Scientists smash skulls with Stone Age weapons to solve ancient murders, video shows
Science isn’t always test tubes and beakers. Sometimes, you have to smash fake skulls with an ax.
A team of Spanish scientists used that very technique to try and answer a 7,000 year old mystery, shared in a study from the March edition of the Journal of Archaeological Science.
In 2006, archaeologists found a mass grave in Germany containing 26 bodies with signs of extreme trauma dated to the Stone Age. Coined the “Talheim Death Pit,” the skulls of the bodies were smashed and some of their legs were broken, suggesting torture. Scientists said the grave showed the violence that was prevalent during the Neolithic era. The Neolithic era, also called the New Stone Age, started about 10,000 years ago and encompassed the final development of stone tools.
What remained a mystery was how they were actually killed, and what weapons were used to do so much damage.
To answer those questions, the scientists built their own “weapon-tools” that were commonly used in the Neolithic period. The first was an ax, created to replicate the materials that would have been used in the Stone Age. The handle was maple with a head made of serpentinite rock, a stone similar to flint used in European weaponry. The two pieces were tied together with strips of leather.
The researchers based the second weapon on another murder victim, this time from Spain, who was found with similar skull trauma in an oceanside cave in 1999. Scientists at the time determined the Spanish victim was killed using a stone adze, a weapon where a pointed rock was sharpened and tied to a stick.
Fake skulls were created using polyurethane, gelatin and rubber skin. With the skulls mounted, the scientists grabbed ax and adze and took a swing.
The weapons make a sickening crunch when they collide with the artificial bone, and they leave behind a murderous fingerprint.
“The present experiment demonstrates that, although axes and adzes are very similar weapon-tools, there are a number of characteristics in the fracture patterns they cause that allow differentiation between the two,” the scientists wrote in the study.
The scientists said that damage from an ax has a “symmetrical oval or drop-shaped fracture outline” compared to the adze which causes “on straight (point of impact) and one convex side (dispersion of the force following the direction of the blow).”
Based on the resulting damage on the skulls, the scientists concluded that, like the skull found in Spain, the German massacre victims were likely also killed with an adze.
Because the adze marks can show direction of an attack, the scientists were able to reconstruct how each of the victims may have been killed.
They said they could “better reconstruct the possible scenarios in which the cranial trauma occurred, differentiating between frontal confrontation, attack from the back, lateral blows, or the height of the attacker with respect to the victim.”
The scientists hope this type of reconstruction can be used to describe “the most likely scenarios surrounding the confrontation and the possible cause of death of the individuals, which is especially important during the Neolithic period, when this type of cranial trauma is very common.”
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