The discovery was made at the Thung Binh 1 archaeological site, located in the Tràng An Landscape Complex, a UNESCO World Heritage site renowned for its dramatic karst mountains. The skeleton, cataloged as TBH1, belonged to a man estimated to be about 35 years old. His bones were remarkably well-preserved, suggesting he was a healthy individual, which immediately presented a puzzle for the research team: What caused his death?
The first clues to this ancient mystery were subtle. A closer examination of the skeleton revealed two unusual features. First, the man had a tiny extra rib in his neck, a rare and harmless anatomical quirk known as a cervical rib. But it was the second discovery that took the story in a sinister direction: a sharp, pointed piece of quartz was found buried in the soil near his body. This stone point was a geological outsider; its material wasn't local to the region and it didn't match any of the other stone tools found at the site, suggesting it had been brought from a great distance.
Connecting these clues, the scientific team, led by Christopher M. Stimpson, conducted a microscopic analysis of the man's neck bones. There, they found the "smoking gun": clear signs of trauma. One of his ribs was fractured, and the bone around the break showed signs of a severe infection that had been active at the time of his death.
As detailed in their paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the researchers pieced together a grim narrative. TBH1 was likely attacked, struck violently in the neck by a projectile—perhaps a spear or an arrow—tipped with the foreign quartz. The blow itself was not instantly fatal. Instead, it left him with a festering wound. Unable to fight off the resulting infection, he would have succumbed to a slow, agonizing death days or even weeks later.
The team also noted that his skull had been crushed, but this damage occurred long after he died, likely from the immense pressure of soil and rocks within the grave over millennia, not from the initial violent encounter.
If this interpretation is correct, TBH1 represents a landmark discovery in the study of human history. While other prehistoric cases of fatal violence are known—such as the 13,000-year-old conflict victims at the Jebel Sahaba cemetery in Sudan or the famed 5,300-year-old Ötzi the Iceman, who was shot with an arrow in the Alps—this find adds a dark and compelling new chapter to the global story of human conflict, providing the earliest direct evidence of murder in this part of the world.