Ice Age skeleton with broken neck bone provides rare glimpse into the lives of ancient hunter-gatherers

By Mindy Weisberger, CNN

(CNN) — A well-preserved human skeleton that scientists recently excavated in Vietnam dates back about 12,000 years ago to the Ice Age and contains the oldest human mitochondrial DNA found in the region. It belonged to a man who died when he was around 35 years old after being pierced in the neck by a projectile with a tip made of quartz that showed signs of human workmanship.

But the man didn’t die right away; analysis of his damaged cervical rib bone revealed signs of tissue growth and an infection that likely caused his death, scientists reported Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. The man may have lived for months after being wounded until he died and was buried in a cave site named Thung Binh 1 in what is now Tràng An Landscape Complex, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The circumstances of the man’s traumatic injury are unknown, but this case may be the earliest evidence of conflict between hunter-gatherers in mainland Southeast Asia, according to the study. His wound and his survival for some time afterward offer a rare glimpse into the lives of people in this region during the waning days of the Pleistocene era about 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago.

“Human skeletal material from the Late Pleistocene of Southeast Asia is relatively scarce,” said Hugo Reyes-Centeno, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Kentucky and a fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies, in an email. He was not involved in the new research.

“We have abundant evidence of interpersonal violence in the Holocene, particularly as populations adopt food-producing economies and societies become more stratified, but fewer examples from the Pleistocene of populations that were presumably practicing a foraging economy,” he added. “This study adds to those rare examples.”

‘A major surprise’

Researchers found the skeleton, which they dubbed “TBH1,” in December 2017. The skull was shattered and flattened, but most of the pieces appeared to be present — including all of the man’s teeth. The pelvis and vertebrae were also fragmented. Recovery of TBH1’s bony bits, conducted by an international team of collaborators, continued through 2018 due to the extreme fragmentation of the remains and less-than-ideal conditions in the cave, said lead study author Chris Stimpson, a researcher and honorary associate at the University of Oxford’s Museum of Natural History in the UK.

“It’s in the subtropics so there’s a lot of water, a lot of calcium carbonate deposition,” Stimpson told CNN. “That makes the sediment very, very sticky.”

Team members removed the skull and skeletal pieces in large blocks of sediment to avoid damaging them further and then spent months piecing them together in the lab. There wasn’t enough collagen in the bones to determine how old they were, but radiocarbon dating of charcoal samples near the burial suggested that the skeleton was 12,000 to 12,500 years old.

Skeletal analysis revealed a minor ankle injury, but the man’s overall health was good before the trauma that caused his death. Review of the mitochondrial DNA confirmed that the individual was male and suggested a maternal lineage associated with local hunter-gatherers, descended from humans who were among the earliest to migrate into the region.

Since few well-preserved human skeletal remains from this period have been uncovered in Southeast Asia, this near-complete find with its DNA preserved was already significant. Discovering traumatic damage to the man’s cervical rib — an extra bone in the neck that rarely appears in humans — “was a major surprise,” Stimpson said.

One more surprise lay in store for the scientists. Near the injured cervical rib was a fragment of opaque quartz measuring 0.7 inch (18.28 millimeters) long and weighing about 0.014 ounce (0.4 gram). It bore carving marks commonly seen in stone tools from the period. But there were no other quartz tools in the cave, making the projectile point potentially an “exotic technology” that originated elsewhere, according to the study.

“Given the difference in the tool causing the injury compared to the tools found at the site, the study opens the intriguing possibility of violence between members of different populations,” Reyes-Centeno said. “But further archaeological work at the site and in the region is necessary to fully reconstruct the circumstances of the individual’s death.”

Based on the quartz fragment’s shape, scientists interpreted it as the point of a projectile that pierced the man’s neck on the right side and broke his cervical rib, ultimately leading to a fatal infection. The position, size and type of injury hinted at a small but fast-moving object; a larger object would have caused more serious damage, and death probably would have been instantaneous, the study authors reported.

While it’s possible that the broken bone represents a violent encounter with an individual who was not local, scientists can only guess at the circumstances that caused the man’s injury and what the final weeks of his life were like. The archaeological record from this time and place preserves little about how hunter-gatherers interacted with each other, but the man’s survival after his injury and his subsequent burial suggest that perhaps he did not suffer and die alone, Stimpson said.

“It’s speculative,” he added, “but the fact that he managed to hang on for a couple of months, and the fact that he was buried in the manner and in the place that he was, you can infer that there were folks looking out for him — in life and in death.”

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