Centre for Applied Bioanthropology, Institute for Anthropological Research, Zagreb, Croatia.
Institute of Evolutionary Biology, CSIC - Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
PLoS One. 2021 Mar 10;16(3):e0247332. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0247332. eCollection 2021.
Paleogenomic and bioanthropological studies of ancient massacres have highlighted sites where the victims were male and plausibly died all in battle, or were executed members of the same family as might be expected from a killing intentionally directed at subsets of a community, or where the massacred individuals were plausibly members of a migrant community in conflict with previously established groups, or where there was evidence that the killing was part of a religious ritual. Here we provide evidence of killing on a massive scale in prehistory that was not directed to a specific family, based on genome-wide ancient DNA for 38 of the 41 documented victims of a 6,200 year old massacre in Potočani, Croatia and combining our results with bioanthropological data. We highlight three results: (i) the majority of individuals were unrelated and instead were a sample of what was clearly a large farming population, (ii) the ancestry of the individuals was homogenous which makes it unlikely that the massacre was linked to the arrival of new genetic ancestry, and (iii) there were approximately equal numbers of males and females. Combined with the bioanthropological evidence that the victims were of a wide range of ages, these results show that large-scale indiscriminate killing is a horror that is not just a feature of the modern and historic periods, but was also a significant process in pre-state societies.
古屠杀的古基因组学和生物人类学研究强调了一些地点，在这些地点，受害者是男性，很可能是在战斗中全部死亡，或者是同一家庭的被处决成员，这可能是有意针对社区的一部分人进行的杀戮，或者是屠杀的人很可能是与先前建立的群体发生冲突的移民社区的成员，或者有证据表明杀戮是宗教仪式的一部分。在这里，我们根据克罗地亚波托恰尼 6200 年前大屠杀中记录的 41 名受害者中的 38 名的全基因组古代 DNA，提供了史前大规模杀戮的证据，这些杀戮不是针对特定家庭的，并将我们的结果与生物人类学数据结合起来。我们强调了三个结果：（i）大多数个体是无关的，而是一个明显的大型农业人口样本，（ii）个体的祖先具有同质性，这使得屠杀与新遗传祖先的到来无关的可能性降低，以及（iii）男性和女性的数量大致相等。结合生物人类学证据表明受害者的年龄范围广泛，这些结果表明，大规模的不分青红皂白的杀戮不仅是现代和历史时期的一个特征，也是前国家社会的一个重要过程。
