TSUNAMI VICTIM
By Charles Choi | October 25, 2017 1:00 pm
Paragraph 1 Tsunamis have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the
past two decades.Now a new study finds that a 6,000-year-old
skull may come from the earliest known victim of these killer
waves.
Paragraph 2 The partial human skull was discovered in 1929 buried in a
mangrove swamp outside the small town of Aitape Papua New
Guinea, about 500 miles north of Australia. Scientists originally
thought it belonged to an ancient extinct human species, Homo
erectus. However, subsequent research dated it to about 5,000
or 6,000 years in age, suggesting that it instead belonged to a
modern human.
A Rare Specimen
Paragraph 3 The skull is one of just two examples of ancient human remains
found in Papua New Guinea after more than a century of work
there. As such, archaeologists wanted to learn more about this
skull to elucidate how people settled this region.
Paragraph 4 The scientists went back to where this skull was found and
sampled the soil in which itwas discovered. They focused on
details such as sediment grain size and composition.
Paragraph 5 In the sediment, the researchers discovered a range of
microscopic organisms from the ocean known as diatoms. These
were similar to ones found in the soil after a 1998 tsunami killed
more than 2,000 people in Papua New Guinea — for instance,
their shells of silicawere broken, likely by extremely powerful
forces.
Paragraph 6 These diatom shells, combined with the chemical compositions
and the size ranges of the grains, all suggest that a tsunami
occurred when the skull was buried. The researchers suggested
the catastrophe either directly killed the person or ripped open
their grave.
Paragraph 7 Tsunamis, which are giant waves caused by earthquakes,
volcanic eruptions or underwater landslides, are some of the
deadliest natural disasters known. The 2004 tsunami in the
Indian Ocean killed more than 230,000 people, a higher death
toll than any fire or hurricane.
Paragraph 8 The site where the skull was found is currently about 7.5 miles
away from thecoast. Still, the researchers noted that back when
whoever the skull belonged to wasalive, sea levels were higher,
and the area would have been just behind the shoreline.
Paragraph 9 The waves of the tsunami that hit Papua New Guinea in 1998
reached more than 50 feet high and penetrated up to three miles
inland. “If the event we have identified resulted from a similar
process, it could have also resulted in extremely high waves,”
study co-lead author Mark Golitko, an archaeologist at the
University of Notre Dame in Indiana and the Field Museum in
Chicago.
Paragraph 10 These results show “that coastal populations have been
vulnerable to such events for thousands of years,” Golitko said.
“People have managed to live with such unpredictable and
destructive occurrences, but it highlights how vulnerable people
living near the sea can be. Given the far larger populations that
live along coastlines today, the potential impacts are far more
severenow.”
Paragraph 11 Golitko plans to return to the area over thenext few years “to
further study the frequency of such events, how the
environment changed over time, and how people have coped
with the environmental challenges of living in that environment.”
He and his colleagues detailed their findings Wednesday in the
journal PLOS O.
Retrieved and adapted from:
<http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/dbrief/2017/10/25/first-tsunami-
victim/#.WfYiYmhSzIU>