Federal government websites often end in. The site is secure. Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October Learn More or Try it out now. Paleogenomic and bioanthropological studies of ancient massacres have highlighted sites where the victims were male and plausibly died all in battle, or were executed members of the same family as might be expected from a killing intentionally directed at subsets of a community, or where the massacred individuals were plausibly members of a migrant community in conflict with previously established groups, or where there was evidence that the killing was part of a religious ritual.
We highlight three results: i the majority of individuals were unrelated and instead were a sample of what was clearly a large farming population, ii the ancestry of the individuals was homogenous which makes it unlikely that the massacre was linked to the arrival of new genetic ancestry, and iii there were approximately equal numbers of males and females. Combined with the bioanthropological evidence that the victims were of a wide range of ages, these results show that large-scale indiscriminate killing is a horror that is not just a feature of the modern and historic periods, but was also a significant process in pre-state societies.
Violence on a massive scale has been present in human societies for at least 13, years as evidenced by numerous skeletons of both sexes and all ages showing fatal violent injuries from the cemetery of Jebel Sahaba in Sudan [ 1 β 3 ] which is generally regarded as representing the earliest evidence of collective violence or warfare [ 4 ]. This hypothesis was additionally strengthened by the recent publication of the massacre of a group of prehistoric hunter-gatherers near Lake Turkana in Kenya [ 5 ], although some doubt the conclusion that this site represents early intragroup violence [ 6 ].
Paleogenomic and bioanthropological studies of ancient massacres have highlighted sites where the victims were male and plausibly died all in battle [ 14 ], or were executed members of the same family as might be expected from a killing intentionally directed at subsets of a community [ 13 ], or where the massacred individuals were plausibly members of a migrant community in conflict with previously established groups [ 9 ], or where there was evidence that the killing was part of a religious ritual [ 15 ].
The mass burial is represented by a small pit, approx. A The upper layers of the pit showing numerous commingled skeletons. B Schematics of the middle layer of the pit with different colors marking individual skeletons. The injuries caused by different weapons in combination with archaeological context and absolute dates point to a single episode of execution [ 22 , 23 ].
