Papua New Guinea skull ‘world’s oldest tsunami victim’

Sydney : A 6 000-year-old skull found in Papua New Guinea is likely the world’s oldest-known tsunami victim, experts said yesterday after a new analysis of the area it was found in.

The partially preserved Aitape Skull was discovered in 1929 by Australian geologist Paul Hossfeld, 12km inland from the northern coast of the Pacific nation.

It was long thought to belong to Homo erectus (upright man), an extinct species thought to be an ancestor of the modern human that died out about 140 000 years ago.

But more recent radiocarbon dating estimated it was closer to 6 000 years old, making it a member of our own species - Homo sapiens. At that time, sea levels were higher and the area would have been near the coast.

An international team led by the University of New South Wales returned to the site to collect the same geological deposits observed by Hossfeld.

Back in the lab, they studied details of the sediment including its grain size and geochemical composition, which can help identify a tsunami inundation.

They also identified a range of microscopic organisms from the ocean in the sediment, similar to those found in soil after a devastating tsunami hit the region in 1998.

“We have discovered that the place where the Aitape Skull was unearthed was a coastal lagoon that was inundated by a large tsunami about 6 000 years ago,” said study author and UNSW scientist James Goff.

“We conclude that this person who died there so long ago is probably the oldest-known tsunami victim in the world.”

The conclusions, aided by researchers from the United States, France, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, are published in the journal PLOS ONE.