A crime has been committed. In fact, it is the first murder in history. For many, the case could have been solved long ago, taking Abel as the first victim at the hands of his brother Cain. But we lack evidence to confirm it. On the other hand, the Atapuerca deposit had a case in store for us.
a long trial
If you think that justice works too slowly, come see the work of a paleontologist studying a murder from 230,000 years ago . It took twenty years to reconstruct a skull from 52 fragments. The individual is known as Cr-17 (he was not the Cristiano Ronaldo of prehistory, as far as we know) and has two identical skull fractures. The investigation of the case has determined that they were produced by a blunt object that ended the life of Cr-17. Judgment has only been a few hundred years in coming, yes, but now we even know that the beating was caused by a right-hander. We almost have the killer.
“The key is not that a piece of bone is missing. It is that when a skull that has meat is hit, the bone behaves like an elastic body. That is why it can be known that the individual received the blows before or just after death.
Commented Nohemí Sala , a researcher at the Center for Human Evolution and Behavior at the Complutense University of Madrid who, in 2015, published the sentence, that is, the study, in the scientific journal PLoS ONE. Investigators have found no sign of healing or recovery of bone tissue, so the blows were fatal . In addition, due to the frontal area of the skull in which they are located, the signs point to a face-to-face confrontation. Cr-17 was not victorious, of course. We have no news of the murder weapon.
the crime scene
Atapuerca is a special place to study the life (and death) of the Middle Pleistocene (from almost 800,000 years ago to 130,000 years ago). In the Sima de los Huesos , more than 7,000 pieces of bone appeared. A puzzle without instructions that is very difficult to put back together. But the efforts of paleontologists are unparalleled and, for now, about thirty bodies have been counted that ended up in this pit.
“To date, we have 20 individuals in the collection represented by their skulls and jaws, of the 29 estimated by dentition. This high number of specimens has allowed a study on the forensic taphonomy of a fossil population, something unthinkable outside the walls of this Burgos abyss”.
That is why Atapuerca offers a unique opportunity to study the life of a group of individuals from the Middle Pleistocene. The Sima de los Huesos is a vertical well 13 meters deep, which was hidden 30 meters below the surface and more than 500 meters from the nearest entrance to the cave of the Atapuerca site. How did those humans end up there? Why?
Beyond documenting the first murder case in the history of mankind , it is still difficult to venture an explanation as to why the bodies ended up there. Various theories are considered, such as that a mud flow dragged and accumulated the remains in this well, where they were fossilized. Or perhaps we are facing the first funeral rite in history.
Serial murders?
Nohemí Sala has not stopped investigating the fossils of the Sima de los Huesos and in February 2022 published a forensic analysis of the skulls found at the site. The investigation documents 57 head injuries with signs of healing; nine individuals who suffered impacts that could be lethal and, of them, six show deep fractures in the left region of the neck, which has been interpreted as signs of violence.
In addition, more than seventy percent of the remains belong to young men and women, an amount that would have greatly diminished the demographics of the group. It is suspected that these deaths were a tragedy, which is why the theory of the intentional accumulation of these bodies has gained probability points compared to the rest of the options.
References:
Sala, N. et al. 2015. Lethal Interpersonal Violence in the Middle Pleistocene. PLoS ONE 10 (5): e0126589. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0126589.
Sala, N. et al. 2022. Taphonomic-forensic analysis of the hominin skulls from the Sima de los Huesos. The Anatomical Record. DOI: 10.1002/ar.24883.
