(ORDO NEWS) — A Cro-Magnon man who tried to hide in a rock shelter was hit on the head with a stone ax – and thus opened the era of murders in Europe.
But, of course, this only applies to modern humans – other species of Homo have killed their own kind before.
Almost a century and a half ago, archaeologists discovered Cro-Magnon, the oldest rocky shelter of the Cro-Magnons.
This cave is located in the valley of the river Weser in southwestern France and is not the only home of the early people in the area.
For example, the Lascaux Cave, famous for rock carvings related to the Madeleine culture (10-18 thousand years ago), is located very close.
In Cro-Magnon, traces of an earlier – Gravettian – culture remained. The cave is dated between 31 and 33 thousand years ago.
Initially, scientists reported the discovery of the remains of two people, later excavations have increased their number.
Unfortunately, then, as a result of somewhat careless storage, the bones got mixed up.
Only recently they were dismantled and found out that in Cro-Magnon there were the remains of four adults (two men, one woman, the sex of another could not be established), three newborns and one older child.
Among the bones found in the cave is a skull with a suspicious-looking defect on the frontal bone.
Previous research has drawn conflicting conclusions about how the skull acquired this feature, with some scientists believing the damage was sustained before death, others interpreting it as post-mortem wear and tear.
French researchers who studied the skull using computed tomography, and then made a 3D reconstruction of the head of an ancient person.
Using similar technology in 2018, another group of scientists identified a benign tumor in another person from the same cave – and also on the frontal bone.
It would seem that an unexpected similarity (what kind of epidemic of forehead defects?) suggests that these are just traces of the disease.
However, the scientists compared the resulting 3D model of the Cro-Magnon head with examples of traumatic brain injuries of the era when antibiotics, although already known, were not widely used.
The researchers found that the porous fibrous growth on the bone strongly resembled the pattern seen in victims of head injuries during the American Civil War.
In such cases, the soldiers usually lived for a while, the wound healed, after which they fell ill with meningitis, “probably as a result of a post-traumatic bacterial infection,” and died.
“Death, preceded by delirium and coma, sometimes with convulsions, occurred a month or several weeks after the initial injury,” the study authors write.
The limited healing of the wound, they believe, indicates that the victim did not die immediately, but probably died within a month of the injury.
The authors of the study concluded that the wound was most likely caused by a violent assault rather than an accidental blow to the head: “The defect has the appearance of a penetrating injury with a blunt-edged object, rather than a sharp one, as with metal tools and weapons.
In other words, it looks more like a blow mark than a cut.” They suggest that the Cro-Magnon man was hit on the head with a stone axe.
If the scientists are right, this is the earliest evidence of violence in European Homo sapiens communities to date, but not the first among the genus Homo .
In 2015, a work was published , the authors of which examined one of the skulls from the Sima de los Huesos burial (Atapuerca archaeological site) in northern Spain.
They came to the conclusion that the ancient Homo , who lived in those places 430 thousand years ago, was pierced in the skull with a spear or a stone tool.
True, so far it has not been possible to establish to which human species the victim belonged.
The fact is that in this cave there are a lot of bones with very different dating. At first, scientists believed that Neanderthals lived in Atapuerca.
Then gradually more and more ancient bones were found (and new methods of their research and dating appeared).
We wrote about a find with an estimated age of 1.4 million years – of course, it could not be Neanderthals.
Now Homo antecessor, Heidelberg man, Homo erectus and even Denisovan are trying on the role of the ancient inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula .
But whatever species of Homo lived in Atapuerca, it was familiar with interpersonal violence. And the Cro-Magnons, who lived 400 thousand years later, did not lag behind their ancient relatives.
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