I don’t know if I understand the reasoning behind them concluding it had to be a single event. Why couldn’t it have been a drawn out event like cannibalism, or a single individual like a serial killer? They don’t seem to provide very sound reasoning to this conclusion and use that assumption throughout the rest of the paper.
I think they're saying it was a single event because (so they also say) all 37 people were all killed in the same way: close-range, with a blunt instrument, and at what they assume—from the carbon dating and location of the bones—was about the same time. They do jump to the conclusion that it was a massacre pretty quickly, but it does make enough sense, I guess.
They speculate that cannibalism could have been involved, but don't talk about a serial killer. It seems a stretch for someone in a Bronze Age society to secretly commit 37 murders, followed by systematic butchery of the bodies, and then burial in a common grave. 37 people may have been the majority of people in your tribal unit, so it would be kind of hard to kill them all without someone noticing!
Why would it be a stretch? Again, you’re making a lot of assumptions. We don’t know a lot of how people lived then. Serial killers in modern society have committed brazen crimes in small communities and got away with it for long periods of time. It seems not very rigorous to discard alternative explanations. I’m not saying it’s likely or the probable thing, I just am not really convinced they were very rigorous about any other possibility other than the conclusion they set out to believe in the beginning.
I agree they didn't give equal time to all possible explanations, but given that they can only speculate, I think they probably chose the most realistic explanation from among the likely possibilities, and they gave it enough throat-clearing up front that I wasn't confused about whether they were saying they'd proven it or not. I'm not saying they couldn't have done a better job of saying "hey, we're just guessing here, for funsies", but it didn't bother me.
Indeed; while it’s great that they did isotopic analysis of the teeth, bone sections, particularly the long bones of adolescents, would reveal if a starvation event was ongoing at the time, and would at least rule out starvation cannibalism, which they hypothesise as possible but unlikely, although don’t give a reason beyond the presence of cattle for it being unlikely.
What if, for instance, they were all dropping dead of some pestilence, and it’s been a bitter winter and a late spring, and you’re short on labour, and your little society is collapsing and protein is scarce.
I don’t know. Hard decisions have been made many times through history.
Starvation would hit other demographic first and harder. The very young and very old would be heavily represented instead. If you're gonna kill people for food teenagers will be the last people you'll kill due to resources invested in them ant potential future yields. You're gonna kill 5yos or something.
I think you are making a ton of assumptions about the hypothetical starvation event. First, if you are killing people for food, you are going to take what you can get. This might be the neighboring tribe of all ages, as described in the article.
Human / child sacrifice. Cannibalism. Happened all over the world. 10 Commandments saying “Thou Shalt Not Kill” is because inhuman religious practices were literally killing children.
