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 3000 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 a little white from the University

of Oxford when the lead researchers on this project. So without further ado here's a

listen.

A listen 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 the awesome ancient history detective

story that has grabbed world headlines. Listen 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 okay fair enough okay you don't know about other people to a human in history

that is absolutely remarkable. Now listen 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?

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 like for instance you'll have weapons embedded in your body and

things like that. And you mentioned the Jomon period there I mean what time scales are we talking

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