Prehistoric massacre in Kenya may be oldest evidence of warfare

Man's inhumanity to man, as18th century Scottish poet Robert Burns put it, is no recentdevelopment.

Scientists said on Wednesday they had found the oldestevidence of human warfare, fossils of a band of people massacredby a troop of attackers with weapons including arrows, clubs andstone blades on the shores of a lagoon in Kenya about 10,000years ago.

The remains of 27 people from a Stone Age hunter-gathererculture were unearthed at a site called Nataruk roughly 20 miles(30 km) west of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya.

One man's skeleton was found with a sharp blade made of avolcanic glass called obsidian still embedded in his skull.Another man had wounds from two blows to the head apparentlywith a club, crushing his skull. A woman in the last stages ofpregnancy appeared to have been bound by her hands and feet.

Victims also had projectile wounds to the neck and brokenskulls, hands, knees and ribs.

University of Cambridge paleoanthropologist Marta Mirazon Lahrsaid evidence indicates these people, who hunted animals,caught fish and gathered edible plants, were slain in apremeditated attack by raiders, perhaps from another region.

'Brutal, physical, lethal'

"It is a brutal, physical, lethal attack with the intentionto kill those individuals who could put up a defence or mount acounter-attack, or who perhaps were of no use to them, whetherit was a man or a very pregnant woman, too young or too old," saidMirazon Lahr.

Our species arose 200,000 years ago in Africa. Many scholarshad thought warfare first emerged long after the time of theNataruk people when humans formed settled communities instead ofa nomadic, hunter-gatherer existence.

The Nataruk fossils "raise the question of whether warfarehas been part of the human experience for much longer thanpreviously thought," Mirazon Lahradded.

A planned attack would suggest that resources the Natarukpeople possessed, perhaps water, dried meat or fish, nuts oreven women and children, were considered valuable, she said.

There were remains of 21 adults and six children, most underage 6. There were no older teenagers. "Whether they managed toescape, or were taken, we will never know," she said.

"At the end, all massacres are savage," Mirazon Lahrsaid.

"How many examples do we have from our very recent, and current,history? But finding the remains of a massacre among theskeletons of hunter-gatherers of this period was totallysurprising."

The research appeared in the journal Nature.

• Fossil skull may belong to world's earliest known murder victim