ArticlePloS one2021
Genome-wide analysis of nearly all the victims of a 6200 year old massacre.
Article in PloS one, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Local ancestry inference identifies robust evidence of selection in Neolithic Europe.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Updated analysis of the Bronze Age population genetics from Bezdanjača Cave - the case of I2a1a male individuals.Croatian medical journal · 2026Article
- Article
- The persistence and loss of hard selective sweeps amid admixture in ancient Eurasians.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- A large mass grave from the Early Iron Age indicates selective violence towards women and children in the Carpathian Basin.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Article
- Global patterns of natural selection inferred using ancient DNA.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Family-based community organization in Neolithic Northern China from 8,800 to 7,500 years ago.Innovation (Cambridge (Mass.)) · 2026Review
- Lessons learned: Recommendations for reproducible paleogenomic data analyses.American journal of human genetics · 2025Review
- Was descent in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe patrilineal or bilateral?Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Ancient DNA reveals diverse community organizations in the 5th millennium BCE Carpathian Basin.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Urbanization and genetic homogenization in the medieval Low Countries revealed through a ten-century paleogenomic study of the city of Sint-Truiden.Genome biology · 2025Article
- Social and genetic diversity in first farmers of central Europe.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Slavs in the closet: computational genomic analysis reveals cryptic slavic signatures in the Avar Khaganate and their contribution to medieval Croatian population formation.Frontiers in genetics · 2025Article
- Leveraging ancient DNA to uncover signals of natural selection in Europe lost due to admixture or drift.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Pervasive findings of directional selection realize the promise of ancient DNA to elucidate human adaptation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Review
- The Allen Ancient DNA Resource (AADR) a curated compendium of ancient human genomes.Scientific data · 2024Article
- Haplotype-based inference of recent effective population size in modern and ancient DNA samples.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Understanding natural selection in Holocene Europe using multi-locus genotype identity scans.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
Abstract
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.
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