Deadly violence among humans goes back at least 430,000 years ago, as scientists have found evidence of a fatal blow to the head on an ancient skull.

According to BBC News, the skull was unearthed in Northern Spain's "Pit of Bones," a site containing the remains of 28 humans, possibly more. The skull showed the killer hit the victim multiple times with the "intention to kill."

Published in the journal PLOS One, the new discovery also causes a change of perception for the "Pit of Bones" site.

"This individual was killed in an act of lethal interpersonal violence, providing a window into an often invisible aspect of the social life of our human ancestors," study lead author Nohemi Sala, of the Centro Mixto UCM-ISCIII de Evolución y Comportamiento Humano, told CBS News. "The site provides evidence of the earliest funerary practices found to date and suggests this behavior can be traced back to deep within the Middle Pleistocene time period."

The study did not do much for the origin of the human race, but social practices are an important nonetheless.

"The only explanation that we have that can not be rejected is the idea that the human bodies arrived at this place by other humans," study co-author Rolf Quam told NPR. "That other humans went to the top of this vertical shaft and deposited dead members of their social group down into the site, and in this way formed a kind of primitive cemetery or kind of an early manifestation of funerary practices.

"Clearly this is an intentional human disposal of the dead."

Not involved in the study, Debra Martin, an anthropologist at the University of Nevada, called the discovery "completely compelling."

"I suspect the farther we push back and find straight up forensic evidence such as these authors have," she told BBC News, "we will find that violence is culturally mediated and has been with us as long as culture itself has been with us."