CHAND: Scientists point to the two holes in this skull as evidence of the earliest known murder, 430,000 years ago
The first known murder was just as brutal as any other. The attacker smashed the victim twice in the head, leaving matching holes above the victim’s left eyebrow. The dead body was then dropped down a 43-foot shaft into a cave—where it lay for nearly half a million years.
Talk about your cold case.
Paleontologists pieced together the 430,000-year-old skull and reported their forensic analysis Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE. Injuries to the skull represent the oldest direct evidence of homicide, the scientists say.
As for whether this was the first murder ever to occur, “for sure that’s not the case,” says Nohemi Sala, lead author of the study. The scientists can describe this victim as a young adult, but the age and even gender are unknown.
“In the fossil record, there are many cases of traumatic injury, but not a lot of evidence of killing,” says Sala, a paleontologist at the Instituto de Salud Carlos III in Madrid.
That doesn’t mean killing was uncommon before modern times, of course, but fossilized remains of any kind are relatively rare so far back.
The last several tens of thousands of years, on the other hand, are littered with grisly scenes. Take the case of Shanidar-3, a Neanderthal who lived about than 50,000 years ago. A cut on one of his left ribs shows that Shanidar-3 was probably killed by a spear, making him perhaps the oldest known murder victim prior to the new find.
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