We can call him Abel. Scientists in Spain have published a paper titled
Lethal Interpersonal Violence in the Middle Pleistocene. In it they present evidence of the earliest murder in the human archaeological record.
NPR spoke with one of the authors of the study:
One of the authors of the study, Rolf Quam of Binghamton University, spoke with NPR and said the evidence they found, which includes a skull reconstructed from about 50 fragments, clearly points towards murder. Two major injuries on that skull, above the left eye, couldn't have both happened unintentionally.
"The fact that there are two of these fractures in the frontal bone seems to imply a pretty clear intention to kill," Quam said. "There's no sign of healing of the fractures, the edges show oblique angles, all indicating that this is clearly something that occurred while the bone was still fresh, and we believe, a murder." Basically, the evidence suggests the wounds occurred while the body was still living. As part of the study, Quam and his team used 3-D imaging to create a virtual reconstruction of the cranium and its injuries.
The skull comes from the appropriately named Spanish site—
Sima de los Huesos.
The Sima de los Huesos ("Pit of Bones" in Spanish and typically abbreviated as SH) is a lower Paleolithic site, one of several important sections of the Cueva Mayor-Cueva del Silo cave system of the Sierra de Atapuerca in north-central Spain. With a total of at least 28 individual hominid fossils now firmly dated to 430,000 years old, SH is the largest and oldest collection of human remains yet discovered.
Beyond the possible evidence of murder, the site offers up some of the earliest examples of funerary practices in our ancestral history.
Quam said their presence there was intentional. "The only explanation that we have that can not be rejected is the idea that the human bodies arrived at this place by other humans."
[...]
Quam pointed out that the fossils in question aren't exactly human, but they are close, ancestors of the Neanderthals. He called them "human ancestors, not chimpanzees, not apes." Quam continued, "These are a different form of humanity that lives on the planet before we evolved. They're clearly human-like. I tend to think of them as humans."
There's some photos from the
scientific publication below the fold.
(A) Frontal view of Cranium 17 showing the position of the traumatic events T1 (inferior) and T2 (superior); (B) Detailed ectocranial view of the traumatic fractures showing the two similar notches (black arrows) present along the superior border of the fracture outlines. Note that the orientation of the two traumatic events is different; (C) Detail of the notch in T1 under 2X magnification with a light microscope. (D) Endocranial view of T1 and T2 showing the large cortical delamination of the inner table (black arrows).
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0126589.g002