Someplace off southeastern Japan’s coast round 3,000 years in the past, a shark attacked and killed a person who was seemingly fishing or shellfish diving. Afterward, the sufferer’s fishing comrades presumably introduced the physique, minus its sheared off proper leg and left hand, again to land for burial.
A brand new evaluation of that unlucky man’s partial skeleton, excavated round a century in the past at a village cemetery close to Japan’s Seto Inland Sea, has unveiled that grisly state of affairs. This particular person from Japan’s historical Jōmon tradition (SN: 2/15/97) represents the oldest identified human sufferer of a shark assault, say archaeologist J. Alyssa White of the College of Oxford and colleagues. Radiocarbon relationship locations his loss of life from 3,391 to three,031 years in the past, the researchers report within the August Journal of Archaeological Science: Stories.
A roughly 1,000-year-old skeleton of a fisherman on Puerto Rico beforehand displayed the earliest indicators of a shark encounter.
White’s group documented no less than 790 gouges, punctures and different kinds of chew injury primarily confined to the Jōmon man’s arms, legs, pelvis and ribs. A 3-D mannequin of those accidents signifies that the sufferer first misplaced his left hand attempting to fend off a shark. Ensuing bites severed main leg arteries, quickly resulting in loss of life.
After the person’s physique was recovered, his mutilated left leg most likely indifferent and was positioned on his chest when he was buried, the researchers say.
Quite a few shark tooth discovered at some Jōmon websites counsel that sharks had been hunted, maybe by drawing them to blood whereas fishing at sea. “However unprovoked shark assaults would have been extremely uncommon as sharks don’t have a tendency to focus on people as prey,” White says.
