New Delhi, June 2: Even in 5000 BC, men were ready to kill for sex.

A 6,800-year-old mass grave in Germany has thrown up the earliest evidence so far to suggest that prehistoric farming communities killed males from rival tribes to capture their women.

Scientists have analysed the teeth of skeletons from a pit at Talheim in southwest Germany to reconstruct what appeared to be a massacre in which men and children were selectively killed and the women spared.

The skeletons in the three-metre-long pit — discovered by German scientists two decades ago — show signs of violent injury. At least 20 had been killed by blows to the head or by arrows in the back, pointing to a single violent massacre.

Now, researchers at Britain’s Durham University suggest that it could have been an attack on a local tribe by outsiders, with the local women “selectively taken alive at the time of the massacre”.

“This is the earliest physical evidence for violence motivated by competition over women,” said anthropologist Alex Bentley, lead author of the research paper just published in the journal Antiquity.

“All evidence until now was either archaeological evidence for violence, with the role of sex unresolved, or was much more recent, historical evidence for violent contests over women,” Bentley told The Telegraph.

The chemical analysis of the teeth has helped Bentley and his colleagues to cluster the skeletons into three groups. One group represents a local tribe while the other two are outsiders.

“The local group was almost certainly the target of the attack,” Bentley said. “(Yet) the local adult women are conspicuously missing from among the victims. Assuming the massacre and the absence of local women are connected… the simplest explanation is that they were captured.”

Radiocarbon dating on the bones suggest the individuals lived between 4900 BC and 4800 BC. The researchers believe that both the attackers and the target tribe were neolithic communities, Europe’s earliest farmers who had domesticated pigs, sheep and cattle and farmed wheat, lentils and peas.