Dozens of skeletons buried in a 3,700-year-old cemetery in China show evidence of extreme trauma, suggesting that assailants felt a need to "overkill" their victims in bloodthirsty raids during the Bronze Age.
"One individual had 18 separate stab wounds to the cranial vault, which is obviously more than is needed to incapacitate or kill a person," Elizabeth Berger, a bioarchaeologist at the University of California, Riverside, said in a presentation April 24 at the Society for American Archaeology annual meeting in Denver, Colorado.
