The first known murder in human history took place 430,000 years ago in Spain, suggests a new study that describes the mutilated remains of the victim.
While the study, published in the latest issue of the journal PLOS ONE, does not specify the species of human, the site and the time of the likely crime indicate that the first known murder victim was a proto-Neanderthal, meaning an early member of the Neanderthal lineage.
The victim’s skull appears to have been bashed twice, leading to his or her demise.
“The type of injuries, their location, the strong similarity of the fractures in shape and size, and the different orientations and implied trajectories of the two fractures suggest they were produced with the same object in face-to-face interpersonal conflict,” lead author Nohemi Sala and colleagues write.
“Given that either of the two traumatic events was likely lethal, the presence of multiple blows implies an intention to kill,” they added.
Sala, a researcher at Centro Mixto UCM-ISCIII de Evolución y Comportamiento Humanos in Madrid, and an international team came to this conclusion after studying the skull in detail. It was unearthed at a well-known Spanish site called Sima de los Huesos (SH) where at least 28 Neanderthals and proto-Neanderthals have been found.
During the time that bones began to accumulate at the site, the only possible access route to the place was “through a deep vertical chimney,” the authors said.
The origin of the accumulation has been hotly debated, with four different theories proposed: 1- non-human carnivores dragged their prey there, 2- geological activity somehow led to the accumulation, 3- accidental falls, and 4- intentional accumulation of bodies by early humans.
Could the victim described in the study have tripped and fallen down the shaft, hitting his or her head a couple of times on the way down?
The scientists reject that remote possibility.
They explained that “any scenario related to the free-fall would require the highly improbable occurrence of the same object striking the skull twice.”
The orientation of the hits, based on damage to the skull, further suggest that someone wielding an object bashed the head with near equal force, resulting in two fractures that would have penetrated the bone-brain barrier. Sala and colleagues therefore believe that the victim “did not survive these cranial traumatic events.”
Then there’s the question of how the murdered remains wound up going down the shaft. The researchers propose that the site was reserved for disposal of dead individuals.
“The only possible manner by which a deceased individual could have arrived at the SH site is if its cadaver were dropped down the shaft by other hominins (early humans),” they wrote.
“Thus, the interpretation of the SH site as a place where hominins deposited deceased members of their social groups seems to be the most likely scenario to explain the presence of human bodies at the site,” they continued.
This means, they conclude, that it may “represent the earliest funerary behavior in the human fossil record.”
For more, see Discovery News
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