According to the Nature article published by Dr. Mirazón Lahr and colleagues, the skeletons present the earliest evidence for intergroup violence among hunting-foraging populations, which they interpret as a "massacre":[2] the remains of adults and six children show signs of a violent end, having been clubbed or stabbed and left to die without burial.

First, these authors suggest that much of the evidence of peri-mortem trauma identified by Mirazón Lahr is equally - if not more - likely to have occurred after deposition; that is, after the skeletons were buried, intentionally or otherwise.

The area has produced thousands of animal fossils: elephants, hippos, rhinos, giraffe, zebras, warthogs, buffaloes, antelopes, gazelles, primates, hyraxes, snakes, turtles, crocodiles and fish, as well as lions, hyaenas and wild dogs.

[citation needed] In 2012, fragments of human bones were found on the surface at Nataruk, mixed with gravel, an area that is barren desert today.

The survey of the site showed that Nataruk was exceptional not only in the number of exposed remains, but also in their distribution throughout a large area of ~200 x 100 m, forming clusters along a sandy ridge and on two mounts.

Two individuals were found to have no lesions in the preserved parts of the skeleton, but the position of their hands suggests they may have been bound, including a young woman who was heavily pregnant at the time.

Prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies were not sedentary and did not own land or have significant possessions, and their small numbers constrained the development of social hierarchies.

[11] If Mirazón Lahr and colleagues' interpretations are correct, the findings at Nataruk suggest that inter-group conflict has a long history and was part of the life of hunter-gatherers.

The attack combined distance (arrows) and close-proximity (melee) weaponry (clubs, stone knives), suggesting premeditation and planning.

Finally, two of the projectiles found embedded in the human skeletons at Nataruk and in 2 of the other 3 cases of violent trauma in Southwest Turkana were made of obsidian, a rare stone in this area, suggesting that the attackers came from a different place.

Regarding the motive for the attack, the hunter-gatherers that lived around Nataruk may have had valuable resources that were worth fighting for—water, game and its meat, fish, nuts, or indeed women and children, suggesting that two of the conditions associated with warfare among settled societies—territory and resources—were probably the same for these groups.

So Nataruk was at the centre of the best hunting and fishing grounds in that part of the Turkana Basin, and the hunter-gatherer communities there had access to much richer resources than others.

"[13]Antoine Zazzo has since carried out radiocarbon dating of the human remains using apatite,[14] although he stresses the ages obtained should be treated with caution "...because the reliability of the reference age, a bone collagen sample dated in the late 60's or very early 70's, i.e.well before the advent of modern purification techniques, and in a site where collagen preservation is very poor, remains questionable.

However, several aspects make Jebel Sahaba very different from Nataruk, suggesting parallels between Jebel Sahaba and later Neolithic sedentary societies: The differences between the two sites make what was discovered at Nataruk even more significant by establishing that inter-group violence can and did arise independent of whether populations were sedentary and had possessions that today are identified as valuable.