In the 1970s, a group of cavers exploring the Mendip Hills in Somerset stumbled upon a dark secret buried for millennia. Deep inside a 50-foot shaft lay a disordered pile of human and animal bones. The discovery faded into obscurity for decades, reduced to a footnote about an odd cave system. But a recent revisiting of these bones has unearthed a far more harrowing story: a brutal massacre that unfolded over 4,000 years ago.
Scientists now believe they have identified the largest known case of prehistoric violence in Early Bronze Age Britain. The remains of at least 37 men, women, and children tell a chilling tale of a community wiped out in a single, horrific event. But that’s not all. The most harrowing fact that came out of this investigation was that the victims weren’t only murdered; they may have been cannibalized.
An Unexpected Brutality
Previously, archaeologists had found just a few skeletons with injuries dating between 2500 BCE and 1500 BCE, which has led many to believe that Bronze Age Britain was largely peaceful. These new findings suggest the opposite.
The study, led by Professor Rick Schulting from the University of Oxford, undoubtedly concluded that the victims of the Charterhouse Warren site met gruesome fates. Their skulls were crushed by blunt instruments. Limbs were systematically severed. Bones were scraped clean of flesh and cracked open.
Some of the fractures are consistent with deliberate breaking to extract marrow. And, chillingly, some bones even show signs of possible cannibalism, with marks consistent with human teeth.
“If we saw these marks on animal bones, we’d have no question that they were butchered,” Schulting explained to the BBC.
Men, women, and even children — entire families — appear to have been targeted. Researchers estimate that the victims may have represented an entire village, a community of around 50 to 100 people.
“Charterhouse Warren is one of those rare archaeological sites that challenges the way we think about the past,” Schulting noted. “It is a stark reminder that people in prehistory could match more recent atrocities and shines a light on a dark side of human behavior.”
What Caused the Charterhouse Massacre?
The evidence points to a coordinated, deliberate attack. There are no signs of defensive wounds or combat. The victims appear to have been taken by surprise. And the ferocity of the violence — the systematic dismemberment, the potential cannibalism — suggests something more than a raid for resources.
“This level of almost erasing the person, literally chopping them into pieces, seems like something you would only do if fueled by anger, fear, and resentment,” Schulting told the BBC. It may have been an act of revenge, a ritualized attempt to dehumanize the victims and send a message to their kin. Scrape marks and blunt force trauma hint at a desire to desecrate the bodies, a brutal form of psychological warfare.
But what could ignite such fury in a time typically seen as peaceful? The researchers found no evidence of resource shortages or ethnic conflict. Instead, they speculate that social factors — insults, theft, or accusations of sorcery — may have sparked the violence. In a society without courts or centralized justice, grievances could easily spiral into deadly retribution.
“If you felt wronged, it was ultimately your responsibility to do something about it,” Schulting said. “It’s not like you could go to the magistrate and ask for something to be done.”
In such a context, feuds could escalate beyond reason. “This is not a homicidal maniac. This is a community of people that came together to do this to another community.”
The presence of plague DNA in two victims makes things ever murkier. Could disease have sparked fear or panic, leading to a violent outburst?
It’s impossible to tell for sure what possessed the perpetrators to commit such an atrocity. What’s more certain is that extreme violence of this kind never comes out of nowhere. There’s a context, a history, that we can’t fully see. What we observe is only the result — a community destroyed, their remains left as a haunting record.
Echoes of the Past
The violence at Charterhouse Warren is shocking, but perhaps not unique. Across Europe, other prehistoric sites have yielded evidence of mass killings and postmortem processing of bodies. In Gough’s Cave, just a few miles away, human skulls were fashioned into cups by Mesolithic people nearly 15,000 years ago. But unlike Charterhouse Warren, those remains show no signs of violent death.
The attack at Charterhouse Warren likely had repercussions that stretched for generations. “Cycles of tit-for-tat revenge can escalate dramatically and may be out of all proportion to the original offence,” Schulting and his team wrote in their paper. Perhaps in time, calmer heads prevailed, allowing a semblance of normality to return. But the memory of the massacre — of an entire community reduced to bones in a pit — would have endured.
This discovery forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: the capacity for violence, even extreme violence, has always been part of the human story. Steven Pinker’s idea of the “better angels of our nature” may reflect a long-term decline in violence, but the “darker angels” are never far away.
The findings appeared in the journal Antiquity.
