Fifteen members of one family were killed with blows to the head at Koszyce, and the fathers who were missing from the grave appear to have buried them

In 2011 archaeologists near the village of Koszyce in southern Poland excavated a grave holding 15 people: women, children and young men. Every one had been killed by blows to the head, possibly in a raid on their settlement. Radiocarbon dating places the killing between 2880 and 2776 BC. The bodies were laid out with care and given generous grave goods. In 2019 a team from Copenhagen, Aarhus and Poznań sequenced their genomes in PNAS. All belonged to one extended family of three generations, four nuclear families. A mother lay cradling her child. Individual 14, the oldest, lay near her two sons. A woman of 30 to 35 lay with her teenage daughter and five-year-old son. Four of the males were brothers or half-brothers. A boy of two lay among his second-degree kin, with neither parent in the grave. Only one father was present, buried opposite his partner and son. Morten Allentoft said, "Everyone in the grave was a woman, a child or a young man." The team's theory is that the fathers were away during the attack, came back and buried their families by kinship. The family had no steppe ancestry, unlike their Corded Ware neighbours. The killers are unknown; the authors suggest a territorial conflict.