A 6,000-year-old skull found in Papua New Guinea is likely the world’s oldest-known tsunami victim, experts said yesterday after a new analysis of the area it was found in.
The partially preserved Aitape skull was discovered in 1929 by Australian geologist Paul Hossfeld, 12km inland from the northern coast of Papua New Guinea.
It was long thought to belong to Homo erectus (upright man), an extinct species thought to be an ancestor of the modern human that died out about 140,000 years ago.
Photo: AFP / UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES / Ethan COCHRANE
However, more recent radiocarbon dating estimated it was closer to 6,000 years old, making it a member of our own species — Homo sapiens. At that time, sea levels were higher and the area would have been near the coast.
An international team led by the University of New South Wales (UNSW) returned to the site to collect the same geological deposits observed by Hossfeld.
Back in the lab, they studied details of the sediment including its grain size and geochemical composition, which can help identify a tsunami inundation.
They also identified a range of microscopic organisms from the ocean in the sediment, similar to those found in soil after a devastating tsunami hit the region in 1998.
“We have discovered that the place where the Aitape skull was unearthed was a coastal lagoon that was inundated by a large tsunami about 6,000 years ago,” study author and UNSW scientist James Goff said. “It was similar to the one that struck nearby with such devastating effect in 1998, killing more than 2,000 people.”
“We conclude that this person who died there so long ago is probably the oldest-known tsunami victim in the world,” Goff said.
The conclusions, aided by researchers from the US, France, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, were published in the journal PLOS ONE.
Goff, an authority on tsunamis, said while the bones of the skull had been well-studied previously, little attention had been paid to the sediments where they were unearthed.
“The geological similarities between these sediments and the sediments laid down during the 1998 tsunami made us realize that human populations in this area have been affected by these massive inundations for thousands of years,” he said.
“After considering a range of possible scenarios, we believe that, on the balance of the evidence, the individual was either killed directly in the tsunami, or was buried just before it hit and the remains were redeposited,” Goff added.
Following the 1998 tsunami, which penetrated up to 5km inland, attempts to retrieve victims were called off after a week because crocodiles were feeding on the corpses, leading to their dismemberment.
This may also explain why the skull of the person who died 6,000 years ago was found on its own, without any other bones, the researchers said.
Attention has been drawn to the effect of tsunamis in recent decades, particularly following those in Indonesia in 2004 and Japan in 2011, which killed about 230,000 and 16,000 people respectively.
However, research in the Pacific has shown that throughout history and prehistory, the region has seen repeated catastrophic tsunamis that have caused death, abandonment of settlements, breakdown of trading routes and even war, the study said.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the