10 Prehistoric Events Too Brutal For History Books

Ten events from before the written record, and what each of them left behind instead of a story. A pit of thirty-four people killed with the same tool their culture used to build houses. A man shot in the back at altitude whose killer took the arrow shaft and left the treasure. More than a hundred and forty children buried in a single wet layer with the footprints still in the mud. A year when the sun gave light without heat on three continents at once. An island where two catastrophes are still being argued over because the people who could settle it were taken. A migration that replaced the gene pool of a continent and may have arrived behind a plague. A letter asking for help that was never sent, baked hard by the fire that answered it. A wave that crossed the last dry ground between Britain and Europe. Two faunas placed in contact by sixty kilometers of new volcanic rock. And a bottleneck with no site, no layer, and nothing to excavate, recorded only in the DNA of people currently alive.