Shattered skeleton is first confirmed death from trebuchet

5 days ago (science.org)

"What are you going to do, lob a stone at me from 300m away?" shouted the man on the parapet, moments before impact.

“The breaks indicate a very large area of impact and devastation,” she says. “It’s likely the individual was killed by a siege engine.”

So it’s likely, which means it’s not confirmed as the headline implies.

  • I don't get the nitpicking here. Scientifically correct, since circumstantial. Meteor is also possible, but very unlikely.

    The probability regimes in which science is dealing often only leave marginal room for alternative explanations.

Trebuchets were used in the Syrian civil war (2011-2024).

I would link a video but I don't think that is a wise idea for legal reasons. There were so many parties in that war and I'm not sure which ones were declared terrorist organizations.

"...uncovered the graves of nine skeletons dated to the early 1300s. Five, including Skeleton 150, dated to the 1300s."

That seems like a contradiction.

  • I parsed it as ((mass grave containing 9 skeletons) dated to the early 1300s) && ((5 skeletons) dated to the 1300s).

    As in, the grave itself was dated, and 5 of the 9 skeletons found inside were also individually dated to roughly the same century. Maybe the other 4 were not tested, or turned out to have been buried at a later date.

But have they identified the trebuchet that killed him?

We can rule out Warwolf [1] my favorite trebuchet, which never killed anyone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warwolf

  • > We can rule out Warwolf

    Can we? That Wikipedia page is inconclusive, and thus article says:

    During Edward I’s 1304 siege of the castle, English forces deployed the recently invented trebuchet, a weapon first documented in the 12th century. A cousin to the catapult, trebuchets were capable of hurling boulders weighing more than 100 kilograms hundreds of meters. One at Stirling, dubbed “War Wolf,” “was the biggest trebuchet ever built at that point,” Buckberry says. Eyewitness accounts confirm the giant siege engine was used during the 1304 battle, tearing through two stone walls “as an arrow would fly through a piece of cloth.”

    Accounts of the battle don’t mention any trebuchet casualties. But Buckberry says Skeleton 150’s injuries strongly suggest at least one defender was hit from behind by a flying boulder, launched by War Wolf or one of the other siege engines arrayed outside Stirling Castle’s walls. “It’s a huge amount of energy delivered in milliseconds,” Waltenberger says. “In skeletons from past times you rarely see this.”

Interesting find! I wonder if the massive damage could also be explained by the falling wall (documented in the article).

  • Unlikely, as a regular slow crush gives very different injuries compared to a high velocity impact.

    • It depends on how tall the damaged structure was. A large chunk of masonry falling from a tower could reach speeds comparable to a car crash.

Hope he died quickly, instead of having to deal with the pain of multiple bones crushing

Our modern weapons are far more destructive, but our propensity for violence and war seems to be an invariant across the millennia.

> indicates horrific demise

If I go, I would like to go from massive blunt trauma from behind that renders me instantly unconscious.

> 14th century

While this death may be the first confirmed from a trebuchet, is that really the first death by a trebuchet? Plus, I'd say catapults are almost identical to a trebuchet in workings, for the most part. I don't quite believe that this was really the first death by catapult.

  • Catapults store energy using elastic deformation, like a bow; counterweight trebuchets store energy using gravity.

  • Didn't the Romans have something similar?

    • The Romans had onagers and ballista, both of which work via string tension. Then around 6AD it seems string traction (mangonels) where introduced from China and finally counterweight/gravity was introduced in the 12th century.

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