WORLD'S EARLIEST KNOWN SHARK ATTACK VICTIM IS THOUSANDS OF YEARS OLD
Chrissie Watkins, probably one of the most famous fictional shark attack victims and the first to fall foul of the shark in Jaws, but what about the first in real life?
Well, we know that the first recorded shark attack victim in the US was Charles Vansant, the first victim in the notorious Jersey Shore shark attacks from 1916, but that was just over 100 years ago: The First Summer of the Shark
The Jersey Shore shark attacks of 1916 were a series of shark attacks along the coast of New Jersey, in the United States, between July 1 and 12, 1916, in which four people were killed and one injured.
It turns out that the world's earliest known shark attack victim died some 3,000 years ago, so with that timeline it doesn't take an oceanographer to tell you it wasn't Jack the Ripper.
Although at first sight, you'd be forgiven for thinking that it was as the victim had almost 800 deep, serrated injuries.
These wince-inducing injuries were mainly inflicted on the arms, legs, and front of the chest and abdomen. Ouch!
Original excavation photograph of Tsukumo No 24. Pic: Laboratory of Physical Anthropology, Kyoto University
And what makes it worse is that it looks like the man, who was discovered in Tsukumo, Japan, by the Seto Inland Sea, was alive at the time of the unrelenting attack.
“We know that sharks have been around for millions of years, so it’s no surprise that there would be cases of shark bites 3,000 years ago. Even more incredibly, we’re able to use those teeth marks to pretty accurately determine what kind of shark species inflicted the bites and this is a tool still used today by scientists and marine biologists to help provide us with clues on these type of interactions between sharks and humans”
One so ferocious that it saw his left hand sheered clean off and resulted in a missing right leg.
It was estimated that the man - thought to be most likely a fisherman - died 1370 to 1010 BC. That's Before Christ and not Before Chrissie.
To discover more about the attack, the archaeologists turned to George Burgess of the Florida Program for Shark Research, to get to the bottom of this ancient shark death.
And his report found the man was clearly the victim of a shark attack and, based on the distribution of the teeth marks they could still tell the likely species. A tiger shark or great white.
Words by Dean Newman
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