Burned and damaged human bones from 5,700 years ago hint at a brutal end for a group of Stone Age people who possibly died in a house fire in Ukraine, a new study finds.
But why two people suffered severe head injuries and why one died a century later than all the others is still an unsolved mystery.
\”We can only speculate that there was a connection between fire and lethal violence, that is, killing people in the house, leaving their corpses, and setting the house on fire,\” biological anthropologist Katharina Fuchs at the University of Kiel in Germany and her colleagues wrote in a study published Wednesday (Dec. 11) in the journal PLOS ONE.
In 2004, archaeologists discovered about 100 fragments of human bones in a prehistoric house at Kosenivka, an archaeological site about 115 miles (185 kilometers) south of Kiev. Kosenivka preserves the remains of a prehistoric \”mega-settlement\” built by the agrarian Cucuteni-Trypillia society (CTS), which lived in modern-day Romania, Moldova and Ukraine from 4800 to 3000 B.C. These settlements included public buildings and family homes, many of which were deliberately burned down when people left.
But the discovery of human bones inside one of the burned-out houses in Kosenivka surprised archaeologists, who conducted a new detailed study to find out what exactly happened.
A closer look at the bones revealed the remains of at least seven people: two children, a teenager and four adults. Four skeletons were found inside the destroyed house and were badly burned, while the other three were unburned and found outside the house. Researchers found that two of the adults had suffered severe head trauma just before their deaths, solving a 5,700-year-old forensic mystery.
To investigate this cold case, the research team used radiocarbon dating to determine that six people, possibly a family, had died between 3690 and 3620 B.C., while the seventh — an unburned adult — died about 130 years later, after the house burned and was abandoned. Then, they looked closely at the fracture patterns and discoloration of the bones to determine that the bones had been scorched while still fresh.
Given the contemporary dates of death and evidence of burning, the team concluded that three people may have died inside the burning house, while the others may have suffered from smoke inhalation or carbon monoxide poisoning and died outside the house. However, this analysis did not provide further information about the cause of the skull injuries.
Regardless of how these six Stone Age people died, it\’s clear that the house and bodies were completely covered by soil and debris in just a few months and that part of someone else\’s skull was placed on top a century later, the study authors explained.
The isolated skull fragment may have been a deliberate ritual burial, the researchers wrote, and the entire collection of bones may have been the result of a complex, multilayered burial tradition. Unfortunately, Fuchs told Live Science in an email, \”although they have left us a tremendous amount of archaeological material, there are still many things we don\’t know about them — for example, how they treated their dead.\”
Jordan Karsten, an archaeologist at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email, \”It seems reasonable that the individuals recovered from Kosenivka were killed during a raid and that their home was set on fire during the conflict.\” \”Previous explanations [for burned CTS houses] have focused on ritual house destruction through deliberate burning, but these results suggest that inter-group conflict may better fit the data.\”
Economically, burning a house filled with food, ceramics, tools and ritual objects makes little sense, and the CTS people lived in a forested steppe region near nomadic herder groups.
\”Isn\’t it possible that these neighbors would do this rather than have their homes destroyed?\” Karsten said.