Nearly 8,000-year-old skull found in Minnesota River

A partial skull from practically 8,000 years in the past that was discovered by two kayakers in a river last summer can be returned to Native American officers in Minnesota

ByThe Related Press

21 May 2022, 19:10

• 3 min learn

REDWOOD FALLS, Minn. -- A partial skull that was discovered last summer by two kayakers in Minnesota can be returned to Native American officials after investigations determined it was about 8,000 years previous.

The kayakers discovered the skull within the drought-depleted Minnesota River about 110 miles (180 kilometers) west of Minneapolis, Renville County Sheriff Scott Hable stated.

Pondering it is likely to be associated to a lacking person case or murder, Hable turned the skull over to a medical examiner and finally to the FBI, where a forensic anthropologist used carbon relationship to determine it was probably the cranium of a younger man who lived between 5500 and 6000 B.C., Hable stated.

"It was an entire shock to us that that bone was that previous,” Hable advised Minnesota Public Radio.

The anthropologist determined the man had a depression in his skull that was “maybe suggestive of the cause of death.”

After the sheriff posted concerning the discovery on Wednesday, his workplace was criticized by a number of Native Americans, who stated publishing photos of ancestral stays was offensive to their tradition.

Hable said his workplace removed the publish.

"We didn’t mean for it to be offensive whatsoever,” Hable mentioned.

Hable stated the stays can be turned over to Upper Sioux Group tribal officials.

Minnesota Indian Affairs Council Cultural Resources Specialist Dylan Goetsch stated in a statement that neither the council nor the state archaeologist were notified about the discovery, which is required by state legal guidelines that govern the care and repatriation of Native American stays.

Goetsch said the Facebook post “confirmed a whole lack of cultural sensitivity” by failing to name the individual a Native American and referring to the stays as “somewhat piece of historical past.”

Kathleen Blue, a professor of anthropology at Minnesota State University, mentioned Wednesday that the skull was definitely from an ancestor of one of many tribes nonetheless dwelling in the space, The New York Occasions reported.

She said the younger man would have likely eaten a food regimen of plants, deer, fish, turtles and freshwater mussels in a small region, quite than following mammals and bison on their migrations.

“There’s most likely not that many people at that time wandering around Minnesota 8,000 years in the past, as a result of, like I mentioned, the glaciers have solely retreated just a few hundreds years before that,” Blue mentioned. “That period, we don’t know a lot about it.”