HOA LU, VIETNAM—Because of Southeast Asia’s harsh climatic and soil conditions, human remains decay quickly and rarely survive. It was a great shock, then, when archaeologists excavating the Thung Binh 1 cave near Hoa Lu unearthed the bones of an individual who lived around 12,000 years ago, Science News Today reports. Further inspection of the surviving skeletal fragments revealed an even bigger surprise. The 35-year-old man, known as TBH1, may have been the victim of an assault that ultimately cost him his life. Researchers noticed a fractured rib near his neck, and alongside it a tiny flake of sharpened quartz lodged in the bone left behind by an arrowhead. They believe the man was deliberately targeted and shot in the earliest known instance of interpersonal violence from mainland Southeast Asia. To make matters even worse, the individual did not die immediately in the attack, but weeks or perhaps months later after suffering an agonizing infection caused by his wounds. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. To read about people buried some 13,000 years ago in the Upper Nile Valley whose remains bear marks of considerable trauma, go to "The Roots of Violence."
