children

A shallow pit at Gomolava, in northern Serbia, has yielded a grim snapshot of life and death around 2,800 years ago. Researchers report that 77 people, overwhelmingly women and children, were killed in a single episode and buried together in what is now one of Europe’s largest known prehistoric single-event mass graves. The evidence points to selective violence, not disease or a simple battle aftermath, and it raises uncomfortable questions about how power was asserted in the Early Iron Age. The new analysis draws on osteology, ancient DNA, and isotope testing, published in Nature Human Behaviour. Crucially, the victims were not simply one family group wiped out in a raid; genetic testing suggests most were unrelated and came from a