Scientists reexamined a 100,000-year-old human skull and found the victim had likely been stabbed in the face with a stone tool

Imagine a murder mystery so old that the “crime scene” is a cave in northern Israel, and the only witness is a skull. According to a new study published in Scientific Reports, a team of researchers led by paleoanthropologist Ana Pantoja Pérez took a fresh, high-tech look at a roughly 100,000-year-old skeleton known as Qafzeh 25. What they found was a healed cut mark on the jaw that the researchers interpret as being made by a sharp stone tool, not a fall or an animal bite. If that interpretation is correct, it may be among the oldest known cases of survival after such an injury.

For millennials and Gen Z who grew up on true crime podcasts, this is basically the ultimate cold case. Except it took CT scanners and microscopes instead of detectives, and instead of decades, it took about a thousand centuries to crack.

Meet Qafzeh 25
The remains were excavated decades ago at Qafzeh Cave, a site near Nazareth that has intrigued archaeologists for almost a century. At least 27 people were buried there between about 145,000 and 92,000 years ago, making them some of the earliest known skeletons of Homo sapiens outside Africa.


That alone is what makes Qafzeh important. These were not a few old bones lying around by chance. Those buried here were placed deliberately, some with grave goods such as deer antlers placed next to their bodies. That’s a big deal because it shows early humans had rituals around death, thousands of generations before pyramids or Stonehenge.

The clue that changes the story
Qafzeh 25 was an adult male, and his skull had been studied before. But this time, researchers used micro-CT scanning and microscopic imaging to analyze the bone in much greater detail than was possible with earlier tools. What they saw was a cut across the lower left jaw that went into a tooth and a little bit of the upper jaw, too.

Here’s the twist worthy of a documentary: the bone was somewhat healed. It meant that the man didn’t die instantly. He lived through the injury and for a while afterward, the study noted.

Also, the location of the wound is important. The cut was on the left side of his face, and studies of modern forensic patterns show that in a face-to-face attack, injuries are generally on the left side more often, as most attackers are right-handed. That is one of the reasons the team thinks this was an act of violence rather than an accident.

Why a scratch on an ancient jaw is actually a big deal
Injuries from sharp weapons are incredibly rare in skeletons this old. Most of the Stone Age trauma that archaeologists have documented is blunt force trauma, like by a rock or a club, not something with an edge.

A separate, well-known study of another Qafzeh individual, a child named Qafzeh 11, revealed a very different type of injury: a blunt-force fracture to the skull that the child survived for years afterwards, as reported in the widely-cited 2014 study in PLOS ONE. Collectively, the two cases make the Qafzeh cave appear less like a unique burial site and more like a snapshot of everyday human peril, from conflict, accidents, or just a hard life.

If the interpretation is correct, the study adds evidence for injury, care, and deliberate burial in the same population. That’s a more complete picture of early human society than just tool use or fire.

What this means for how we think about ancient people
It's easy to imagine early humans as primitive or merely focused on survival. This finding turns that on its head. The findings provide real data to the ongoing debate of when complex behaviors such as interpersonal violence, caring for the sick or injured, and funeral customs first appeared in our species, said the lead author Ana Pantoja Pérez in a statement from Spain's National Research Centre on Human Evolution (CENIEH).

So next time true crime fans talk about the “oldest unsolved case,” this one might actually take the title. Somewhere in a cave near Nazareth, about 100,000 years ago, someone got into a fight, survived it, and was later laid to rest by people who clearly cared. It’s a very human story, even now, all this time.