The musket blast was sudden and deadly, the killing nearly 500 years ago of what may have been the first gunshot victim in the Western Hemisphere.

?We didn?t expect it. We saw this skull and saw the almost round hole and thought people must have been shooting around here recently,? said Guillermo Cock, an archaeologist who found the remains near Lima, Peru. But he realised that the skull was ancient, and a recent bullet strike would simply have shattered it, Cock said.

The skull was found among a large group of bones of ancient Incas, who had died violently in the early 1500s as the Spanish Conquistadors battled the native empire. The bones were in shallow graves, leading the archaeologist to speculate the burials were done hurriedly during conflict, perhaps an uprising against the Spanish in 1536.