The first war: Stone-age massacre site offers earliest evidence of mass conflict

Some 10,000 years ago a woman in the last stages of pregnancy met a terrible death, trussed like a captive animal and dumped into shallow water at the edge of a Kenyan lagoon. She died with at least 27 members of her tribe, all equally brutally murdered.

Scientists say it is the earliest evidence of warfare between stone age hunter-gatherers.

The fossilised remains of the victims, still lying where they fell, preserved in the sediment of a marshy pool that dried up thousands of years ago, were found by a team of scientists from Cambridge University.

The evidence of their deaths was graphic and unmistakable: the remains, which include at least eight women and six children, show skulls smashed in, skeletons riddled with wounds from stone arrows and blades, and in four cases, hands almost certainly bound.

The discovery, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, was made in 2012 at Nataruk, a site 30km from Lake Turkana in northern Kenya’s Rift Valley, and is the earliest evidence of violent confrontation between nomadic hunter-gatherer groups.

“The deaths at Nataruk are testimony to the antiquity of inter-group violence and war,” said Marta Mirazón Lahr, from the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies at Cambridge, who led the study. “These human remains record the intentional killing of a small band of foragers with no deliberate burial, and provide unique evidence that warfare was part of the repertoire of inter-group relations among some prehistoric hunter-gatherers.”

The fragmentary remains of the children, all under six except for one teenager, were found with the women’s skeletons.