Man killed by quartz arrow 12,000 years ago
Hunter-gatherers from 12,000 years ago used quartz-tipped weapons against each other, according to evidence unearthed by scientists from Liverpool John Moores and Oxford universities and the Smithsonian.
The remains of a man shot by an arrow with an exotic stone tip has been described by the team in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
The man, found in what is now Vietnam, survived the initial injury but likely succumbed to infection, according to Dr Alex Wilshaw, a forensic anthropologist in the School of Biological and Environmental Sciences.
The discovery was made at Thung Binh 1, a cave in the limestone karst of the Tràng An UNESCO World Heritage landscape, by an international team from the SUNDASIA project, directed by Dr Ryan Rabett (Queen’s University Belfast/Arts and Humanities Research Council UK).
Death on the Red River
The study of the remains was led by Dr Chris Stimpson (Oxford University Museum of Natural History/Natural History Museum UK) who oversaw the recovery of the skeleton in the cave.
Reconstruction and analysis of the skeleton by Dr Wilshaw revealed that the man was around 35 years old at death and stood approximately 1.7 meters tall (5’7”). Skull measurements and mitochondrial DNA link him to early hunter-gatherer populations from Southeast Asia and examination of his skeleton indicated good health in life. It was the manner of his death, however, which sets the discovery apart.
It appears that a sharp implement pierced his neck with sufficient force to fracture a cervical rib. The culprit, a quartz point, was found in association with the injured bone, but this artifact presents something of a mystery.
“The point is especially intriguing,” said lithic specialist Dr Benjamin Utting of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. “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.”
Cared for by tribe
The injury was not immediately fatal. Instead, the damaged bone indicated a likely death from infection, over weeks or months.
Dr Wilshaw added: “This individual must have initially been in very good health to have survived so long with this injury, there must have been people caring for him, bringing food and sheltering him.
“The injury and infection would have been debilitating and he would have been in an incredible amount of pain for a long time before his eventual death.”
This skeleton is such a rare and important find. There are almost no skeletons of this age in existence in the whole of Southeast Asia and very few from across the world. At 12,000 years old, it predates the population changes of the last 10,000 years that have given rise to the people we see today.
