4,000-year-old victim was shot in the back—and survived with an arrow to the rib
"It is direct evidence of a violent conflict episode," says Carlos Tornero, who led the team that unearthed the rib in a mountain cave 6,000 feet above sea level near the Spanish-French border. His team announced the finding July 8.
Previous excavations at the cave—called Roc de les Orenetes, or "Rock of the Swallows" in Catalan—unearthed thousands of human bones. Some had fractures and cut marks apparently caused by stone-tipped spears, arrows, and copper or bronze axes and daggers. The researchers published their analysis of the bones last year and concluded the injuries came from conflicts with other groups. This latest finding reinforces that idea. The interior of the cave as seen from the entrance. Photograph by Leo Pérez, IPHES-CERCA
"This extraordinary discovery is direct proof, and confirms our initial hypothesis," says Tornero, an archaeologist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA).
Little is known about who shot the arrow, except that they were probably from an enemy group who fought violently against the people later buried in the cave—in a dispute over territory, or perhaps access to resources. The researchers dated the violent episodes to between 2550 and 2150 B.C.
Tornero says the victims in the cave were likely from a single clan of Early Bronze Age farming people; but their attackers may have been nomadic hunters. The archer shot this individual from behind so the arrow lodged in their back, within the rib cage but below the shoulder blade.
"Undoubtedly, the person who was struck had little ability to react in time to avoid it," says Tornero. Excavation work at the Roc de les Orenetes site, where human remains dating to 2400 BC can be seen in the foreground. Photograph by Leo Pérez, IPHES-CERCA The moment of the discovery of a flint arrowhead with a broken tip, dated to 2400 BC. Photograph by Iván Ramírez, IPHES-CERCA
Each arrowhead found in the cave was likely once embedded in the flesh of the dead people interred there, he says. But this individual did not die from their arrow wound—instead, the rib bone shows signs of healing that indicate the victim lived for a long time after their close encounter with death, Tornero says.
Roc de les Orenetes was discovered in 1969, and the remains of 60 bodies—many bearing scars from battle—have since been unearthed there, although only one-third of the site has been excavated, according to Tornero. The newly found arrowhead is another indicator of the violent conflicts in prehistory, as well as final proof for Tornero that the ancient people buried at Roc de les Orenetes were sometimes the victims of violence—and may have been the perpetrators of deadly violence in return.
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National Geographic
a day ago
- National Geographic
4,000-year-old victim was shot in the back—and survived with an arrow to the rib
A flint arrowhead lodged in a rib from a person who lived in the Spanish Pyrenees more than 4,000 years ago was most likely shot during a skirmish with a rival clan, researchers say. "It is direct evidence of a violent conflict episode," says Carlos Tornero, who led the team that unearthed the rib in a mountain cave 6,000 feet above sea level near the Spanish-French border. His team announced the finding July 8. Previous excavations at the cave—called Roc de les Orenetes, or "Rock of the Swallows" in Catalan—unearthed thousands of human bones. Some had fractures and cut marks apparently caused by stone-tipped spears, arrows, and copper or bronze axes and daggers. The researchers published their analysis of the bones last year and concluded the injuries came from conflicts with other groups. This latest finding reinforces that idea. The interior of the cave as seen from the entrance. Photograph by Leo Pérez, IPHES-CERCA "This extraordinary discovery is direct proof, and confirms our initial hypothesis," says Tornero, an archaeologist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA). Little is known about who shot the arrow, except that they were probably from an enemy group who fought violently against the people later buried in the cave—in a dispute over territory, or perhaps access to resources. The researchers dated the violent episodes to between 2550 and 2150 B.C. Tornero says the victims in the cave were likely from a single clan of Early Bronze Age farming people; but their attackers may have been nomadic hunters. The archer shot this individual from behind so the arrow lodged in their back, within the rib cage but below the shoulder blade. "Undoubtedly, the person who was struck had little ability to react in time to avoid it," says Tornero. Excavation work at the Roc de les Orenetes site, where human remains dating to 2400 BC can be seen in the foreground. Photograph by Leo Pérez, IPHES-CERCA The moment of the discovery of a flint arrowhead with a broken tip, dated to 2400 BC. Photograph by Iván Ramírez, IPHES-CERCA Each arrowhead found in the cave was likely once embedded in the flesh of the dead people interred there, he says. But this individual did not die from their arrow wound—instead, the rib bone shows signs of healing that indicate the victim lived for a long time after their close encounter with death, Tornero says. Roc de les Orenetes was discovered in 1969, and the remains of 60 bodies—many bearing scars from battle—have since been unearthed there, although only one-third of the site has been excavated, according to Tornero. The newly found arrowhead is another indicator of the violent conflicts in prehistory, as well as final proof for Tornero that the ancient people buried at Roc de les Orenetes were sometimes the victims of violence—and may have been the perpetrators of deadly violence in return.
Newsweek
2 days ago
- Newsweek
Model Responds To Fake Astronomer CEO Daughter Video
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National Geographic
2 days ago
- National Geographic
A century ago, there was a race to make the first color photos. Now there's a race to save them.
The revolutionary invention of autochromes changed photography. As those pictures decay, they're revealing a new kind of beauty. First digitized in 2008 (left), this 1937 photo of a dance performance in Mississippi was created using Dufaycolor, an early color-film product. By 2023, it had been transformed by a form of chemical deterioration known as vinegar syndrome. Photograph by J. Baylor Roberts, National Geographic Image Collection In the early 1980s, the late National Geographic Society photographer turned archivist Volkmar Wentzel was delving through storage when he stumbled onto something both breathtaking and heartbreaking: a box of delicate glass panels, most of them the size of postcards, displaying color images captured in the early 20th century. Many were deteriorating, their once crisp scenes speckled with ghostly snowflakes, obscured by halos, and otherwise rendered surreal by time and neglect. They were autochromes, the products of a turn-of-the-20th-century race to capture the world in all its color. And now the race was on to preserve them, even as time transformed them in extraordinary ways. Introduced in 1907 by French inventors Auguste and Louis Lumière, autochrome technology was revolutionary in its day, relying on a light-sensitive silver emulsion covered with a fine layer of potato starch. That powdery extract—then popular as thickener, adhesive, and fabric stiffener—was crucial to capturing the chroma of the era. Microscopic particles dyed green, orange, and violet were scattered across a plate and sealed on with varnish. When light struck the plate through a camera's open shutter, each colored granule blocked a range of wavelengths corresponding to colors of the visible spectrum, exposing the emulsion beneath to countless tiny dots of variously filtered light. Some autochromes—early 20th-century color photos on glass plates—now have freckles from oxidizing silver particles, as in this undated, unidentified landscape. Unknown Photographer, National Geographic Image Collection After a few chemical baths in a darkroom, the transparency that appeared on glass was, seen up close, a pointillistic mosaic. But pull back and shine light through the plate—covered with another glass layer, for protection—and a vivid, painterly image emerged. National Geographic magazine's first full-time editor was an autochrome champion, commissioning and procuring glass plate works from photographers around the world. Because exposure times were long, much of early color photography consists of still lifes and landscapes, but National Geographic acquired dynamic images of life as it's lived: of crowded bazaars in Albania, of masked dancers in Tibet, of riders atop brightly garbed elephants in India. Autochromes, together with similar processes involving glass plates, remained the primary means of making color photos until the 1935 debut of Kodachrome film, with its layers of emulsion that were themselves photosensitive. In the film era, the Society's glass plates were not carefully preserved. Wentzel, during more than 40 years as a National Geographic field photographer, saw value in the old photos while many of his peers were focused on innovation. When the Society thinned its collection in the 1960s, he rescued plates from the trash, taking them home for safekeeping and eventual return to the archive. Others simply moldered, forgotten, until Wentzel rediscovered them in off-site storage upon becoming the Society's first official photo archivist, in 1980. A Syrian desert patrol on camelback visits the ruins of Palmyra in a 1938 Dufaycolor. This version was scanned in 2012, before its acetate film began visibly degrading. Photograph by W. Robert Moore, National Geographic Image Collection In the past 13 years, the telltale blotch of vinegar syndrome has set in. 'Dufays' and autochromes are kept in cold storage today, which slows but doesn't halt such deterioration. Photograph by W. Robert Moore, National Geographic Image Collection Wentzel made it a mission to preserve, catalog, and exhibit the old photos, and today National Geographic's Early Color Photography Collection comprises some 13,000 plates, including one of the world's largest assemblages of autochromes (the largest is at the Musée Albert-Kahn, outside Paris). But as with many remaining early color photos, National Geographic's have been altered by light, heat, humidity, and improper handling. Plates have cracked and fissured. Oxidizing silver particles have created radiant, amoeba-shaped orange blotches. On the autochrome descendants known as Dufaycolors, violet bruises are evidence of 'vinegar syndrome,' a chemical decay affecting layers of film between glass. Named for its telltale scent and contagious from plate to plate, vinegar syndrome is 'a plague amongst photographic archives,' says Sara Manco, director of the National Geographic Society's photo and illustration archives. Degrading always sounds bad, but they're also developing, from documentary objects into a weird science-history project. Rebecca Dupont , National Geographic image archivist It all sounds rather tragic, but the blemishes also have given many of the plates a strange new beauty. No longer pristine documents of history, they've become testaments to the ravages of time: abstracted, fragmented, and obscured, like so many ancient and admired artifacts. What's more, says image archivist Rebecca Dupont, witnessing the deterioration—a process that will only ever play out once—offers lessons about the science behind these objects. 'If you think about it, photography is still a relatively new medium, only 150 years old,' Dupont says. And the objects in the collection 'haven't yet reached the end of their lives. They're in a special stage right now where we get to see what happens to them.' (These 18 autochrome photos will transport you to another era.) Exposure to humidity caused this Dufaycolor to fade and its film base to shrivel. As National Geographic archivist Sara Manco says, 'We'll never know what that image was like.' Photograph by Rudolf Balogh, National Geographic Image Collection Even as the plates continue to deteriorate, some measure of permanence has been achieved. With a 2020 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Manco and a team of archivists spent three years digitizing the entire collection. These days, the originals are carefully organized in temperature-controlled storage. Those afflicted with vinegar syndrome are sequestered, and many broken ones have been painstakingly pieced together. Despite all that care, the archivists know they can't preserve the plates forever—and they're OK with that. 'Degrading always sounds bad, but they're also developing, from documentary objects into a weird science-history project,' Dupont says. 'Are the images we're looking at being lost? Or are they just being changed into something new?' A version of this story appears in the August 2025 issue of National Geographic magazine.
