Study finds 33,000-year-old skull shows signs of blunt trauma

Some 33,000 years ago, a man was violently clubbed to death by a left-handed attacker brandishing a club or similar object. This is the conclusion of an international team of scientists who published the results of his forensic badysis in an article recently published in PLOS ONE.

The so-called Cioclovina calvaria is a fossilized skull about 33,000 years old, discovered in a cave in southern Transylvania in 1941 during a mining operation. This makes it one of the oldest fossilized human remains still known. It has therefore been extensively studied by scientists interested in learning more about the Upper Paleolithic, which began between 40,000 and 45,000 years ago, and marks the major dispersion of modern humans in Europe.

"The Cioclovina individual is particularly important because it is one of the oldest and relatively complete skulls of modern Europeans from the Upper Paleolithic period," Katerina Harvati, co-author of Eberhard Karls University of Tubingen, Germany. "The human remains of this period are very rare and often very fragmentary."

It was eventually determined that the skull was a man and previous researchers had noted the presence of two small scars healed on the frontal bone – evidence of a type of trauma occurring sufficiently before death to give the damaged area time to remodel (antemortem).

This is largely undisputed, but there was also a large fracture of the right parietal lobe. And scholars were not in agreement on whether there was evidence of blunt trauma and possibly the cause of death of the deceased. " man (traumatic injury). Alternatively, the fracture could have developed after death (post mortem). The fact that it is not described in the original 1942 publication describing the skull discovered at the time reinforces this last point of view, but not enough to settle the debate once and for all.

Havarti is therefore badociated with two colleagues – Elena Kranioti of the University of Crete and Dan Grigorescu of the University of Bucharest – to conduct a more thorough forensic badysis. The team did a skull scan to better study the fracture structures. They also simulated brain trauma with 12 synthetic bone spheres filled with ballistic gelatin to mimic the human brain. They dropped balls of different heights and administered single shots with a stone, a "bat-like object" and a baseball bat under different scenarios.

There are established medico-legal techniques to determine whether this type of trauma is likely to occur anti-, peri-or post-mortem. Head trauma showing signs of remodeling, such as the formation of callosities on longer bones or the formation of bone bridges in the skull, clearly indicates that the injury occurred before death, at least five to seven days before death. There will be no signs of this remodeling for per mortem or post mortem wounds, as is the case for Cioclovina calvaria.

It is a bit more difficult to distinguish between the last two cases and forensic badysts usually study single fraction models to do so. For example, the fracture propagates along trajectories of least resistance in a perimeter lesion and its direction forms an acute or obtuse angle. There may also be bone flakes at the site of impact for a perimeter injury. A post mortem fracture would have none of these elements.

"[Our results] closely matched to the patterns expected for blunt trauma ".

Computed tomography revealed at least two fractures with no signs of remodeling, showing the warning signs of perimetral injury. The first was a linear fracture along the base of the skull and the second was the previously observed depressed fracture. According to the authors, the two fractures present the warning signs of a perimetral lesion, probably the result of blows carried by an object resembling a bat, probably brandished by a left-handed attacker facing his victim.

"Our results clearly showed that the fracture patterns observed on this skull could not be produced after death or following an accidental fall," Harvati told Live Science. "Instead, they closely matched the patterns expected for blunt trauma (ie, trauma inflicted with a blunt instrument, such as a club, for example) up to the head. The extent of the injuries he allegedly sustained would have resulted in death, and as to how or why this happened, we can only speculate. "

This is also an indication that violence was really part of this period of human history. "The Upper Paleolithic was a time of increasing cultural complexity and technological sophistication," the authors wrote. "Our work shows that violent interpersonal behavior and murder were also part of the behavioral repertoire of these early modern Europeans."

DO I: PLOS ONE, 2019. 10.1371 / journal.pone.0216718 (About DOIs).