Archaeologists working near the small Croatian village of Potočani made a somber discovery in 2007. In a shallow pit, just a meter deep and two meters wide, they found the tangled legs of at least 41 people. Radiocarbon dating on several of the bones showed that they were in the pit for about 6,200 years. The deceased included men, women and children, from toddlers to the elderly, and it was clear that they had died violently.
Thirteen of the 41 people in the pit struck deadly blows to the sides or back of their skulls from a mixture of different weapons. Based on the shape of the injuries, it probably included stone hammers, wooden knobs and copper shafts.
“The position and morphology (appearance) of the wounds strongly suggest that these people did not run away from their attackers,” archaeologist Mario Novak, of Croatia’s Institute of Anthropological Research, told Ars, “but probably knelt or with laid their hands. fastened. “This evidence, together with the presence of so many women and children in the group, told archaeologists that they did not dig up the effects of a battle, but a massacre.
Potočani is only one of the very similar slaughter areas spread over Neolithic and Copper-era Europe. So far, archaeologists have unearthed the remains of about half a dozen similar cases across the continent, all of which date back to 7,500 to 6,000 years ago. Novak told Ars that more sites are likely to exist and are waiting to be located.
At each of these sites there is a clear pattern: large numbers of victims of both sexes and all age groups, killed with different types of weapons and apparently without fighting, and hastily buried in a shallow pit or trench.
Novak and his colleagues recently sequenced old DNA of 38 of the 41 people in the mass grave in Potočani, hoping to find out more about who the victims were, how they were related to each other and ultimately why they died.
Identification of the victims
A few pieces of pottery in the pit connected the victims to the Lasinja culture, a group of people who lived in present-day Croatia, northern Bosnia, Slovenia, eastern Austria, and western Hungary during the Copper Age. has. to 2300 BC Archaeological evidence tells us that the Lasinja made their living mostly by grazing cattle and by mining and cultivating copper. The 41 people in the mass grave were probably part of a larger group.
“It’s very likely that it’s the unfortunates who failed to escape,” Novak told Ars. ‘It is also possible in a few years that we may find another mass funeral in the area with the remains of other members of their community. You must remember that the archaeological excavation was done on a very small area (basically this pit), so that the neighboring plots may contain similar, but still unexamined archaeological features.
DNA from 38 of the Potočani victims showed that they all shared essentially the same ancestry, with their roots mostly among the farmers of Anatolia who first farmed agriculture in Southern and Central Europe about 8,000 to 7,000 years ago. brought. They also owe about nine percent of their ancestry to the hunter-gatherer groups that lived in Europe before the Anatolian farmers arrived there.
At the time of the massacre, these people were part of a population that seemed large and fairly stable. None of the victims’ DNA showed signs of inbreeding, indicating a small, isolated population. And mitochondrial DNA, which is passed directly from mother to child, showed at least 30 genealogies of the mother in the group, which also indicates a large, genetically diverse community.
The mass grave at Potočani may seem like the result of conflict over territory; when one group moves into an area, the people already living there can use force to expel the newcomers. And it’s easy to imagine that people who have trained livestock for a living could come into conflict with more sedentary farmers. But because the victims’ DNA points to a large, established population, it is unlikely that they were recent migrants to the area.
Despite their shared heritage, most victims were not closely related. Twenty-seven of the victims had no family members in the mass grave with them. Novak and his colleagues identified several small family groups: a young man with his two daughters and nephew, two younger sisters with a cousin or great-grandfather, a father and his son, and a young son with his aunt or half-sister. Because the victims of the massacre were mostly unrelated, we can also rule out the possibility that their attackers targeted specific families for some reason.
What happened in Neolithic Europe?
The DNA analysis answered two out of four major questions about the ancient mass grave; archaeologists now know more about who the victims were and how they related to each other. We are sitting with evidence that some group of people committed a horrible act against others 6,200 years ago – but almost no evidence to tell us who or why not.
“We also know almost nothing about the perpetrators of this heinous act, because we have no cultural (material) and / or biological (skeletal) remains that we can associate with them,” Novak said. “We can therefore only speculate on the basis of the available data from Potočani and some well-known similar websites from all over Europe.”
Another unanswered question is why such inexplicable (at least for modern researchers) massacres seem to have become more common in Neolithic Europe. “Why such a number of almost identical episodes / events took place on the continent of Europe at that time is not yet clear,” Novak told Ars. Some archaeologists have suggested that Europe’s population increased dramatically during the Late Neolithic and Early Copper Ages, when agriculture would have made food more plentiful and predictable – but around that time, shifts in the ancient climate led to drought, famine, and struggle for resources. .
“At this point we can not know for sure,” Novak told Ars. ‘So far, about 6,200 years ago, we have no evidence of adverse climatic conditions in the region. But this is a completely underestimated topic, so we may get new information soon. ”
PLOS ONE, 2021 DOI: 10.1371 / journal.pone.0247332 (About DOIs).