00:01790 cuts.
00:02One hunter.
00:043,000 years of silence.
00:06A single skeleton.
00:08790 wounds.
00:10Every one of them cut to the bone.
00:12Scientists first looked at the body and assumed only one thing could do this, a metal weapon.
00:17But there was a problem.
00:18This tribe never had metal.
00:20When researchers re-examined the V-shaped gashes, the answer was worse.
00:24These wounds matched a modern shark attack, almost perfectly.
00:28It is the earliest recorded case of a human being hunted and killed by a shark.
00:32What makes it truly disturbing is this, when the bite happened, he was still alive.
00:36Let me take you back.
00:38In 2021, archaeologists in Japan's Okayama region uncovered the remains of a man catalogued as Tsukumo No. 24.
00:46Radiocarbon dating placed his death between 1370 and 1010 BC, in the Jaman era.
00:51But here's the strange part.
00:53He wasn't found in the sea.
00:55He was found lying carefully placed inside a proper shell mound grave, his body arranged with respect.
01:00That tells us one thing.
01:02When he died, someone was there.
01:04Someone cared enough to bring him home.
01:07Researchers reconstructed the scene.
01:09A group of Jaman fishermen head out to sea.
01:11The hunter slips into the water to spear fish.
01:14Blood spreads through the current.
01:16And a shark, following the scent, arrives.
01:19The attack began on his left leg, where the bite marks are deepest and most crowded, meaning the shark struck
01:24from below.
01:25Instinctively, he fought back with his hands and feet.
01:28So one foot, then the other, then his left hand were torn away.
01:31His companions dragged him back onto the boat.
01:34But it was already too late.
01:37790 wounds.
01:38Every rib fractured.
01:39His chest and abdomen ripped open.
01:42He was likely dead before they hauled him aboard.
01:45The only thing his people could do was carry what remained of him to shore and bury him with honor.
01:49You might think the sea 3000 years ago couldn't have been that dangerous.
01:53The truth is far worse than you imagine.
01:56Jaman sites have yielded enormous numbers of shark teeth, along with artwork depicting tigers and hammerhead sharks.
02:01Back then, coastal waters were more crowded with sharks than they are today.
02:05Some pain is unavoidable.
02:07But some pain is chosen for you.
02:09And the human story is far darker than one attack.
02:13Imagine a child, 310 centuries ago.
02:16Someone took a sharpened stone blade and cut off his leg.
02:19And the child lived.
02:20For 10 more years.
02:22In 2020, an international team squeezed into a limestone cave in East Kalimantan, Indonesia.
02:28Deep inside, they found the remains of a young person, roughly 19 or 20 years old, dating back 31,000
02:34years.
02:34The skeleton was remarkably complete, except for one impossible detail.
02:39The left lower leg was gone.
02:41Not smashed, not crushed.
02:43Cut clean.
02:44Too clean for any accident.
02:46The clues were unmistakable.
02:48The cut surface had healed and remodeled, and the remaining leg bone was visibly thinner than the other, a sign
02:53of long-term disuse.
02:55There was only one conclusion.
02:57This was surgery.
02:5831,000 years ago.
03:00No metal tools.
03:02No anesthesia.
03:04No disinfectant.
03:05No stitches.
03:07A prehistoric surgeon opened the skin, separated the muscle, carefully avoided the major artery and nerves, and saw it through
03:13the bone.
03:14Then, with no antibiotics of any kind, the wound somehow did not become infected.
03:18The child survived, and lived another 6 to 9 years, into adulthood.
03:23Consider how hard that is.
03:24Even in a modern hospital today, the postoperative infection rate for major amputations can reach 40%.
03:30In 2022, this discovery was published in Nature, pushing back the record for the earliest known surgery by 24,000
03:36years.
03:37Why did the child need it?
03:39The surrounding terrain gives the answer.
03:42Miles of steep cliffs and enormous boulders, an unforgiving landscape.
03:45Most likely, the child fell from a height and shattered his lower leg beyond repair.
03:50The people of the tribe had exactly one choice.
03:53Take the leg.
03:54That child then lived nearly a decade on a single leg, across jagged mountain ground.
03:58Think about what that means.
04:00Someone fed him every day.
04:02Someone kept him clean.
04:04Someone carried him over rocks and through jungle.
04:07It is some of the earliest known evidence of human compassion, of refusing to abandon your own.
04:1230,000 years ago, our ancestors already understood that.
04:15But the human story is never only about tenderness.
04:195,500 years ago, in southern France, archaeologists unearthed the remains of three women.
04:24For decades, everyone assumed it was an ordinary Neolithic burial.
04:28Then the truth resurfaced.
04:30Two of the three were crammed into a narrow space, their bodies twisted into impossible positions,
04:34weighed down by heavy stones so they could not move.
04:37And their limbs told a darker story.
04:39They had been bound with rope, one end around the ankles, the other tied to the neck.
04:44The moment they struggled, the rope tightened.
04:46The more they fought, the faster they suffocated.
04:49It mimics, almost exactly, the infamous torture used by the Italian mafia centuries later.
04:54But these people weren't gangsters settling a score.
04:57This was a carefully designed agricultural trap.
05:00The whole structure was built to resemble a grain silo.
05:03The third woman wasn't bound.
05:05She was placed above the other two, on top of the stones, in a peaceful pose, holding some special symbolic
05:10status.
05:11And the orientation of the building was precisely calculated, so that on a certain day, sunlight would fall directly into
05:17its interior.
05:18Whoever designed all of this was cruel, calm, and highly organized.
05:22If that was human cruelty, what came next was nature and violence combined.
05:26Ten thousand years ago, in what is now Los Angeles, there was a natural death trap, the La Brea tar
05:32pits.
05:33Animals wandered in, got stuck in the thick asphalt, and their cries drew predators, who then got stuck themselves.
05:39Paleontologists have pulled out dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, American lions, mammoths.
05:44Thousands of ice-age creatures.
05:46But only one human.
05:48She's called the La Brea woman.
05:50Roughly 18 to 25 years old, under 5 feet tall, dead around 1200 years ago.
05:55Native peoples were not naive.
05:57They knew the danger of the tar pits and never went near them willingly.
06:01So how did she end up inside?
06:03The answer was written on her skull.
06:05A fractured jaw, a cracked cranium, and a small circular hole near the crown of her head.
06:10The signature of a hard blow.
06:12And not one any animal could deliver.
06:14This was done by human hands.
06:16If that reading is correct, she is the oldest known murder victim in Los Angeles.
06:21Someone shattered her skull and threw her body into the pit.
06:24And then there's the man who died of drowning.
06:26In the driest place on earth.
06:28The Atacama Desert, in northern Chile, where yearly rainfall is almost zero.
06:335500 years ago, a man aged 35 to 40 died near the coastline and was buried in a circular stone
06:38structure, resting on a bed of shells.
06:41No fatal wounds.
06:42No clear sign of disease.
06:45Scientists were stuck.
06:46Then someone had an idea.
06:48Test the bone for diatoms.
06:51Diatoms are microscopic algae that enter human bone by exactly one path.
06:55You breathe in water.
06:56It floods the lungs, ruptures the air sacs, and pushes seawater into the bloodstream, until it seeps into the marrow.
07:02The result came back.
07:04His bones were full of marine diatoms.
07:07He had drowned.
07:08In the middle of the driest desert, beside the sea.
07:11And his life had been hard long before that.
07:14Severe arthritis, deformed joints, legs worn down from years of squatting to gather shellfish, shoulders and arms damaged from a
07:20lifetime of rowing and harpooning.
07:22He was also severely anemic, because his body was infested with tapeworms, from poorly handled food.
07:28But perhaps the most unsettling of them all was the most common.
07:31Trepanation.
07:32Drilling a hole into the human skull.
07:35One of the oldest surgical procedures we know.
07:37At a Neolithic site in France, dating to around 6500 BC, archaeologists found more than 40 skulls, each with a
07:44deliberately bored circular hole.
07:45These weren't battle wounds.
07:47The edges were smooth.
07:50Intentional.
07:51One study estimated that up to 10% of Neolithic people underwent this.
07:55At this French site, the figure was astonishing.
07:57One in three.
07:59And the survival rate?
08:01Fewer than 40% of the skulls show any sign of healing.
08:04In other words, more than 60% died on the table, from infection, blood loss, or the blade cutting too
08:10deep into the brain.
08:11No anesthesia.
08:13No painkillers.
08:14A sharpened stone blade, sometimes a shell.
08:17The patient stayed fully conscious the entire time.
08:20And if they somehow survived, the wound took months to close.
08:2430,000 years of human history.
08:26And these are only a handful of the ways we've learned to die.
08:29Some were hunted.
08:31Some were murdered.
08:32Some were saved by the very hands that hurt them.
08:35Our ancestors were, at the same time, more brutal and more compassionate than we like to imagine.
08:40The question is not whether they were like us.
08:42It's whether we are still like them.
09:08The most mature?
09:11The tremendous person is the same thing.
09:11They do not the same thing.
09:12I saw it.
09:17I saw it.
09:20I saw it.
09:23It was a man.
09:24Some were murdered.
09:25His mother was murdered.
09:25He was murdered in the prison.
09:25I saw it.
09:25The other day.
09:32Let's go.
09:59Let's go.
10:33Let's go.
11:01Let's go.
11:34Let's go.
11:57Let's go.
12:29Let's go.
12:55Let's go.
13:33Let's go.
13:57Let's go.
