A 5,000 year old murder mystery

 From Mass Murder in the Late Neolithic by Patrick Wyman.  A 5,000 year old murder mystery.

The faces stared upward out the shallow pit, illuminated by the last rays of the evening sun. Tiny fragments of bone stood out from their skulls, stark white against the brown of drying blood and dark hair. The men and boys gathered around the grave’s opening could barely stand to look down at what remained of their family: their mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers, and children, infants and the elderly. Fifteen people lay in the grave, all with their skulls crushed and mangled by a cascade of vicious blows, most of them children and women. They hadn’t even been able to fight back.

Most of the men had been away, watering their cattle at the river or hunting deer in the nearby forest, when the attackers had come. They returned to the cluster of temporary square houses of timber and earth to find a scene of bloody carnage amid the still-smoking cookfires they had left behind. Their family group and their world was gone, utterly destroyed.

All that was left was to bury the dead. An older man placed his elderly wife with their two adult sons. A young father, his wife dead in childbirth two years before, carefully positioned his young son next to the boy’s aunt, his sister. A mother lay on her side next to her teenaged daughter, arranged together in death by the woman’s husband, the girl’s father. He carefully placed a small clay pot next to his daughter’s head, one of many items that accompanied the dead on their next journey: flint axes, the tusks of boars, bone pendants, amber jewelry, tools of stone and bone.

As the sun set and darkness fell on the pit, the small group covered the bodies with dirt, the freshly turned earth marking the spot just north of the Carpathian Mountains where they left their families behind for all eternity, nearly 5,000 years ago.

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