10,000-year-old war grave

A PREHISTORIC mass grave is the earliest evidence of human warfare, scientists believe.

Showing no mercy, the ancient attackers murdered 27 men, women and children, leaving their bodies strewn along the shore of a lagoon in Kenya around 10,000 years ago.

Some of the victims, including a heavily pregnant woman, had had their hands bound as their heads, knees and limbs were clubbed and stabbed. Others had arrow heads and stone projectiles embedded in their skulls and chests.

The massacre took place at a time when humans lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Experts believe it is the earliest evidence that war was being waged by prehistoric people – thousands of years before it was thought to have originated.

The slaughter took place between 9,500 and 10,500 years ago at Nataruk, a remote site 19 miles west of Lake Turkana, the journal Nature reports.