• DOI:10.1038/nature19778
• Corpus ID: 205250945

Contesting the massacre at Nataruk

@article{Stojanowski2016ContestingTM,
  title={Contesting the massacre at Nataruk},
  author={Christopher M Stojanowski and Andrew C Seidel and Laura C. Fulginiti and Kent M. Johnson and Jane E. Buikstra},
  journal={Nature},
  year={2016},
  volume={539},
  pages={E8-E10}
}

• C. Stojanowski, A. C. Seidel, +2 authors J. Buikstra
• Published 24 November 2016
• Geology
• Nature

Mirazón Lahr et al.1 present the earliest evidence of inter-group warfare at the East African site of Nataruk. Their evidence of warfare is based on three inferences: that the skeletons were all contemporaneous, that the bodies were left unburied, and that most individuals exhibited perimortem trauma consistent with interpersonal violence. We believe the data suggest that the burials are not contemporaneous and that most of the observed cranial damage is inconsistent with blunt force trauma. Therefore, the inference of inter-group warfare is premature. There is a Reply to this Comment by Mirazón Lahr, M. et al. Nature 539, http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature19779 (2016). Mirazón Lahr et al.1 suggest that the skeletons at Nataruk document a single-event massacre of a forager band, after which the bodies remained unburied near the edge of a lagoon. The case for warfare is based on observations of alleged perimortem trauma to infer multiple simultaneous fatalities. Although the embedded obsidian lithic in KNM-WT 71251 is suggestive, interpretations of perimortem blunt force trauma on most crania are inconsistent with the forensic anthropology literature2–6. We discuss three of the more compelling examples here. Mirazón Lahr et al.1 describe a radiating fracture on the left frontal of KNM-WT 71253 as produced by an inferred strike to the left parieto-temporal region that was unobservable owing to erosion of the posterior vault. A similar fracture is noted on the right frontal. Both fractures are transversely oriented midway between the coronal suture and the supra-orbital margins and, importantly, are unconnected. Given the lack of an impact site, the right frontal fracture must be taphonomic, providing strong evidence for the presence of conditions conducive to post-depositional warping and cracking. This interpretation is supported by the directional change exhibited by this fracture—a feature shared, to a lesser extent, by the fracture on the left frontal described as resulting from blunt force. Such changes in direction have been associated experimentally with postmortem weathering processes7 (Fig. 1a, b) and fractures with this morphology are not interpreted as evidence for trauma in the bioarchaeological literature8–11.