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1903
- In 1903, Parisian police clerk Alphonse Bertillon became the first to photo document a crime scene.
allthatsinteresting.com › alphonse-bertillon-photography33 Of The Very First Crime Scene Photographs Taken In The ...
Oct 26, 2017 · When the Paris police investigated Madame Debeinche’s May 1903 murder, they began by photographing the crime scene.
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- Overview
- Cause of death
- The weapon
- The motive
The first known murder was just as brutal as any other. The attacker smashed the victim twice in the head, leaving matching holes above the victim’s left eyebrow. The dead body was then dropped down a 43-foot shaft into a cave—where it lay for nearly half a million years.
Talk about your cold case.
Paleontologists pieced together the 430,000-year-old skull and reported their forensic analysis Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE. Injuries to the skull represent the oldest direct evidence of homicide, the scientists say.
As 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. The scientists can describe this victim as a young adult, but the age and even gender are unknown.
“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.
That doesn’t mean killing was uncommon before modern times, of course, but fossilized remains of any kind are relatively rare so far back.
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. A face-to-face attack with a blunt instrument best fits the pattern of injury, the scientists say. The bones showed no evidence of healing, so the victim probably died immediately or soon after the attack.
What’s more, the two holes in the skull are the same shape and appear to have been made by the same weapon. It’s very unlikely that an accidental fall onto a rock would produce two nearly identical skull fractures, the team says.
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.
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.
Another unsolved mystery: what drove an ancient person to kill. “Life was hard in the past,” Sala says, so there could have conflicts over resources or any number of reasons for a fight.
Even with difficult lives, though, Sala describes the Sima de los Huesos people as caring for one another. “There were 28 individuals at the site of different ages,” she says. “We know that some of these people had health problems. 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.
And 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.
Overall, the site paints a picture of ancient people who lived, loved—and sometimes fought—together.
- Erika Engelhaupt
Dec 27, 2018 · Nearly 150 years later, in 1248 AD, the first documentation of medical knowledge aimed at solving crimes was recorded in the book "Hsi Duan Yu" (the Washing Away of Wrong). It detailed the process of distinguishing drowning from strangulation.
Mar 20, 2024 · The very first crime scene photographs ever made were taken by a pioneering detective from Paris who realized how useful photography can be in solving a case.
May 27, 2015 · The specific site in question, Sima de los Huesos (“Pit of Bones”), was discovered in 1984 and contains the remains of at least 28 early Neanderthal individuals from the Middle Pleistocene, a...
Jul 14, 2021 · Published July 14, 2021. Updated July 15, 2021. In 1903, Parisian police clerk Alphonse Bertillon became the first to photo document a crime scene. Years earlier, he streamlined the use of mugshots, effectively revolutionizing detective work all with a camera.
In 1888, during the reign of England's most notorious serial killer, Jack the Ripper, the use of crime scene photographs were extensively studied in an effort to detect clues and criminal profiling of the vicious murderer.
