Some 33,000 years ago, a man was violently clubbed to death by a left-handed attacker wielding a club or similar object. That's the conclusion of an international team of scientists, who published the results of their forensic analysis in a recent paper in PLOS ONE.
The so-called Cioclovina calvaria is a fossilized skull around 33,000 years old, discovered in a cave in South Transylvania in 1941 during a mining operation. That makes it one of the earliest fossilized human remains yet known, so naturally it's been studied extensively by scientists interested in learning more about the Upper Paleolithic period, which started around 40,000 to 45,000 years, and marks the major dispersal of modern humans in Europe.
"The Cioclovina individual is particularly important, as it is one of the earliest and relatively complete skulls of modern Europeans from the Upper Paleolithic period," co-author Katerina Harvati of Eberhard Karls University of Tubingen in Germany told Live Science. "Human remains from this period are very rare and often very fragmentary."
It was eventually determined be the skull of a male, and earlier researchers had noted that there were two small, healed scars on the frontal bone—evidence of some kind of trauma that occurred sufficiently prior to death to give the damaged area time to remodel (antemortem).
That is largely undisputed, but there was also a large fracture on the right parietal lobe. And scholars disagreed on whether this was evidence for blunt force trauma and possibly the man's cause of death (a perimortem injury). Alternatively, the fracture could have developed after death (postmortem). The fact that it isn't described in the original 1942 publication describing the then-newly discovered skull lends some support to this latter view, but not enough to settle the debate once and for all.
A-C shows CT scans of Cioclovina skull; D-F shows a modern cranium with perimortem trauma; and G-H is a medieval cranium with post-mortem trauma. Kranoti et al, 2019 Various angles on the perimortem fractures on Cioclovina calvaria. Kranoti et al, 2019 Modeling the fracture patterns from blunt force trauma. Iakovos Ouranos Distinctive fracture patterns on synthetic bone spheres from a baseball bat, a volcanic rock, and a fall from ten meters (around 32 feet). Kranoti et al, 2019
So Havarti partnered with two colleagues—Elena Kranioti of the University of Crete and Dan Grigorescu of the University of Bucharest—to conduct a more thorough forensic analysis. The team made CT scans of the skull, the better to study the fracture patterns. They also simulated the head trauma with 12 synthetic bone spheres, filled with ballistic gelatin to mimic the human brain. They dropped balls from varying heights, and administered single blows with a rock, a "bat-like object," and a baseball bat under different scenarios.
There are well-established forensic techniques for determining whether this kind of trauma likely occurred anti-, peri-, or post-mortem. Head trauma that shows signs of remodeling—the formation of callouses on longer bones, for instance, or bony bridges forming in the cranium—is a strong indication that the injury occurred antemortem, at least five to seven days before death. There won't be signs of this remodeling for peri- or post-mortem injuries, which is the case for the Cioclovina calvaria.
It's a bit tricRead More – Source
[contf] [contfnew] 
Ars Technica
[contfnewc] [contfnewc]
