7,000-year-old massacre shows signs of torture, mutilation

Traci Watson, Special for USA TODAY | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Archaeologists Identify 7,000-Year old human bones Bloomberg's Vonnie Quinn highlights the discovery of a jumble of 7,000-year-old human bones found in a German ditch. They help confirm that Europe's first farmers resorted to mysterious and savage killings, a new report shows.

Archaeologists Identify 7,000-Year old human bones Bloomberg's Vonnie Quinn highlights photos illustrating worldwide headlines on "Bloomberg Surveillance."

A jumble of 7,000-year-old human bones found in a German ditch helps confirm that Europe's first farmers resorted to savagery and bloodshed, a new report shows.

At least 26 people — including several babies — died in the massacre, researchers report in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Many victims were either mutilated after death or tortured while still alive by killers who probably lived a short walk down the road.

"I have been at the site when the skeletons were still in the ground, and the sight was horrifying, even after 7,000 years," says study co-author Detlef Gronenborn of the Romano-Germanic Central Museum in Germany. "This must have been an outbreak of extreme cruelty and aggression."

Uncovered almost a decade ago during road construction, the bones at what is known as the Kilianstädten site suggest that many of the victims' legs were broken just before or after death. Only torture or mutilation can explain such fractures, the researchers say. Dents on the bones show the killers used an ax-like implement to bash in their victims' skulls. One arm bone reveals an attempted amputation.

The remains include those of a dozen children aged 9 or younger, including three children who were either infants or toddlers. Noticeably absent, however, were younger women, who may have been carried off as booty rather than killed.

The dead may well have known the people who slaughtered them. Travel was slow and the countryside thickly populated, says study co-author Christian Meyer, a bioarchaeologist who performed the research while at Germany's University of Mainz. It's unlikely a mob would march for days, bypassing many other settlements, to wipe out a distant village, Meyer explains.

The victims and their assassins were members of a pioneering people known as the Linear Pottery culture, named for their patterned bowls and dishes. From roughly 5600 B.C., they spread westward into Europe, bringing with them revolutionary skills such as growing wheat and raising cattle.

But the good life in Europe seems to have turned sour for these early farmers, and some went to extreme measures. At the archaeological site of Talheim in Germany, researchers unearthed a mass grave of some three-dozen Linear Pottery people. At the Asparn-Schletz site in Austria, a pit contained the bones of nearly 70 villagers — many struck from behind as they fled.

Those mass graves were discovered in the 1980s. "It's been 30 years since the last site was discovered, so possibly those were isolated cases," Meyer says. "So finding another site is very important. … There is a pattern emerging now."

The events at Kilianstädten were "very clearly a massacre that wiped out a large group of people," agrees archaeologist Mark Golitko of The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. The findings should help establish the rate of violent outbursts, he says.

The "most surprising" aspect of the site is the evidence of mutilation and torture, archaeologist Penny Bickle of Britain's University of York says. That "goes beyond what we would expect if the individuals had simply been killed in the course of a raiding party." Perhaps climate change or disease helped do in the Linear Pottery people, she says, but no one knows for sure.

These people "were capable of very violent behavior but also capable of very caring behavior," Meyer reflects. "It's just human nature. They were not different from us."