Homicidal hominids have existed for at least a half-million years, say scientists forensically trying to piece together the ancient events that led to a prehistoric Spaniard’s brutal killing.
Two blows to the victim’s forehead with a sharp instrument took their life, after which the body was heaved 43-feet down a shaft to rest in an unmarked mass grave now dubbed by archaeologists as Spain’s “Pit of Bones.”
This is where the murder victim and 27 others spent the next 500,000 years; their corpses and crimes -- the ones that befell them and their own -- buried and forgotten there, until contemporary times.
After that eternity passed, only about 50 bone fragments remained of these early humans, and at least one of them was intentionally slain by blunt force trauma, researchers concluded after carefully studying the set of injuries on “Cranium 17.”
Technically, whoever the victim is and whatever their own culpability was, they’re still entitled to justice, since there is no statute of limitations on murder. But solving the homicide, and at least naming and shaming the now-deceased perpetrator, is practicably undoable now.
“Not even Sherlock Holmes could help us in that,” opined Nohemi Sala of Spain’s Complutense University at Madrid, who was one of a group of paleontologists instrumental in bringing the pit and its gruesome contents to light.
And, unfortunately, “intentions do not fossilize,” Sala added. “So it is impossible to interpret the motivation of the killing.”
