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.

The latest skull comes from the Sima de los Huesos, or “Pit of Bones,” site in Spain, where paleontologists have found the remains of at least 28 individuals. Who were these people? Well, they weren’t modern humans, and they weren’t really Neanderthals either.

Exactly what to call the Sima de los Huesos people has been debated, but Sala and her colleagues identify them as members of the species Homo heidelbergensis, an early human ancestor that gave rise to the Neanderthals.

Cause of death

To figure out whether the skull fractures resulted from blows or from the fall down the cave shaft, the team compared the injuries to those from modern cases of violence and falls. A face-to-face attack with a blunt instrument best fits the pattern of injury, the scientists say. The bones showed no evidence of healing, so the victim probably died immediately or soon after the attack.

View Images The “Pit of Bones” cave in Spain. © Javier Trueba/Madrid Scientific Films, from Arsuaga et al/Science 2014 The remains of 28 individuals who lived over 400,000 years ago were found in this cave, the "Pit of Bones" in Spain.

What’s more, the two holes in the skull are the same shape and appear to have been made by the same weapon. It’s very unlikely that an accidental fall onto a rock would produce two nearly identical skull fractures, the team says.

The weapon

Sala says the weapon was probably “something very hard,” but we’ll never know if it was made of wood or rock, or something else.

The scientists scoured the site, she says, but didn’t turn up any potential murder weapons. There was only stone tool found at the site, and it wasn’t the right shape.

The motive

Another unsolved mystery: what drove an ancient person to kill. “Life was hard in the past,” Sala says, so there could have conflicts over resources or any number of reasons for a fight.

Even with difficult lives, though, Sala describes the Sima de los Huesos people as caring for one another. “There were 28 individuals at the site of different ages,” she says. “We know that some of these people had health problems. One person had very serious pathology in the lower back and probably had troule walking and moving.” Someone had to be caring for these people before their deaths, she says.

And while it might not sound like a lovely funeral today, the fact that people living at the site buried bodies by dropping them down the same shaft indicates some sense of ceremonial burial or ritual—the dead weren’t merely dragged away from the campsite to decay.

Overall, the site paints a picture of ancient people who lived, loved—and sometimes fought—together.