Prehistoric before 3000 BC

San Juan ante Portam Latinam and the Arrowhead Problem

A Basque rock shelter holds 338 Neolithic dead and a few dozen flint arrowheads. How many of them were killed...

Ofnet: Two Pits of Skulls and the Question of Massacre or Rite

In 1908 two pits of skulls turned up in a Bavarian cave. Archaeologists still disagree whether they record a...

The Linear Pottery Culture in Five Mass Graves: What Went Wrong at the End of a Culture

Five mass deposits from Europe's first farming culture, c. 5000 BC, show massacre, execution and a disputed...

Perimortem: The Hardest Word in Osteology, and What It Cannot Prove

Perimortem means 'around the time of death', yet bone keeps no clock. Why the word is hard to apply, and how...

Herxheim: Cannibalism or Death Ritual, and Why the Dig Team Still Disagrees

At Herxheim in Germany, hundreds of Neolithic farmers' bones were smashed and cut around 5000 BC, and the...

Asparn/Schletz: The Enclosure Whose Dead Were Never Buried

At Asparn/Schletz in Austria at least 67 Linearbandkeramik farmers were killed and left unburied in a ditch...

Jebel Sahaba: What a Restudy Did to the Oldest Massacre

For fifty years Jebel Sahaba in Sudan was the oldest known massacre. A 2021 re-examination of the same bones...

Bell Beaker Pottery: The Cup That Tracked a Continent-Wide Migration

Bell Beaker pottery spread from Iberia across Europe after 2750 BC, and ancient DNA has shown it carried both...

Talheim, 5000 BC: The Pit That Changed the Neolithic Argument

Thirty-four people were killed with axes and adzes and thrown into a pit in Neolithic Germany. What Talheim...

Writing and Trade: How Bronze Age Bookkeeping Invented the Written Word

Long before literature or law, writing began as a bookkeeping tool, invented from clay tokens used to track...

Göbekli Tepe: The Monuments Hunter-Gatherers Raised Before Farming

Göbekli Tepe's carved stone enclosures in southeastern Turkey show hunter-gatherers building monuments...

Lascaux and Altamira: How Two Caves Rewrote the Story of the First Artists

Discovered a century apart, the painted caves of Lascaux and Altamira forced scholars to accept that Ice Age...

Doggerland: Europe's Lost Mesolithic Homeland Beneath the North Sea

Doggerland was a thriving Mesolithic landscape beneath today's North Sea, drowned by rising seas and a...

Proto-Cities before Writing: Jericho, Çatalhöyük, and the Trypillia Mega-Sites

Long before cuneiform or hieroglyphs, Jericho, Çatalhöyük, and Ukraine's Trypillia mega-sites show how large...

Ötzi the Iceman: Solving a 5,300-Year-Old Murder in the Alps

In 1991 hikers found a 5,300-year-old body frozen in the Alps: Ötzi the Iceman, whose murder and genome...