The Neolithic period, which we often imagine as the rather peaceful onset of an agricultural and pastoral lifestyle, was actually a very violent age of human history. Scientists are discovering a number of traces of Neolithic violence and sometimes they also come across places that became the scene of massacres in the Neolithic.
One such place is a cave near the town Talheim in southern Germany, which has been known since its discovery in 1983 for the event known as the “Talheim Massacre” (Massaker von Talheim). Here, archaeologists discovered the remains of 34 people from the Neolithic period, who were killed about five thousand years ago. The dead belong to the Linear Pottery culture. Coincidentally, the people of this culture were the first farmers not only in southern Germany, but also in the territory of today’s Bohemia and Moravia. So it is a crime that affects us to some extent.
Investigating a Neolithic murder
Talheim massacre victims have fractured skulls. Miguel Angel Moreno-Ibanez from the Spanish University of Rovira i Virgilio and his colleagues decided to find out what weapons the perpetrators of the massacre used. The results of their remarkable experimental research recently published magazine Journal of Archaeological Science.
(Photo: Miguel Angel Moreno-Ibanez, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
The researchers created seven model skulls out of a polyurethane polymer covered with a rubber “skin.” They filled the fake heads with ballistic gel to represent the brain. Then came the part where the finished heads were pounded from different sides with well-known Neolithic tools, which researchers say could have been used as weapons to break the skull. These were primarily classic stone axes and also teslices – a special type of ax with a head placed perpendicular to the ax.
TIP: A cave in Spain hid the remains of a massacre of Neolithic immigrants
It turns out that the traces of stone axes and adzes, which are very similar as tools, differ in some details. Thanks to the experiment, archaeologists discovered that the victims of the massacre in Talheim were most likely killed by teslices and according to researchers, the same weapon was also used in the Neolithic murder in the Spanish cave of Cova Foradada.
