The Aitape skull was discovered in Papua New Guinea in 1929, and researchers say it has revealed that the person most likely died in a catastrophic tsunami. (Credit: Arthur Durband) Tsunamis have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the past two decades. Now a new study finds that a 6,000-year-old skull may come from the earliest known victim of these killer waves. The partial human skull was discovered in 1929 buried in a mangrove swamp outside the small town of Aitape Papua New Guinea, about 500 miles north of Australia. Scientists originally thought it belonged to an ancient extinct human species, Homo erectus. However, subsequent research dated it to about 5,000 or 6,000 years in age, suggesting that it instead belonged to a modern human.
The skull is one of just two examples of ancient human remains found in Papua New Guinea after more than a century of work ...
