The advance of the Carthaginian general Hannibal on Rome during the Second Punic War caused havoc to those in his path, and a devastating fire in an Iron Age farmhouse may be evidence of the damage wrought by his troops more than 2,200 years ago, a new study finds.
The fire completely destroyed the farmhouse and almost everything in it — including four sheep, a goat and a horse — but the people who lived there seem to have escaped, as no human remains were found, said study lead author Oriol Olesti Vila, an professor of Antiquity and the Middle Ages at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
