InglêsAspectos linguísticos - linguistic aspects

• (IESES 2017)

TSUNAMI VICTIM

By Charles Choi | October 25, 2017 1:00 pm

Paragraph 1 Tsunamis have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the

past two decades.Now a new study finds that a 6,000-year-old

skull may come from the earliest known victim of these killer

waves.

Paragraph 2 The partial human skull was discovered in 1929 buried in a

mangrove swamp outside the small town of Aitape Papua New

Guinea, about 500 miles north of Australia. Scientists originally

thought it belonged to an ancient extinct human species, Homo

erectus . However, subsequent research dated it to about 5,000

or 6,000 years in age, suggesting that it instead belonged to a

modern human.

A Rare Specimen

Paragraph 3 The skull is one of just two examples of ancient human remains

found in Papua New Guinea after more than a century of work

there. As such, archaeologists wanted to learn more about this

skull to elucidate how people settled this region.

Paragraph 4 The scientists went back to where this skull was found and

sampled the soil in which itwas discovered. They focused on

details such as sediment grain size and composition.

Paragraph 5 In the sediment, the researchers discovered a range of

microscopic organisms from the ocean known as diatoms. These

were similar to ones found in the soil after a 1998 tsunami killed

more than 2,000 people in Papua New Guinea — for instance,

their shells of silicawere broken, likely by extremely powerful

forces.

Paragraph 6 These diatom shells, combined with the chemical compositions

and the size ranges of the grains, all suggest that a tsunami

occurred when the skull was buried. The researchers suggested

the catastrophe either directly killed the person or ripped open

their grave.

Paragraph 7 Tsunamis, which are giant waves caused by earthquakes,

volcanic eruptions or underwater landslides, are some of the

deadliest natural disasters known. The 2004 tsunami in the

Indian Ocean killed more than 230,000 people, a higher death

toll than any fire or hurricane.

Paragraph 8 The site where the skull was found is currently about 7.5 miles

away from thecoast. Still, the researchers noted that back when

whoever the skull belonged to wasalive, sea levels were higher,

and the area would have been just behind the shoreline.

Paragraph 9 The waves of the tsunami that hit Papua New Guinea in 1998

reached more than 50 feet high and penetrated up to three miles

inland. “If the event we have identified resulted from a similar

process, it could have also resulted in extremely high waves,”

study co-lead author Mark Golitko, an archaeologist at the

University of Notre Dame in Indiana and the Field Museum in

Chicago.

Paragraph 10 These results show “that coastal populations have been

vulnerable to such events for thousands of years,” Golitko said.

“People have managed to live with such unpredictable and

destructive occurrences, but it highlights how vulnerable people

living near the sea can be. Given the far larger populations that

live along coastlines today, the potential impacts are far more

severenow.”

Paragraph 11 Golitko plans to return to the area over thenext few years “to

further study the frequency of such events, how the

environment changed over time, and how people have coped

with the environmental challenges of living in that environment.”

He and his colleagues detailed their findings Wednesday in the

journal PLOS O .

Retrieved and adapted from:

<http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/dbrief/2017/10/25/first-tsunami-

victim/#.WfYiYmhSzIU> Accessed on October, 29 th , 2017.