediment surrounding them, to approximately 9,500 to 10,500 years ago. Researchers discovered the bones in 2012, identifying at least 27 individuals on the edge of a depression. Instead their remains were preserved after being submerged in a now dried lagoon, near the lake shore where they lived their final, terrifying moments during the wetter period of the late Pleistocene to early Holocene. Nataruk's prehistoric killers did not bury their victims' bodies. Still, she notes, "what we see at the prehistoric site of Nataruk is no different from the fights, wars and conquests that shaped so much of our history, and indeed sadly continue to shape our lives.” ![]() "The injuries suffered by the people of Nataruk-men and women, pregnant or not, young and old-shock for their mercilessness," says Marta Mirazon Lahr of the University of Cambridge, who co-authored the study published today in the journal Nature. They also provide poignant clues that could help answer questions that have long plagued humanity: Why do we go to war, and where did our all too common practice of group violence originate? The battered skeletons at Nataruk, west of Kenya's Lake Turkana, serve as sobering evidence that such brutal behavior occurred among nomadic peoples, long before more settled human societies arose. They are the victims of the earliest scientifically dated evidence for human group conflict-a precursor to what we now know as war. ![]() But it instead describes the grizzly demise of a group of African hunter-gatherers some 10,000 years ago. This violent tableau resembles something from the darker side of modern warfare. Skulls smashed by blunt force, bodies pin-cushioned by projectile points and hapless victims-including a pregnant woman-abused with their hands bound before receiving the fatal coup de grâce.
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