1,000-year-old bones represent oldest tsunami victims in East Africa

May 13, 2020

A thousand years ago, a thriving early Swahili village bustled on the banks of Tanzania’s Pangani River, a few miles inland from the Indian Ocean. Residents built their houses out of wood lattices daubed with earth. They filled their nets with fish and crafted beads from shells. Their ceramics were plain and functional.

And then one day, a tsunami barreled in, triggered by an earthquake on the other side of the Indian Ocean.

New research, funded by the National Geographic Society and published today in Geology, describes a macabre rarity in the geological record. The villagers evidently had no chance to escape the torrent that overtook them. Many drowned in their razed homes and were buried in the wreckage. As far as the study’s authors know, the Tanzanian site is the first—and oldest—tsunami deposit bearing human remains found in East Africa.

The sand that buried the village contained the remains of fish, rodents, birds, amphibians, and even the shells of small marine mollusks—a sign that water had washed in from the Indian Ocean, several miles downriver. And wherever the researchers dug, they kept finding more human bones.

“Sometimes, it was kind of emotional—we needed to think about the science, but in the meantime, we were working with the people who died there,” Maselli says.

Radiocarbon dating of charcoal and bone in the deposits confirmed that the flooding event happened about a thousand years ago. Tsunami deposits from around the Indian Ocean also date to that time, suggesting that an event similar in scale and intensity to the 2004 tsunami occurred a millennium ago.

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