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 oldest such deposit with human remains in the world, found across the Indian Ocean in Papua New Guinea, is 7,000 years old.
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