Attack 10,000 years ago is earliest known act of warfare
Hunter-gatherers’ skeletons show signs of being shot by arrows, clubbed and maybe even bound
By Bruce Bower
Along the edge of a dried-out lagoon in East Africa, researchers have discovered skeletal relics of the oldest known instance of small-scale warfare.
In a planned assault, attackers killed 12 hunter-gatherers between around 9,500 and 10,500 years ago, say biological anthropologist Marta Mirazón Lahr of the University of Cambridge and her colleagues. The skeletons unearthed at Nataruk, a site located near Kenya’s Lake Turkana, show that ancient hunter-gatherers were capable of deadly group raids, a precursor of the more complex forms of war launched by societies and nations, the scientists report online January 20 in Nature.