The man-versus-man fight is not a recent affair as researchers claim to have found the oldest evidence of human warfare dating back around 10,000 years. The fossils of a band of people probably massacred by rivals with various weapons, including arrows, clubs and stone blades, have been discovered on the shores of a lagoon in Kenya.

The fossil site is called Nataruk, which is 20 miles west of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. In all, the remains of 27 people -- 21 adults and six children, most under age 6 -- have been found from a Stone Age hunter-gatherer culture.

The site was discovered by researchers from the Cambridge University's Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies. Among the fossils are 12 relatively complete skeletons, some of them showing clear signs of violence.

While one man's skull had a sharp blade made of a volcanic glass called obsidian still embedded inside, the skull of another was crushed probably with a club. Then there was a woman in her advanced stage of pregnancy whose limbs were tied. Most of the victims had broken skulls or wounds inflicted through sharp-edged weapons to the neck, hands, knees and ribs.

University of Cambridge paleoanthropologist Marta Mirazón Lahr said, "It is a brutal, physical, lethal attack with the intention to kill those individuals who could put up a defence or mount a counter-attack, or who perhaps were of no use to them, whether it was a man or a very pregnant woman, too young or too old".

Lahr said the fossils suggest that these people were ambushed by raiders, probably from another part of the earth. The warfare, it is said, first started after the time of the Nataruk people when humans formed settled communities instead of a nomadic, hunter-gatherer existence.