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It begins with a mystery.

Potočani is a small farming village in the Croatian interior, closer to the borders of Hungary and Bosnia-Herzegovina than to its own capital Zagreb. In 2007, a villager in the nearby hills began to dig a foundation for a garage. Heavy rains stopped his work and revealed a small pit. Bones protruded from the earth.

The villager knew he had found a mass grave. But to further identify the skeletons he called the University of Zagreb. By chance, an archaeological team was nearby working on a highway project. They were able to study the remains on the very same day.

Mass graves are an unfortunate part of the landscape in that region. 44 corpses were identified. At first, it was assumed that the bodies were from the recent Balkans conflict, or perhaps from World War II, but they found no modern objects in the pit. Upon inspecting the teeth of the dead, they found no fillings. These were not modern corpses. In fact, they were prehistoric. And they were men and women, old and young, close kin and stranger.
Potočani is the oldest indiscriminate massacre ever discovered.

Mario Novak, head of the Laboratory for Evolutionary Anthropology and Bioarchaeology at the Institute for Anthropological Research in Zagreb, Croatia, led a team who published a study in Plos One called Genome-wide analysis of nearly all the victims of a 6200 year old massacre. It details the genetic characteristics of 41 of the 44 bodies. The remaining three had insufficient material remaining for a genetic sample. What they learned opens a window into ancient Croatia.

The paper states: Direct radiocarbon dates (~4200 BCE) as well as several recovered pottery fragments, assign the massacred people to the Middle Eneolithic (Copper Age) Lasinja culture which was widespread in the region of continental Croatia, northern Bosnia, Slovenia, eastern Austria, and western Hungary.