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In a discovery shedding light on prehistoric human conflict, archaeologists have found a flint arrowhead embedded in a human rib dating back more than 4,000 years. The remains were unearthed at Roc de les Orenetes, a high-altitude collective burial site in the Catalan Pyrenees (northeast Spain), situated over 1,800 meters above sea level. This exceptional find—revealing direct evidence of interpersonal violence—was made during recent excavations led by Dr. Carlos Tornero from the IPHES-CERCA and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. This discovery provides a rare, tangible glimpse into the social tensions within early highland communities of the third millennium BCE. It...

The 5,000-year-old swords found 43 years ago during the excavations in the old mud-brick palace structure in Malatya Arslantepe Mound are the oldest swords in the world. Many archaeologists believed that the earliest swords only dated to around 1600 or 1500 BCE before the discovery of a cache of swords at the archaeological site of Arslantepe in Turkey. The nine swords from the archaeological site of Arslantepe (Melid) attest to the use of this weapon for the first time in the world – at least a millennium before the already-known examples. They date back to the Early Bronze Age (c....