TBH1 was a relatively healthy 35-year-old living in prehistoric Southeast Asia, presumably doing cave guy stuff like hunting and foraging. Thanks to some suspicious bone trauma paired with a stone shard where stone shards usually are found, researchers believe TBH one didn’t die of natural causes. He might be the victim of one of the earliest recorded murders in human history.
Excavated from the Thung Binh 1 cave in Vietnam’s Tràng An Landscape Complex, TBH1’s remains were unearthed between 2017 and 2018 by an international team. That team was led by archaeologist Christopher Stimpson, who published his findings in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
It looked like a regular prehistoric burial, with the usual post-mortem skull smashing, a grisly yet common occurrence in ancient gravesites. However, things got a little odd when the researchers more closely examined the bones.
Scientists Say a 12,000-Year-Old Skeleton Shows Evidence of Murder
TBH1 had a fractured cervical rib, a rare extra rib in the neck that only one percent of humans have. In nearby sediment, they found a suspiciously pointy bit of nonlocal quartz that looked like a weapon.
Stimpson’s team concluded that the quartz projectile had been deliberately shaped and launched straight into TBH1’s neck. It cracked the rib, got lodged in his flesh, and eventually led to an infection that killed him slowly, painfully, over days or weeks.
If this is all correct, TBH1’s story becomes the oldest known case of interpersonal violence— aka murder—in Southeast Asia. This is a prehistoric cold case that was cracked open with a combination of good old-fashioned paleontology and modern-ish day CSI-style bone analysis.
Most ancient murders are lost to time, bones scattered and stories forgotten. But TBH1 gives us a rare look at the long, grim, and depressing history of human-on-human violence. This one probably resulted from an ancient beef that turned deadly before it could be properly squashed.
We’ll never really know now, though, will we?
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