Neolithic Skeletons In Croatia Suggest Mass Killing, Not Warfare

Live Science

A mass grave in Croatia holds dozens of skeletons, and genetic information reveals new clues about how they died.

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00:00About 6,000 years ago during the Stone Age in what is now Croatia,

00:04dozens of people were murdered and buried together in a mass grave.

00:08And archaeologists have new clues about what may have happened.

00:16The pit was discovered in 2007 when a man in a small village was building a new garage.

00:24And there'd been a lot of rain that summer.

00:26The rain exposed a pit with about 41 skeletons.

00:32And luckily there were archaeologists from the University of Zagreb in Croatia working on a survey nearby.

00:38So they were able to get to the pit and inspect it almost immediately.

00:42Just from their initial analysis, they were able to tell that this was not a contemporary massacre.

00:49This wasn't something that had happened in modern times because first they looked for objects in the pit.

00:54If it were a contemporary massacre, they would probably have found something like bullets or modern clothing.

01:00And they didn't find any of that.

01:02Then they also checked the skulls for dental fillings.

01:07Didn't find any of those either.

01:09And then they found some pieces of what looked like prehistoric pottery.

01:12And so they already suspected that this massacre was quite old.

01:18And then when they radiocarbon dated the skeletons and soil from the pit and the fragments of pottery,

01:24they found that indeed this was something that had happened around 4200 BCE.

01:30Recently, researchers conducted further analysis of the skeletons as well as genetic analysis

01:37to try and figure out more about who these people may have been and what might have happened to them.

01:42And to find out what they learned, I talked to the lead author of a new study, Mario Novak,

01:47the head of the Laboratory for Evolutionary Anthropology and Bioarchaeology

01:51at the Institute for Anthropological Research in Zagreb, Croatia.

01:55We took them to the bioecological laboratory and gave them like a preliminary analysis.

02:01First, we saw a couple of injuries that resembled typical gunshots to the back of the head, typical executions.

02:07So we thought this is something, let's call it forensic.

02:10We took samples of human bones for direct radiocarbon dating.

02:14The samples from the top of the pit, in the middle point of the pit,

02:18and from the bottom of the pit to get different, basically, layers.

02:23All three samples basically gave the same result.

02:26They all overlapped, dated to 4200 BCE.

02:31So basically, that confirmed its archaeological context, not forensic.

02:35And that couple of pottery fragments that I mentioned, basically, they can be dated to the same time,

02:41to the so-called Lassinia, copyrighted Lassinia culture.

02:45We thought this is either a result of some kind of a massacre,

02:49or it could be maybe some kind of, these people died of some kind of infectious disease.

02:55We all know about the Black Death Plague in the 14th century medieval Europe,

02:59where people were dying like flies and they were just, you know, the victims were just thrown into mass burials.

03:04So, these were two main scenarios.

03:07But after the analysis, when we saw a lot of these injuries, most of the back of the head,

03:13the injuries that were the direct cause of death, the only plausible scenario was a massacre.

03:21And afterwards, when we looked at the sex of the deceased and their age of death,

03:26we noticed that both sex, males and females, were involved.

03:31The youngest individual was about three years old.

03:34The youngest victim, basically, was about three years old.

03:37And the oldest one was around 50 years of age.

03:40So we have all age groups, both sexes.

03:44We didn't see any facial injuries, no defensive injuries whatsoever.

03:48And in these face-to-face combats, most of the victims are adult males,

03:54males between 20 and 40 years of age.

03:56And in this case, we didn't have any defensive wounds, no facial injuries,

04:00only the injuries on the back of the head.

04:02So how do you make the jump from figuring out that aspect of what you're looking at

04:08to what might have led to that kind of indiscriminate killing in that kind of ancient society?

04:14Since this is an ancient massacre, it happened over 6,000 years ago,

04:19obviously, we don't have any written records about this time.

04:23We don't have, obviously, any witnesses.

04:26So we only have what we call circumstantial, basically, evidence.

04:31And the problem is we only have, the archaeological context is very, very scarce.

04:36We only have the skeletons of the victims.

04:39We don't have anything, anything on, nor any objects that might belong to the attackers.

04:47So this is a very hard thing to hypothesize what might be the cause.

04:55Once researchers had ruled out all these other possibilities, what was left?

04:59Well, they think that the likeliest explanation is probably one that has been applied

05:03to similar mass graves dating to about 5,000 years ago in Germany and Austria,

05:09which is that climate change, or perhaps a sudden population boom, was responsible.

05:17So in a large, stable, generally homogenous population,

05:22a drought or flooding or something that upset the balance of what resources were available to them

05:30may have led to internal squabbling over precious resources that they needed to survive.

05:35And that could have led to a deadly encounter and even a slaughter,

05:40such as the one that happened in Croatia 6,000 years ago.

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