Nearly 10,000 years back more than 27 members of a tribe were killed and the event was earliest proof of warfare between stone-age hunter-gatherers. A group of scientists from Cambridge University discovered the fossilized remnants of the victims, preserved in the sediment of a marshy pool that dried up thousands of years back.

Published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, the discovery was made in 2012 at Nataruk, a place located at a distance of 30km from Lake Turkana in northern Kenya’s Rift Valley. It is the earliest proof of brutal conflict between nomadic hunter-gatherer groups.

Study leader Marta MirazUn Lahr from the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies at Cambridge said that the killings at Nataruk are the indication to the antiquity of inter-group violence and war.

The area dates back to the fertile period post the last ice age, after radio carbon and other dating tests were conducted on the bones, and the shell and sediment were discovered with them.

At present, the site is scrub, but was used to be fertile lakeshore, with plenty of food from fishing, game from close by forest and woodland, and fresh drinking water, 10,000 years back. It was quite desirable area to settle.

Lahr said, “The Nataruk massacre may have resulted from an attempt to seize resources whose value was similar to those of later food-producing agricultural societies among whom violent attacks on settlements became part of life”.

The conclusion on which Lahr has reached is grim. According to Lahr, Nataruk could simply be a poof of a standard antagonistic response to an encounter between two social groups during that time. The co-author of the study Prof. Robert Foley is slightly more optimistic regarding the human condition.