Bones lay tightly packed inside what had once been a semi-subterranean house, along with bronze ornaments, pottery vessels, and the butchered remains of animals. The scene was not chaotic. It was arranged. Archaeologists studying the Early Iron Age site of Gomolava in northern Serbia now say the burial represents one of the largest prehistoric mass killings in Europe, and one that appears to have deliberately targeted women and children. Their findings, published in Nature Human Behaviour, challenge long-held assumptions about how violence operated in prehistoric societies. The grave contained the remains of at least 77 people buried around 2,800 years ago. Most were female, and more than half were children. “When we encounter mass graves from prehistory with this kind of demographic, we might expect they were families from a village that was attacked,” said co-lead Associate Professor Barry Molloy of University College Dublin’s School of Archaeology. “Gomolava genuinely took us by surprise when our genetic analysis showed the majority of people studied were not only unrelated, not even their great–great-grandparents were.” Map showing the …