The victim's skull was bashed in, evidence indicates

May 28, 2015 10:09 GMT  ·  By

A team of researchers are now hard at work investigating what might be the oldest murder case known to history. The victim is said to have died some 430,000 years ago, after somebody hit them over the head hard enough to fracture their skull. 

The blow was so forceful that the bone not only cracked but the skull was left with two sizeable holes in it. Judging by the shape of these holes, scientists suspect that the murder weapon was a spear or ax of sorts.

“Based on the similarities in shape and size of both the wounds, we believe they are the result of repeated blows with the same object and inflicted by another individual, perhaps in a face-to-face encounter,” said researcher Nohemi Sala.

In a report published in the science journal PLOS ONE earlier this week, specialist Nohemi Sala and colleagues explain that, having closely analyzed the wounds, they couldn't find any evidence of healing.

What this means is that there is no way the victim might have sustained these injuries at some point during their life, recovered from them and died from some other cause years later. It must have been murder. Horrific, cold-blooded murder.

As for the motive, the archaeologists haven't yet ruled out the possibility that the victim was killed to be cooked into a stew and eaten. Then again, the entire affair might have been just an argument gone wrong, Phys Org tells us.

The skull was in pieces when researchers found it

Writing in the journal PLOS ONE, scientist Nohemi Sala and fellow researchers explain that this skull that is proof of a murder that happened 430,000 years ago was found in an underground cave system in the Atapuerca Mountains in northern Spain.

The archaeologists further detail that, when discovered, the skull was in pieces. It took over 20 years of hard excavation work to recover just enough fragments to attempt a reconstruction.

When they finally glued back together all of the 52 skull fragments recovered from the underground cave system in Spain's Atapuerca Mountains, the team noticed the two penetrating lesions above the left eye and realized that they were looking at a murder victim.

The same archaeological site that produced this skull has so far yielded the skeletal remains of about 28 individuals that lived during the Middle Pleistocene, i.e. 781,000 to 126,000 years ago.

Since the bodies appear to have all been deposited there after death, archaeologists suspect that, in ancient times, this location was a cemetery of sorts and that hominins knowingly brought and abandoned their dead here.

A photo of the 430,000-year-old skull
A photo of the 430,000-year-old skull

Photo Gallery (2 Images)

Skull is proof of murder committed 430,000 years ago
A photo of the 430,000-year-old skull
Open gallery