A new study led by Natural History Museum London’s Dr Christopher Stimpson (& Honorary Associate at Oxford University Museum of Natural History) has provided the evidence of Southeast Asia’s earliest human conflict, following a discovery Northern Vietnam. The ~12,000-year-old remains of a man were discovered in a cave with a fatal injury to the neck caused by a quartz-tipped projectile.

The discovery was made at Thung Binh 1, a cave in the dramatic limestone karst of the Tràng An UNESCO World Heritage landscape, by an international team from the 2016-2020 SUNDASIA project directed by Dr Ryan Rabett (Queen's University Belfast UK / Institute for Hellenic Culture & the Liberal Arts, The American College of Greece). Reconstruction and analysis of the skeleton by Dr Alex Wilshawm, from Liverpool John Moores University, has revealed that the man was around 35 years old at death and stood approximately 1.7 meters tall. Skull measurements and mitochondrial DNA link him to early hunter-gatherer populations from South and Southeast Asia and examination of his skeleton indicated good health in life.

It appears that a sharp implement pierced his neck with sufficient force to fracture a cervical rib. A quartz point was discovered with the injured bone and is “especially intriguing”, according to lithic specialist Dr Benjamin Utting of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, who worked closely on the excavations. “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.” The injury was not immediately fatal. Instead, the damaged bone indicated a likely death from infection, over weeks or months.

Author of the study, Dr Christopher Stimpson, who also oversaw the recovery of the skeleton in the cave said, “To recover a skeleton of this age – from around 12,000 years ago - and in this condition is a rarity from this part of the world. The excellent state of preservation permitted detailed analysis of the skeleton and skull, facilitating the testing of different models of biological affinity. Furthermore, colleagues from Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre, Copenhagen were able to recover the oldest mtDNA from Vietnam to date, which could also be tested.

These investigations revealed a clear affinity with the early hunter gatherer populations of South and Southeast Asia; as such, TBH1 adds invaluable insights to the slight existing corpus of evidence for this group.

The recovery of the damaged cervical rib with signs of infection, together with the quartz point, however, surprised everyone. Cervical ribs are rare occurrences in human populations anyway but 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.”

This rare find adds to a still sparse record of Late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers in Southeast Asia and a very rare indication of interpersonal violence in prehistory. It also highlights the complexities of ancient social life, and death, in one of the world’s most biodiverse and archaeologically rich regions.

The result has been “a rare and intimate glimpse into the lives of late Pleistocene hunter gatherer communities in Southeast Asia”, according to co-author Dr Nguyen Thi Mai Huong of the Institute of Archaeology, Hanoi.

The findings of this study have been published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Stimpson CM et al. 2025 TBH1: 12 000-year-old human skeleton and projectile point shed light on demographics and mortality in Terminal Pleistocene Southeast Asia. Proc. R. Soc. B 292: 20251819. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2025.1819)

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