A group of bones has been found recently in Vietnam, and the experts say they could belong to the oldest murder victim ever to be known. The unfortunate men, called TNH1 because it was founded in the Thung Binh 1 site, inside the Trang And Landscape Complex, lived 12.000 years ago, and according to the team from Oxford University directed by Christopher Stimpson, died in the hands of another human being.
This investigation, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, leans on concrete archeological details: one injury on the neck that affected one cervical rib (only seen in a very small percentage of people), signs of later infections, and in the grave sediment, one very pointy and well-worked quartz that didn’t come from the local area. The murder weapon, maybe? This piece doesn’t fit with the lithic tools from Thung Binh 1 or any other sites around.
Benjamin Utting, from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, points to the fact that “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.” Altogether, these elements draw a prehistoric dark scene: a stone projectile impacted in TBH1, fracturing his cervical rib and causing infection, which after days or weeks led him to die.
The site, the bones, and the context
The excavation in Thung Binh 1 was made between December 2017 and April 2018 inside the Tràng An Landscape Complex. They collected the bones with the necessary context to separate consequences from cause, meaning alteration after the burial. The most relevant part was what they found in the cervical, which, by the way, is an anatomical variation found in only 1% of people. That fracture, the infection, plus the engineered quartz, plus the fact that the stone is not a tool from any of the sites nearby is what guided the forensic experts in the case.
The victim was a 35 year old male, local to the region, and apparently in good health at the moment of the aggression. Healthy people usually don’t die without a cause, and here, the sequence of evidence gives a coherent explanation.
The murder weapon and a plausible sequence of events:
Looking closely, the investigators built a plausible sequence of events: a non local quartz weapon, an impact in TBH1’s neck, and an infection provoking death in the following days. All these pieces separately could tell a different story, but when you put them together, they talk about violence. Stimpson puts it this way: “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.” And if confirmed, then we would be seen the oldest case of violence documented in Southeast Asia.
It fits in the chronology, human conflicts were dated around that time. The Jebel Sahaba cemetery from 13,000 years ago shows multiple traumas; Ötzi, the Ice Man from the Alps, was killed 5,300 years ago, and the oldest candidate before that was a Pre-Neanderthal hominid who died around 430,000 years ago. TBH1 stands out because the trauma and weapon come from a same archaeological context.
TBH1: more than just a story about a murder
This find gives clarity. A burial carefully excavated, a very specific lesion, a non local quartz, and signs of infection create a narrative about a life that could’ve ended in prehistoric Vietnam. We don’t know who threw the projectile or why, but experts know enough to distinguish between an accident and an aggression.
The weight of the argument doesn’t lie in the affirmations but in the big amount of evidence documented by the team from Oxford University.