A murder committed 430,000 years ago

In an undoubtedly unusual forensic investigation, carried out with modern techniques, it was determined that the lethal wounds identified in this human skull, the most obvious trace of which are the two closely spaced holes located above the left eye, were caused by two separate impacts of the same object, with slightly different trajectories, that occurred around the time of the subject’s death.

The skull dates back to about 430,000 years ago.

The study was carried out by a team led by Nohemi Sala, from the UCM-ISCIII Joint Center for Human Evolution and Behavior, in Madrid. This center depends jointly on the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) and the Carlos III Health Institute (ISCIII), in Spain all of these entities.

According to the study authors, it is highly unlikely that the injuries occurred as a result of a fall. Everything indicates that they were the result of two blows delivered with the same object, which fulfilled the function, intended or improvised, of a weapon. This led Nohemi Sala and her colleagues to interpret the event as a deliberate and lethal act of interpersonal aggression.

This skull comes from the Sima de los Huesos, in Spain, and became famous in 2015 when it was considered forensic evidence of what could be the oldest known murder case in human history.

(Photo: Javier Trueba / Madrid Scientific Films. CC BY)

The study was published in the academic journal PLoS ONE. The reference of the work is the following: Sala N, Arsuaga JL, Pantoja-Pérez A, Pablos A, Martínez I, Quam RM, et al. (2015) Lethal Interpersonal Violence in the Middle Pleistocene. PLoS ONE 10(5): e0126589. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0126589. (Fountain: NCYT by Amazings)