He Died 12,000 Years Ago. Now We Know It Was Murder.

TBH1 was a relatively healthy 35-year-old living in prehistoric Southeast Asia, presumably doing cave guy stuff like hunting and foraging. Thanks to some suspicious bone trauma paired with a stone shard where stone shards usually are found, researchers believe TBH one didn’t die of natural causes. He might be the victim of one of the earliest recorded murders in human history.

Excavated from the Thung Binh 1 cave in Vietnam’s Tràng An Landscape Complex, TBH1’s remains were unearthed between 2017 and 2018 by an international team. That team was led by archaeologist Christopher Stimpson, who published his findings in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

It looked like a regular prehistoric burial, with the usual post-mortem skull smashing, a grisly yet common occurrence in ancient gravesite