The Ancients - The Oldest Known Shark Attack

Episode Date: July 20, 2021

It’s a crossover with Jaws and Open Water that we never expected, but a 3,000 year old corpse has thrown a surprising topic into the mix: shark bites. The body, found in the prehistoric Tsukumo hunter-gatherer burial site in Japan, unexpectedly presented evidence of traumatic injuries compatible with a shark bite, making it the earliest known victim of a shark attack. Following this discovery, Tristan spoke to Alyssa White from the University of Oxford. Alyssa was part of the team who studied body No. 24. She explains how they came across No. 24, the evidence which led them towards the cause of death, and the archaeological science and forensic techniques used to recreate the misfortune of this early shark victim.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.

And in today's podcast, get this, we are talking all about the earliest known shark attack on a human in world history. This podcast really sums up why I love doing these recordings so much, because we get these awesome quirky topics like this. You might have seen in the news over the past couple of weeks that a team of researchers have been studying a skeleton from ancient Japan dating to around 3,000 years ago, looking at some cut marks on this skeleton and deducing that this figure was the victim of a deadly shark attack off the Japanese archipelago.

To talk through how they were able to deduce this, I got on the show Alyssa White from the University of Oxford, one of the lead researchers on this project. So without further ado, here's Alyssa. Alyssa, it is so wonderful to have you on the podcast. Thank you for having me, Tristan. You are very welcome indeed, because we are talking about an awesome ancient history detective story that has grabbed world headlines. Alyssa, you and your team, can we say you have uncovered the earliest known shark attack from the archaeological record from history? Yes, to a human. To a human. Yeah, OK, fair enough. OK, don't know about other people.

To a human in history. That is absolutely remarkable. Now, Alyssa, let's really set the background first of all, because we're going to ancient Japan. But what was the initial aim of your trip to Japan? to Japan, but what was the initial aim of your trip to Japan? My supervisor and I and then another grad student were going to Japan to look for evidence of interpersonal violence during the Jomon period of Japan, which is its hunter-gatherer period. And so you could argue the most direct way you can do that is to look at skeletal trauma, because there's only so many reasons. For instance, you'll have weapons embedded in your body and things like that. And you mentioned the Jomon period there. I mean, what timescales are we talking about?

This feels like this is a huge period in ancient Japan's history. It is. The Jomon period lasted for over 10,000 years. What I'm primarily concerned with is the transition from the end of the Jomon period, between the late and the final Jomon period, to the beginning of the agricultural period in the archipelago. So I look at the Jomon to the Yayoi period, which is that early agricultural period. So that transition happens around 900 BC, around the island of Kyushu, kind of more in southwestern Japan. And if we then focus in on this late Jomon period, which you've been focusing on then, Alyssa, I mean, what has the archaeology revealed about the people at that time,

the cultures at that time? Because there seems to be some stunning pottery in particular from the people who lived in the Jomon period. Most certainly. The Jomon is actually first distinguished by the existence of pottery around 15,000 years ago. And the name means cord marked based on cord markings that were on the pots. So there's certainly an intimate tie between the Jomon culture and the existence of pottery. And so they're fisher, hunter, gatherers, so they don't just rely on terrestrial food sources, but certainly out in the water using marine or freshwater resources as well and the other really distinct thing about them is that they were semi-sedentary because they had storage pits so you actually get pit dwellings and things like that that we can recognize

and we have you know cemeteries and so on and so forth so marine hunter gatherers and that leads me on to the next question then which seems to be related to this very much. Alyssa, how did the people of the German period, how did they usually bury their dead? So one of the most common forms is through a pit burial. So that's just, you know, you dig a hole in the ground and you put the body in it. And then sometimes that includes those kinds of burials, but in what are called shell mounds or shell middens. So these are just accumulations of shells that are caused by humans consuming shellfish and then depositing them. And you have instances where cemeteries are placed within these. And the wonderful thing for us as archaeologists and archaeologists who look at human remains is that the calcium carbonate in

those shells protects the bones from the relatively acidic soil in Japan. Because if you look at pit burials that weren't put into shell mounds, you don't often get human remains preserved at all. Sometimes you'll get the artifacts, which is wonderful, but not so much for me who specializes in human remains. I mean, and these shell mounds, Alyssa, do we find them from all across ancient Japan dating to this period? Yes period yes yes they're quite dispersed it's just interesting because of course it's such a huge archipelago and alissa keeping on that a bit longer then focusing in on this ancient shark attack on this uncovering of this incredible ancient evidence which shell mound in particular are we talking about with this new uncovering so we're talking about skumo kaizuka, which is Skumo Shell Mound,

which is in Okayama Prefecture in Kasaoka City. And it's just right off of the Seto Inland Sea. So it's like, you know, a few kilometers off of the coast. And let's talk about this shell mound in particular. When you were looking through the remains in this shell mound, first of all, how many remains were from this particular shell mound? So you have over 150 human remains that were recovered, but the excavations of the cemetery themselves were taking place in the early 20th century. So this particular individual was excavated around 1920.

1920. And so what has happened since then? What led you then to start looking through these remains? And ultimately, tell me the whole story Alyssa we want the details how did you then stumble upon this particular skeleton skeletal remains that we're going to be talking about we're going to be focusing on really in this podcast so Kyoto University has a wonderful collection of human remains and I mentioned that excavation that took place in the 1920s because some of those excavations of shell mound were carried out by an archaeologist named Kenji Kiyono. And he accumulated several human remains, the bones of several shell mounds that he excavated over a period of decades at Kyoto University. So Kyoto University actually has

a wonderful collection of a number of human remains from shell mounds from different parts of Japan. So we can go there and we can look at individuals from all these different shell mounds. And Skumal just happened to be one of those that we were looking at. And the first time that we went, like I said, was with my supervisor and another grad student and I. And we went only for about two weeks. It was right at the beginning of the other grad student and I's doctoral projects. And we were getting our feet in the water, seeing what the collections were like, finding everything. And quite literally, in the last hour of our visit, we pull out one more individual to look at before we go. and we pulled out one bone, and then we kind of pulled out another. I'm like, Rick, you want to take a look at this? And there were just all of these what looked like really sharp force lesions all over his body.

And we're like, oh, great. We don't have time to look at him. But what we did is we pulled him out as much of him as we could at the time, and then we took some very preliminary photos just so we could look at them while we were gone back in Oxford. And I kind of put a pin in it for when I would come back to Japan and look at the collections in more detail in 2017 when I returned. So a year later, I went back and really began looking at the skeleton in detail. And so how did you go about looking at this skeleton in detail? What techniques did you use? Talk me through the whole process. So I should say the individual in question is what we call number 24.

That's his designation. And so we look at things like his sex. We look at his age. We look how tall he is and things like that. And then the majority of my workload was recording all of these lesions on his body and then trying to figure out what caused them. So when looking at schema number 24, we looked at basic demographic information. And then I recorded all of the skeletal lesions on his body that were traumatic.

And so I was doing that. Originally, we were wondering if this is a bit of interpersonal conflict in line with my dissertation, with my thesis project. And as I kept on going, I was like, I don't think that that's what this is. This doesn't make sense. And we, Rick and I, Rick was in Hokkaido at the time doing his own data collection. And we started this eventually, at times, humorous chain of emails where I was sending him photos. And I was like, Rick, what do you think of this? Because I don't know what to think of it. This almost looks like a metal bladed weapon. It's so sharp and it's so deep. And those don't exist from this time in the Japanese archipelago. Also, why would someone

attack, like hack at your tibia that much? It just doesn't really make sense to me. But all of lesions were really consistent in character. They have this like serrated margins on them. And you're also not going to get serrated blades at this time. So we came to the conclusion that, okay, it's probably not interpersonal conflict. So what could it be? And we thought about terrestrial carnivores and things like that, or scavengers, but there really aren't that many large terrestrial carnivores in Japan that will cause these deep of lesions. And if you look at things like scavenging, the terrestrial scavenging, there is actually a little patch on one of his bones that actually

looks like rodent scavenging or something. They're kind of U-shaped striations. So we do have a little bit of that, but the rest of it doesn't match. It's like, this is a separate thing. We also, I was kind of chatting with other researchers who were investigating the collections at the same time that I was. And one of them mentioned that he had looked at the skeleton before as well and was really puzzled by it. And he had talked to someone and that individual had said that maybe it was something like crab scavenging, like some kind of marine scavenging. And Rick, I sent him this email. He was like, I got your email, Alyssa.

And I went to a crab restaurant in Hokkaido and I was looking at the claws and I just don't see it. So we, you know, kind of threw a series of elimination and just starting to look further afield as it took me weeks to record all of the lesions just because there's so many in detail. So we had plenty of time to investigate while I was in Japan, while we were doing that. And eventually we came across a photo of a bone from a shark attack victim. And it was quite uncanny how similar the lesions were, particularly to the lesions on the tibia and things like that. So from there, we began to investigate whether or not it might be a shark attack and what lesions you can expect to see and the injury pattern. And eventually we reached out to george

bergus who's a shark attack expert and very quickly he confirmed our suspicions and we went from there this has got to be one of the most unique archaeological detective stories ever that ends up with you having to contact a shark expert to figure out what this could be on these serrated parts of this ancient skeleton just want to keep on this a bit longer elisa before we go to the attack itself because you mentioned how it took weeks you know trying to deduce all of this and you know using all your techniques and all that and one thing i've got my notes here is 3d modeling now i recently interviewed someone about new discoveries in scotland rock art discoveries of animals in kilmart and glen and how they use 3D modelling to make it

more visually easy to see these prehistoric rock carvings. What was the importance of 3D modelling for you when you're trying to look at this skeleton and the injuries, the marks on this skeleton? It was incredibly important. So that's where another part of my doctoral project has been developing methodology of looking at trauma and completeness of the skeleton in 3D. So I've been working with John Poundset, one of the co-authors in the paper, and also Rick has been working on this with us. And the idea is that whenever you look at how trauma is usually conveyed in our field, a lot of the time, and there's nothing wrong with this, a lot of the time they're conveyed, you know, kind of on 2D diagrams, and you might put maybe some squares or some stars where trauma is on that diagram,

or you can draw it all out in a line drawing. And whenever you do get 3D models, they tend to be done for individual representations and greater visualization. So one of the great things about the way that we're approaching 3D analysis is that we're taking a freely available 3D model called Body Parts 3D that's actually produced by a Japanese team. And we're putting that into ArcGIS, which is Geographical Information Systems platform. And so we're taking a technology that archaeologists commonly use to do things like map landscapes, and we're taking skeletal information and we're treating it like a map.

And so what I can do is I can create units of analysis within this, just like you would in another kind of map. So I've broken up the body into all of my little recording zones. I can give all of those information based on, you know, how complete they are. So the skeleton can be colored differently or bits can be taken away. But the other great thing is that I can take that completeness. So I can have an idea of whether I'm seeing trauma just because it isn't there on skeletal elements that are present, or if I'm not seeing trauma because the skeletal element isn't present at all, which is a pretty big distinction. So I can take that and I can overlay 3D representations of the trauma on top of that. So I can draw onto it and then I can also intersect

the 3D figures, the 3D shapes to give me an idea of depth and breadth of the lesions as well. breadth of the lesions as well. And like I said, you have at least 790 lesions caused by the shark on the sky skeleton. So recording them was a lot. And then I get back to Oxford and I have, you know, recording sheets and like notes scrawled all towards the edges. And I got to the point where I was just drawing bones because the recording sheets were not enough. And finally, being able to take this and then to put it onto the 3D model and turn him around and look at the pattern of injuries and then share that model with my co-authors and with George, who's never been to Japan

to see the skeleton, and so that he can look at things like the shark attack pattern was excellent. catastrophic warfare bloody revolutions and violent ideological battles i'm james rogers and over on the warfare podcast we're exploring the vast history of ferocious global conflict we've got the classics understandably when we see it from hindsight, the great revelation in Potsdam was really Stalin saying, yeah, tell me something I don't know. The unexpected.

And it was at that moment that he just handed her all these documents that he'd discovered sewn into the cushion of the armchair. And the never ending. So arguably, every state that has tested nuclear weapons has created some sort of effect to local communities subscribe to warfare from history hit wherever you get your podcasts join us on the skeleton were most of the injuries of these more than 700 injuries so you get your deepest lesions on kind of from the hips down. So the bone with

the most bite marks is the tibia, so that's your shin bone. And the bone with the deepest ones is the left tibia. And then the left hip bone as well has a really, really deep gouge and some puncture marks and some fracturing probably caused just by the force of the shark's jaws because they're quite strong. Then you also have some on the arms and then some on the front of the chest and abdomen area as well. Nothing on the cranium, the skull, and nothing on the vertebra, so on the spine. And so with all of this information, how did you then go about trying to reconstruct this horrific event that occurred some 3,000 years ago. It is quite horrific, so it gets a little gory. So just prepare yourself a bit.

One of the amazing things that we had available to us was during these 1920s excavations, all of the burials were photographed, which is wonderful. So we have the original excavation photograph of Skumul 24. And that gives us a great starting point because whenever you look at his extant skeleton, the skeleton I had to study, his right leg is missing. And so it is his left hand and also most of his left foot. And there's a question of, well, were those not present at the time of burial? And the answer is yes. You can tell from the photograph. Moreover, what we couldn't know just from the skeleton, based on the marks, is that the left leg was disarticulated at the time of burial, meaning it's not quite attached to him. And it was buried kind

of on top of him in an inverted position. So he was in quite a state, unfortunately. But that missing right leg, that missing left foot, and that missing left hand, the nearby bones that are remaining all have bite marks near them. So the most parsimonious explanation is that the right leg was lost in a bite, or it was injured to such a point that it couldn't be recovered. The left foot most likely lost whenever attacks were being done to the left leg. And the right hand's completely there, almost. The left hand, though, you don't tend to get attacks to the hands in shark attack cases unless it's in self-defense. So the most likely explanation for that is that he was probably defending himself with his hand

from attack from below and lost that i mean alissa and also to emphasize what you're saying there it sounds like therefore that from your deductions in all of this that this wasn't a shark eating a corpse something that was already dead this person was very much alive and kicking with one leg kicking when this deadly attack happened that's the most likely explanation yes, given that the concentration of injuries to the lower body, as though, you know, you're in the water swimming, which makes sense. B, with that hand being lost. And the thing is, we show in the 3D model too,

those attacks to the legs were severe, and he would have had major blood vessels rupture very early in the attack, most likely. So he probably bled out very quickly and lost consciousness and then passed away. But you have like almost 800 lesions to his body that remain of what remains of his skeleton, not counting any of the soft tissue that was unpacked. So it's likely that the shark fed on the body after the attack for a little while, which also can explain why, you know, if you have a body kind of floating face down,

you're going to have attacks more to the front of the body like we have. So it begs the question, then, how does this mutilated body, which a shark is eating on after the attack, how does it end up in the shell mound with all these other remains? Well, the Jumon had canoes. And like I said, they're fisher-hunter gatherers. And there's fish hooks found at Skumo. They're consuming a lot of shellfish. There's diving that takes place during the Jomon period. So it's quite reasonable that he was out fishing.

And it is possible that his body was washed ashore. That could happen. But given the completeness of his body, it is also quite likely that maybe he was out with companions who weren't directly involved in the attack but might have seen it or come upon him quite soon after and then they recovered him and buried him he's buried in a very normative way as normally as possible and he would have been a lot to recover like i said he's in quite a state so someone who cared for him took him and buried him properly, is what I mean to say. Absolutely. You got that across quite all right. Don't worry at all, Alyssa. One last thing on that, though, to kind of like turn this on its head.

You mentioned how these are coastal hunter-gatherers and that we've got archaeology evidence of the fish hooks. We know that they had canoes, etc. Of course, this is a case of a shark attack. Do we have evidence at this time that seems to suggest that if there are sharks in the waters around Japan, in these inland seas, etc., that there could have been hunting of sharks by these prehistoric coastal hunter-gatherers at that time? There is some evidence for that.

Whether it's opportunistic or purposeful is another question. So there are some sites that have accumulations of shark teeth. Tsukumo isn't one of them. At Tsukumo, there's only a few shark remains. There is one shark tooth. But it's not like that there's a lot of them that would indicate any kind of purposeful hunting of sharks. Might they go after it if a shark gets caught in a net or something? That's another question.

But at Tsukumo, at least, they most likely were not purposefully hunting sharks. Whether that happened elsewhere in Japan, that's very possible based on caches of shark teeth that we found. That's really interesting. And keeping on that a bit longer then, well actually, let's keep on the sharks a bit longer. What type of shark do you and your team think was most likely responsible for this attack 3,000 years ago? So we think it was either a tiger shark or a white shark. And unfortunately, we weren't able to narrow it down past that. We tried very hard to.

For instance, we CT scanned the left tibia and the left hip that had the deepest wounds in the hopes that there would be an embedded shark tooth, because that can happen a lot in these cases. And unfortunately, there wasn't one that remained. We looked at the sea surface temperatures of the time period in this area. And the winter would be good for a white shark. The summer would be good for a tiger shark.

They're both known to exist in the area. White shark attacks have taken place in the 1990s in this area. Unfortunately, there's a lot of the Jomon period shark tooth remains and vertebral remains. They're not split up by region in such a way that would make it easier for us to narrow that down. And then sometimes you can actually look at the spacing between teeth and the puncture marks and the bite size on attack victims and then be able to estimate the species and the size of the shark. on attack victims and then be able to estimate the species and the size of the shark. Unfortunately, we couldn't do that on this individual simply because there's so many bites that narrowing down one continuous bite mark that's large enough for us to make that estimation wasn't possible. So you come down to either it was a white shark, most likely he was attacked

in the winter if that's the case, by a single shark, because white sharks are solitary predators. Or it could be a tiger shark, it's more likely he would have been attacked in the warmer water, you know, in warmer temperatures. And if it is a tiger shark, it is possible that it was multiple sharks. But once more, we can't narrow it down past that, unfortunately. Elizabeth, this is such an incredible archaeological ancient history detective story. As soon as we saw this in the news, on the headlines, we had to get you on the show

to talk all about it. But I mean, last of all, we need to talk about the significance of this whole uncovering of this and deducing of what happened to this figure living 3,000 years ago in ancient Japan. I mean, why is this shark attack, Elizabeth, why is it so extraordinary? Why is it so significant?

I think it grabs people's attention because it is so rare. You have to think about the likelihood of getting a shark attack victim in an archaeological site. A, there has to be a shark attack. And even with our population today, that's incredibly rare. You're getting less than 10 fatalities a year. So there's that. B, the body has to be recovered. C, the body has to be buried. D, I'm getting, I'm like, which letter am I on? D, the body has to be buried in such a way that it'll be preserved, like I was saying with those shell mounds. So he could have very well have been buried, not in the shell mound, just in a pit, and his body wouldn't have survived. Then his body has to be excavated in a way that we know where he came from and his context,

and then we have to be around to look at him. So you have all of these factors that have to be lined up for us to be able to reconstruct the attack. Additionally, because his attack was so severe, that's why we can draw a lot of details out of it. It's because we have a lot of evidence. And it's just a really interesting look at just one part of this individual's life in a community. This isn't common, but he was buried in a normal way. It is a risk of the kind of subsistence

lifestyle he was undergoing. It's a risk that, you know, people still face at times in the settlement in Lindsay. Like I said, there have been attacks in modernity, once more extremely rare. You're more likely to be struck by lightning. But like I said, it's a very visceral way of experiencing someone's life in the past and their death and the humanity of that. The humanity of that, indeed.

And I think once again, to emphasise, Alyssa, I mean, how much further in time, how many more years have we got to go before we hear of the next shark attack in the archaeological record? I think you mentioned it's like thousands of years after this one that we're focusing on now. Right. The next oldest shark attack that we know about on a human is an individual from Puerto Rico from about 1000 AD. So we jump forward about 2000 years. I don't know of any other archaeological shark attacks after that, unfortunately. That is quite right. I think that's quite enough in itself, really, Alyssa. It's such an incredible topic. Just before we wrap up, are there any other elements of this whole story of

your project, of your uncovering of this ancient shark attack that you'd really like to highlight before we wrap up? I would like to highlight that my Japanese colleagues radiocarbon dated his skeleton, which is wonderful, which means that we do colleagues radiocarbon dated his skeleton, which is wonderful, which means that we do have a firm date for his body. So we know that, you know, he was alive around 1300 to 1000 BC. In ancient history terms, you have quite an exact date for when he lived, dating to that late German period culture there. And as you say, you have the whole, through your detective story, through what you've've done figuring out what actually happened to this figure it feels like you've got the many working parts you and your

team does it really emphasize how projects like this it's not just one person it is a huge group of people working together to try and figure out ancient detective stories like this one it is and i'm very lucky to have some very very good colleagues alissa this has been an absolutely fantastic chat. What is next for you in the archaeological stories? What's next for you, Alyssa? I'm cracking on with my interpersonal violence studies, not my shark attack studies.

And I'm hoping to finish my doctorate this year. Alyssa, begs me just to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me and for being a delight. Thank you.