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ARTICLE VIEW:
An unusual quartz-tipped tool killed a man 12,000 years ago. Scientists
are puzzling over who wielded it
By Mindy Weisberger, CNN
Updated:
3:44 PM EDT, Fri August 29, 2025
Source: 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 . 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 , 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 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 ,
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 — 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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