2,800-year-old mass grave of women and children discovered in Serbia reveals 'brutal, deliberate and efficient' violence

Live Science ^ | February 23, 2026 | Kristina Killgrove

[SunkenCiv]

Archaeologists have analyzed a mass grave in southeastern Europe that held the remains of women and children who were violently murdered 2,800 years ago...

The grave was unearthed at the archaeological site of Gomolava, located near the modern town of Hrtkovci in northern Serbia. Originally founded as a settlement on the Sava River in the sixth millennium B.C., both settled and mobile cultural groups used Gomolava repeatedly over the centuries. By the ninth century B.C., semisedentary groups in the Carpathian Basin were consolidating around sites like Gomolava, creating tension over land use and ownership...

Archaeologists discovered postholes around the burial pit that suggested there had been some sort of memorialization of the grave. The pit also contained ceramic vessels and small, bronze accessories, along with the bones of nearly 100 animals, including the complete skeleton of a young cow at the very bottom of the grave.

But when the researchers began to study the 77 human skeletons in the pit, they found that more than 70% of the skeletons were female and 69% were children.

...the researchers studied the individuals' DNA. This analysis revealed that only a handful of the 77 people had close biological ties, which suggests that the killing was not a raid on a settlement of extended families. A study of the skeletons' strontium isotope ratios -- a chemical variant found in dental enamel that is influenced by geographic origin -- also showed that more than one-third of the people grew up outside the Gomolava region...

A second mass grave was also found at Gomolava in 1954. That pit held mostly female skeletons in addition to the bones of animals, metal objects and ceramics that date to the same era.

[GingisK]

Didn’t mass kills like this occur when a new king installed himself? I know that dynasty changes in China included mass murder, reset of the alphabet, and similar “clean slate” activities.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

Some things never change. Here is my list of mass murders in the New World long before Columbus ever sailed the Ocean Blue.|
How the tribes treated each other before the White Man arrived.
https://archive.news.wsu.edu/press-release/2014/08/04/wsu-researchers-see-violent-era-in-ancient-southwest/#.U9_iumNjYzJ

https://www.science20.com/news_articles/the_most_violent_era_in_america_was_before_europeans_arrived-141847
Who invented Scalping?
https://www.americanheritage.com/who-invented-scalping
http://www.dickshovel.com/scalp.html

Last days of the ancient Pueblos.
https://blairmastbaum.substack.com/p/the-terrifying-final-days-of-the

Tongue River Massacre 1820
https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Tongue_River_Massacre_(1820)
Crow Creek Massacre.
https://www.academia.edu/7907221/Mass_Grave_at_Crow_Creek_in_South_Dakota_Reveals_How_Indians_Massacred_Indians_in_14th_Century_Attack
The Genocide Pit in Sacred Ridge, Colorado
https://strangesounds.org/2019/08/scary-archeology-genocide-pit-sacred-ridge-colorado.html

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archeologists-find-evidence-torture-1200-year-old-massacre-180951922/
Ancient Massacre Discovered in New Mexico — Was It Genocide?
https://lostworlds.org/ancient-massacre-discovered-in-new-mexico-was-it-genocide/
The Gallina of New Mexico: a culture of violence?
https://mountainscholar.org/items/22dafb20-e69e-40c9-96cf-ddcdb14fff0f

Anasazi Cannibalism
https://archive.archaeology.org/9709/newsbriefs/anasazi.html

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/article/abs/additional-evidence-for-cannibalism-in-the-southwest-the-case-of-la-4528/FB7F8B0434EA3118B716AE84EC368DC8
Basketmaker II Cave 7: Massacre or Cemetery?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305440312000829

New Research Supports Theory of Ancient Massacre Site in Utah
https://www.cityweekly.net/BuzzBlog/archives/2013/09/11/new-research-supports-theory-of-ancient-massacre-site-in-utah
Massacre at Awatovi is little known act of genocide
https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/trail_dust/trail-dust-hopi-massacre-at-awatovi-is-little-known-act-of-genocide/image_830b57c1-78ad-5775-8b72-ed47dd6aba23.html
How genocide wiped out a Native American population
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna39268873

Isotopic and genetic analyses of a mass grave in central California: Implications for precontact hunter-gatherer warfare
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26331533/
Buried with their MOTHERS’ SKULLS:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3280870/Why-4-300-year-old-bodies-buried-EXTRA-skulls-500-graves-unearthed-California-showing-signs-bizarre-burial-rituals.html

Claremore Mound Massacre
https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=CL003

[nwrep]

Yes, yes, yes. It became the exception, not the rule. Big difference.

[SunkenCiv]

What you’re saying is absurd.

[SunkenCiv]

Often, and not just in China.

[SunkenCiv]

Putinistas never know what they’re talking about.

[eleni121]

Deranged response.

[SunkenCiv]

Your post? Yes, it is deranged.

[Menes]

Hmmm, but these unfortunates lived many centuries before the Slav migrations into Southeastern Europe.

The victims‘ DNA has, of course, similarities to that of modern-day Serbs, but this is definitely due to the fact that the latter still carry a good amount of pre-Slavic era DNA within their cells🙂 There has just been a Slavic substrate been put over it by the advent of the Slavs in the sixth and seventh centuries - who also were (obviously) able to impose their language upon the people who had come before them 🙂

P.S.: I still remember the sayings of the pro-immigration crowd that America is a nation of immigrants.
Well, that says very little, for if you go back in time far enough, you will realize that all nations had some immigration at some time through the millennia
(There is, after all, no instance in recorded history when human beings simply sprouted out of the ground like flowers).

Numbers of migrants, as well as the general lapse of time, do matter: no movement of humans in recorded history has ever been so massive, and so disruptive, as that of our times…