![]() Though the case is closed, the mystery surrounding how she ended up in the water tank on the roof remains. Elisa's bipolar disorder was also listed as a significant factor. The case was closed in June 2013, and the cause of death was listed as accidental drowning. It was then when Lam's body was discovered, floating naked in one of the four large tanks that provided the hotel's water supply." In the video, Elisa gets in and out of the elevator, peeking around the doors and making erratic hand gestures.Īccording to Esquire, "On February 19, 2013, twenty days after Lam was last seen, a hotel staffer was sent up to the roof of the hotel to check on the water tanks after several guest complaints about low pressure and murky water coming out of the taps. After law enforcement could not find any leads, the uncanny footage of Elisa inside the hotel's elevator was released to the public on Feb. All of her belongings were left in the hotel room. 1, 2013, 21-year-old Elisa Lam was reported missing after failing to check out of her hotel room at the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles. Sala’s take on life with Homo heidelbergensis: “They’re not so bad-at least they have also good points.Here's what we know: On Feb. Overall, the site paints a picture of ancient people who lived, loved-and sometimes fought-together. One person had very serious pathology in the lower back and probably had troule walking and moving.” Someone had to be caring for these people before their deaths, she says.Īnd while it might not sound like a lovely funeral today, the fact that people living at the site buried bodies by dropping them down the same shaft indicates some sense of ceremonial burial or ritual-the dead weren’t merely dragged away from the campsite to decay. “We know that some of these people had health problems. “There were 28 individuals at the site of different ages,” she says. “Life was hard in the past,” Sala says, so there could have conflicts over resources or any number of reasons for a fight.Įven with difficult lives, though, Sala describes the Sima de los Huesos people as caring for one another. The motiveĪnother unsolved mystery: what drove an ancient person to kill. ![]() The scientists scoured the site, she says, but didn’t turn up any potential murder weapons. There was only stone tool found at the site, and it wasn’t the right shape. Sala says the weapon was probably “something very hard,” but we’ll never know if it was made of wood or rock, or something else. It’s very unlikely that an accidental fall onto a rock would produce two nearly identical skull fractures, the team says. What’s more, the two holes in the skull are the same shape and appear to have been made by the same weapon. The bones showed no evidence of healing, so the victim probably died immediately or soon after the attack. A face-to-face attack with a blunt instrument best fits the pattern of injury, the scientists say. To figure out whether the skull fractures resulted from blows or from the fall down the cave shaft, the team compared the injuries to those from modern cases of violence and falls. Who were these people? Well, they weren’t modern humans, and they weren’t really Neanderthals either.Įxactly what to call the Sima de los Huesos people has been debated, but Sala and her colleagues identify them as members of the species Homo heidelbergensis, an early human ancestor that gave rise to the Neanderthals. The latest skull comes from the Sima de los Huesos, or “Pit of Bones,” site in Spain, where paleontologists have found the remains of at least 28 individuals. A cut on one of his left ribs shows that Shanidar-3 was probably killed by a spear, making him perhaps the oldest known murder victim prior to the new find. ![]() Take the case of Shanidar-3, a Neanderthal who lived about than 50,000 years ago. The last several tens of thousands of years, on the other hand, are littered with grisly scenes. That doesn’t mean killing was uncommon before modern times, of course, but fossilized remains of any kind are relatively rare so far back. “In the fossil record, there are many cases of traumatic injury, but not a lot of evidence of killing,” says Sala, a paleontologist at the Instituto de Salud Carlos III in Madrid. The scientists can describe this victim as a young adult, but the age and even gender are unknown. Injuries to the skull represent the oldest direct evidence of homicide, the scientists say.Īs for whether this was the first murder ever to occur, “for sure that’s not the case,” says Nohemi Sala, lead author of the study. Paleontologists pieced together the 430,000-year-old skull and reported their forensic analysis Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE. The dead body was then dropped down a 43-foot shaft into a cave-where it lay for nearly half a million years. The attacker smashed the victim twice in the head, leaving matching holes above the victim’s left eyebrow. The first known murder was just as brutal as any other.
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