A mass grave from roughly 3,000 years ago in what is now Serbia is filled with the remains of women and children and may indicate they were targeted for organized slaughter.
The 9th century B.C. burial pit holds 77 individuals. More than 60 percent were children and more than 70 percent were female, an unusually high proportion, researchers report February 23 in Nature Human Behaviour.
Just under three meters across but only half a meter deep, the pit was found more than 50 years ago by Yugoslav archaeologists. The remains are now curated at the Museum of Vojvodina in the nearby Serbian city of Novi Sad, and were only recently