– ‘She was pregnant’ –
Other skeletons also had blows to the head, four had injuries consistent with arrow wounds, and some had trauma to the knees, hands, or ribs.
One was a young woman found in a seated position.
“She had her hands crossed between the legs, lying on the feet that were also crossed. This may suggest that she was bound at the time of death,” said Lahr.
“And she was pregnant, so that was actually a moment that we all stopped to think.”
The remains of a six-to-nine-month-old foetus was found in the skeleton’s abdominal cavity.
The origins of war-making is a controversial topic, touching as it does on the very essence of human nature – are we born with a capacity for organised violence like our close cousins chimpanzees, or do circumstances make us so?
Some anthropologists have suggested war arose along with the concept of ownership that came with humans settling down to till the land.
But the new study contends that warfare was a feature of human already 10,000 years ago, when we were still mainly nomadic.
“My interpretation is that this was a small community, a foraging party, and that they were surprised by an attack,” said Lahr.
But the reason remains unclear, and the nature vs. nurture argument unresolved.
“The massacre at Nataruk could be seen as resulting from a raid for resources — territory, women, children, food stored in pots,” the study authors wrote.
But it could also indicate “a standard antagonistic response to an encounter between two social groups.”
Either way, the deaths “are testimony to the antiquity of inter-group violence and war,” concluded the study.
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