When you purchase through contact on our internet site , we may earn an affiliate commission . Here ’s how it works .
A set of four tiny comb from the Polynesian kingdom Tonga might be among the world ’s Old tattoo kits .
The pecker had been sitting in computer storage in an Australian university for decades . A squad of researchers recently reassessed the artifacts and observe that the comb — two of which are made from human pearl — are 2,700 years old .
Geoffrey Clark of The Australian National University holds a piece of the 2,700-year-old tattooing kit from Tonga.
Archaeologists have have it off that tattoo was practiced in several culture since prehistory . mom from Siberia to Egypt have beenfound with tattoosvisible on their flesh . Ötzi the Iceman , a 5,000 - class - old mummy found in the Alps , has dozens of tattoo on his organic structure , which some research worker think wereinked on for sanative purpose .
" In Oceania , we do n’t have mummy to facilitate us figure out when tattooing first appeared because skin does n’t endure our harsh tropical conditions , " the author of the novel cogitation , Geoffrey Clark , of Australian National University , and Michelle Langley , of Griffith University , write in an article forThe Conversation . " So , alternatively we must depend for less direct clues — such as tools . " [ Mummy Melodrama : Top 9 fact About Ötzi the Iceman ]
It ’s only recently that archaeologists have begun to recognise prehistoric tool that were used to make tattoos . In 2016 , archaeological experimentation showed that 3,000 - twelvemonth - previous volcanic glass tools were in all likelihood used for tattoo in the Solomon Islands . Last class , another team reported that they found ink - tarnish tattoo needles carve out of joker bone from a 3,600 - twelvemonth - onetime aboriginal American grave in Tennessee . And just last calendar week , archeologist reported that a2,000 - year - onetime artifactin museum storage had been identified as a tattoo tool ; that needle was made from prickly pear cactus spines by the ancestral Pueblo people in what is now Utah .
The small cockscomb from Tonga were find in an ancient dump during an excavation at an archaeological site on the Tonga island of Tongatapu in 1963 . The artifacts had been in a storage facility at the Australian National University in Canberra , and then were assumed lose after a flaming . But when the artefact were find intact in 2008 , research worker decide to C - date the tools to check their age .
Tattooing was , and still is , an important pattern of people in the Pacific region ; the word of honor " tattoo " comes from the Polynesian Scripture " tatau . " Men in Tonga were ridiculed if they were not tattoo , Langley and Clark wrote , and many of them traveled to Samoa to receive traditional tattoos when European missionaries bottle up the practice in the nineteenth century .
In the recent eighteenth century , British captain James Cook told Europeans about the elaborate soundbox art he see to it during his voyages in the Pacific . He wrote that , in Tonga , tattoo " is done by what we might call puncturation or instill with a picayune mat bone instrument excision full of fine teeth & fix’d in a handle . It is dipt into the staining mixture … and struck into the skin with a bit of joint untill [ sic ] the blood sometimes follows , and by that think of go out such indelible marks that time can not erase them . "
Langley and Clark think the 2,700 - year - old tattoo comb might have been used in a exchangeable way , and the artifacts extend grounds of the deep antiquity of tattooing in Tonga . The researchers also specify that two of the combs were made from the bones of seabirds and the other two from human osseous tissue .
" Tattoo combs made from human ivory could mean that multitude were permanently notice by tools made from the os of their congeneric — a means of combining memory and identity in their graphics , " Langley and Clark write .
Their findings were bring out in theJournal of Island and Coastal Archaeology .
Originally published onLive Science .
