Ancient bones discovered in a cave in Vietnam could belong to one of the world's earliest known victims of homicide.
An analysis of the bones and circumstances of his death suggests that the man, aged around 35 years at the time of his death, some 12,000 years ago, died at the hands of another human.
If so, it would be the earliest known case of interpersonal violence in Southeast Asia, says a team led by archaeologist Christopher Stimpson of Oxford University in the UK.
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The bones were excavated in the archaeological site in a cave called Thung Binh 1 in the Tràng An Landscape Complex World Heritage Site between December 2017 and April 2018.
Although his skull was crushed in his grave – damage that occurred post mortem – the man, named TBH1, appeared to have been local to the region and died in good health, initial analysis of his bones suggested.
Since people in good health don't generally tend to drop dead, this was a little curious. Then the mystery deepened. An examination of the man's neck revealed two surprising things: first, he had a cervical rib, an extra rib seen in around one percent of people; and second, there was a quartz point in the sediment in which the man was interred.
On closer inspection, the researchers found that the quartz point had been deliberately worked, probably as a projectile. Also, it wasn't local stone by a long shot.
"It doesn't match any other stone tools from Thung Binh 1 or nearby sites, raising questions about who made it and where it came from," says archaeologist Benjamin Utting of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
Looking more closely at the bones, the researchers were able to piece together a likely sequence of events. One of the man's cervical ribs showed signs of fracture, but also infection.
Stimpson and his colleague believe the man was struck by a stone-tipped projectile in his neck, where it lodged after damaging his rib. Infection then set into the wound, and the man sickened and died several days to weeks after the attack.
It's just one event in a long history of human-on-human violence. People buried in the Jebel Sahaba cemetery dating back 13,000 years show heavy signs of interpersonal damage, for example. Ötzi the Iceman was murdered in the Italian Alps 5,300 years ago. The earliest candidate for a case of murder is seen in a pre-Neanderthal hominid who died 430,000 years ago.
Doubtless there are many, many other archaeological remains whose murders remain undetected, but in TBH1 it appears to be pretty clear-cut.
"The evidence of trauma together with the artefact that caused it is an exceptional find for the region specifically and this time period, more generally," Stimpson says.
The research has been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.