Mississippi Repatriates Native American Remains and Artifacts

The Associated Press reports that the Mississippi Department of Archives and History will hand over more than 400 sets of human remains and 83 artefacts in its collections to The Chickasaw Nation under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).

A man and a woman were found buried among wolf teeth and turtle shells. Other graves contained mothers and infants. Some tribal members were laid to rest with beloved dogs. Over the past century, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History has stored the remains of hundreds of Native Americans who once inhabited the state.

Most of the remains were found in the Mississippi Delta and range from 750 to 1,800 years old. For decades, they sat on shelves in the state’s collections.

Now, the remains of 403 Chickasaw ancestors along with various artefacts have been returned to their people to be laid to rest on Mississippi soil.

The initiative is the largest of its kind conducted by the state of Mississippi since the passage three decades ago of the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Since 1990, the law has required that institutions like museums and schools that receive federal funding return human remains, funerary objects and other sacred items to their Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian descendants.

“We see the repatriation process as an act of love,” said Amber Hood, director of historic preservation and repatriation for The Chickasaw Nation. “These are our grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles and cousins from long ago.”

Around 83,000 ancestral native remains in the United States had been returned to descendants as of last fall, according to National Park Service data. But at least another 116,000 still are waiting to be returned.

Anne Amati, NAGPRA coordinator with the University of Denver Museum of Anthropology, said institutions in the southeastern United States have more remains than anywhere else in the country.

Dozens of tribes, including the Chickasaw, Choctaw and Cherokee, once lived across millions of acres throughout the Southeast until forcibly and violently removed by the U.S. government following the Indian Removal Act of the 1830s.

After the Great Depression, thousands of graves were disrupted by the Tennessee Valley Authority as workers built reservoirs. Nearly 11,500 remains from Tennessee have now been returned to descendants, but 21,200 remain. More than 18,600 in Alabama have been returned, but there are still about 10,650 more.

In some instances, shell beads, stone tools, celts and vessels found in burial sites across the nation have been put on exhibit in museums.

Many remains in Mississippi were discovered by Delta farmers developing land from the 1950s to 1970s.

Meg Cook, the Mississippi agency’s director of archaeology, said the state has an ethical as well as a legal responsibility to return remains.

“We’re doing everything that we can to reconcile the past and move forward in a very transparent way,” Cook said. “It’s our responsibility to tell the Mississippi story. And that means all of the bad parts, too.”

There are more than 1,000 remains still to be identified and returned to tribes in Mississippi.

The Chickasaw Nation told Mississippi officials they wanted remains and objects from their ancestors to be transported in muslin bags, which will decompose when reburied. Volunteers were recruited during the pandemic shutdown to hand-sew the bags at home.

“Volunteers knew they were helping in some ways to bring these people home, to put them to rest,” Cook said.

Trapped In A Fossil: Remnants Of A 46-Million-Year-Old Meal

A mosquito plunged its proboscis into an animal, perhaps a bird or a mammal, and filled up on a blood meal around 46 million years ago. Then its luck turned for the worse, as it fell into a lake and sunk to the bottom.

Normally this wouldn’t be newsworthy, and nobody would likely know or care about a long-dead insect in what is now northwest Montana.

But somehow, the mosquito didn’t immediately decompose — a fortuitous turn of events for modern-day scientists — and became fossilized over the course of many years, said Dale Greenwalt, a researcher at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Greenwalt discovered the mosquito fossil after it was given to the museum as a gift, and he immediately realized the specimen’s rarity.

It is, in fact, the only blood-engorged mosquito fossil found, Greenwalt told LiveScience.

The fossil is even stranger because it comes from shale, a type of rock formed from sediments deposited at the bottom of bodies of water, as opposed to amber, the age-old remains of dried tree sap, in which insect remnants are generally better preserved. 

“The chances that such an insect would be preserved in shale is almost infinitesimally small,” Greenwalt said.

In their study, Greenwalt and his collaborators bombarded the mosquito fossil with molecules of bismuth, a heavy metal, which vaporizes chemicals found in the fossil.

These airborne chemicals are then analyzed by a mass spectrometer, a machine that can identify chemicals based on their atomic weights, Greenwalt said.

The beauty of this technique, called time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry, is that it doesn’t destroy the sample — previously, similar techniques required grinding up portions of fossils, he added.

The analysis revealed hidden porphyrins, organic compounds found in hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein in the blood, hidden in the fossilized mosquito’s abdomen.

The finding may bring to mind the story of “Jurassic Park,” a novel and movie in which scientists resurrect dinosaurs from DNA preserved in blood-engorged mosquitoes preserved in amber.

Although this finding doesn’t really make this fictitious story any more likely, it does show that complex organic molecules besides DNA can be preserved for a long time, Greenwalt said.

The discovery also shows that “blood-filled mosquitoes were already feeding at that time, suggesting that they were around much earlier and could have fed on dinosaurs,” said George Poinar, a paleo-entomologist at Oregon State University, who wasn’t involved in the research.

Greenwalt said he had no way of knowing exactly how the mosquito was preserved so well. Perhaps the most likely hypothesis is that the insect was trapped in a covering of water-suspended algae, which are capable of coating specimens in a sticky, gluelike material, before sinking to the bottom; this algae process has been shown to fossilize other types of insects, he said.

Researchers don’t know what kind of animal the blood came from since hemoglobin-derived porphyrins amongst different animals appear to be identical, Greenwalt said.

The study is exciting because it provides more evidence that porphyrins, organic compounds found in “virtually all living organisms from microbes to humans in varying amounts” are “extremely stable” — and are thus a perfect target for studying long-dead plants and animals, said Mary Schweitzer, a researcher at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, who wasn’t involved in the study. 

Ship Found 20 Feet Below World Trade Center Site Traced to Colonial-Era Philadelphia

Researchers long stumped by the mysterious history of an 18th-century ship uncovered at the World Trade Center have finally discovered its origins — thanks to tree rings, according to a new study.

The massive wooden ship — the skeleton of which was unexpectedly discovered 25 feet below street level in the muddy excavation of the World Trade Center site in 2010 — has now been traced to Colonial-era Philadelphia, with a history linked to Independence Hall, according to a new report from scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Scientists say the wood from the vessel was chopped in 1773 from a forest of white oak trees in Philadelphia, the same type of trees used to build Independence Hall, where the Constitution and Declaration of Independence were signed.

Columbia scientists were able to link the growth rings found in the old wood of the ship with a previously taken sample of wood from Independence Hall, researchers said.

Tree rings are like “barcodes” that create unique patterns, allowing for dating, said Neil Pederson, Columbia tree ring scientist and co-author of the study.

While the majority of the boat was made from white oak, a sample from the keel of the ship was the key to narrowing down its history.

“The keel was actually made from hickory, which was only found in the Eastern United States or Eastern Asia, which meant we could really narrow down our search — East Asia wasn’t really a possibility,” Pederson said. “That discovery really put me in a good mood — and put us in a good geographic zone.”

The ship’s 32-foot hull was carefully dug out of the muck in July 2010, exhaustively documented, disassembled, and sent off for preservation at the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory. Some timber samples, however, were sent to Columbia for analysis.

Historians believe the vessel was likely a merchant ship, in the Dutch style of a Hudson River sloop. It likely traveled along the Atlantic, bringing wood and food down to the West Indies and returning with sugar, salt, molasses, and rum.

The ship suffered an infestation of Teredo worms while in the Caribbean, which likely ate away at its wood and led to its demise after about 20 to 30 years on the water. It’s believed that by 1797, the boat was buried in the landfill used to extend Manhattan’s shoreline westward.

Hundreds of artifacts were found in and around the boat, including ceramics, musket balls, a buckle, a British button, a coin, animal bones, dozens of shoes, and a human hair with a single louse on it.

The ship remains at the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory, and researchers say it’s possible it may eventually be reassembled.

50 Million Year Old Fossil Identified as Relative of Ostriches

The bird fossils were found more than a decade ago, completely intact with bones, feathers, and soft tissues in a former lake bed in Wyoming. Nesbitt cannot hide a grin as he calls the fossil a once-in-a-lifetime discovery for palaeontologists.

“This is among one of the earliest well-represented bird species after the age of large dinosaurs,” said Nesbitt, an assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences.

“You can definitely appreciate how complete these fossils are,” added Nesbitt of the remains, the focus of a research paper co-authored by Nesbitt and newly published in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History.

Some of the remains are now on display as part of the exhibit “Dinosaurs Among Us” at the New York-based history museum. The fossils Other specimens used in the study are kept by Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History and the Wyoming Geological Survey.

The new species is named Calciavis grandei — with “calci” meaning “hard/stone,” and “avis” from the Latin for the bird, and “grandei” in honour of famed palaeontologist Lance Grande who has studied the fossil fish from the same ancient North American lake for decades.

The bird is believed to be roughly the size of a chicken, and similar to chickens, were mostly ground-dwelling, only flying in short bursts to escape predators.

Nesbitt began studying the fossil in 2009 whilst a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences, under Professor Julia Clarke, whom Nesbitt considers an important mentor. Clarke co-authored the paper with Nesbitt, who joined Virginia Tech’s faculty in 2014.

The work was funded by two grants from the National Science Foundation’s Earth Sciences Directorate.

Two fossils of Calciavis dating from the Eocene epoch — roughly between 56 million and 30 million years ago — were found by fossil diggers within the Green River Formation in Wyoming, a hotbed for extinct fish. “These are spectacularly preserved fossils, one is a nearly complete skeleton covered with feather remains, the others are nearly as complete and some show soft tissue remains,” said Nesbitt.

“Fossil birds are rare,” added Nesbitt, adding that as bird bones are hollow, they are far more fragile than most mammal bones, and more likely to be crushed during fossilization. One of the fossilized birds in this rare case apparently was covered in mud soon after death.

The former lake in which the fossil was found is best known for producing scores of complete fish skeleton fossils, but other fossils such as other birds, plants, crocodilians, turtles, bats, and mammals from an ecosystem roughly 50 million years old.

Included in the extinct group of early Palaeognathae birds, the Lithornithidae, Nesbitt and Clarke call the bird a close relative of living ostriches, kiwis, and tinamous now living in the southern continents. After tropical forests disappeared in North America, Calciavis and other more tropical birds went extinct, said, Nesbitt and Clarke.

“Relationships among species in this lineage of birds have been extremely contentious,” said Clarke. “We hope the detailed new anatomical data we provide will aid in finding a resolution to this ongoing debate.”

“The new bird shows us that the bird group that includes the largest flightless birds of today had a much wider distribution and longer evolutionary history in North America,” Nesbitt said. “Back when Calciavis was alive, it lived in a tropical environment that was rich with tropical life and this is in stark contrast to the high-desert environment in Wyoming today.”

The Calciavis skeleton will be important to interpreting new bird fossils and other fossils from the Eocene epoch that were collected decades ago. “This spectacular specimen could be a ‘keystone’ that helps interpret much of the sparse fossil of birds that once lived in North America millions of years ago,” said Nesbitt.

New World Dog Bone Fragment Dated to 10,200 Years Ago

According to a Science Magazine report, a 10,200-year-old fragment of dog bone has been identified among thousands of ancient bone pieces discovered in a cave on the west coast of Alaska in 1998. 

The find supports the idea that dogs accompanied the first humans who set foot on these continents—and that both travelled there along the Pacific coast.

“This is a fantastic study,” says archaeologist Loren Davis of Oregon State University, Corvallis, who was not involved in the research. “If the coastal migration theory is correct, we should expect to see exactly the kind of evidence reported in this study.”

Researchers once thought humans initially entered the Americas about 12,000 years ago. That’s when thick glaciers that covered much of North America began to melt. This opened a corridor, which allowed people to trek from Siberia across now-submerged land in the Bering Sea, and then into North America on the hunt for mammoth and other big game.

But over the past decade, archaeologists have shown people might have begun to move into North America much earlier. To get around the glaciers, they would have island-hopped by boat and walked along shorelines exposed to low sea levels. They travelled from Siberia through the Alaskan archipelago about 16,000 years ago, eventually making their way down the Pacific coast.

The sliver of dog bone supports this hypothesis. Recovered from among more than 50,000 prehistoric animal and human remains excavated near Wrangel Island, researchers didn’t realize it came from a dog until they analyzed its DNA.

“We started out thinking this was just another bear bone,” says team leader Charlotte Lindqvist, a biologist at the University at Buffalo (UB). “When we went deeper, we found out it was from a dog.”

The bone is about 10,200 years old, making its owner the oldest dog known in the Americas, the scientists report today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. (The previous record holders were two 10,000-year-old dogs unearthed in the U.S. Midwest.) And the dog’s DNA holds clues to an even earlier time.

The pup’s genome revealed it was closely related to the first known dogs, which researchers think were domesticated in Siberia about 23,000 years ago.

Based on the number of genetic differences between the Alaskan dog and its Siberian ancestors, the team estimates the two populations split 16,700 years ago, plus or minus a few thousand years.

That’s a clue that dogs—and their humans—left Siberia and entered the Americas thousands of years before North America’s glaciers melted.

“Here we have the genetic evidence, if not the physical evidence, [showing] dogs were already in the Americas with humans 16,000 years ago,” says Durham University archaeologist Angela Perri, who was not part of the team.

The dates also line up with DNA-based estimates for when modern Native Americans split off from ancestors in Siberia, providing another line of evidence to pin down when the first migrations happened.

“Understanding how the dogs moved also shows you how the humans moved,” says Flavio Augusto da Silva Coelho, a graduate student at UB who did the DNA and other analyses.

Perri agrees. The study shows dogs are a useful way to track ancient human migrations, especially when human remains are missing or can’t be sampled because of descendant community concerns, she says. Even without human samples, “dogs can tell us some really interesting things” about our history, she says.

For example, chemical isotopes in the dog bone suggest the pooch ate marine animals. Because dogs aren’t much good at fishing, their masters likely gave them scraps of fish, seal, or whale that they themselves hunted. “It’s a strong indication people are feeding dogs,” Perri says. “Everything in this study points to coastally adopted people and their dogs moving into the Americas.”

Forgotten Graves Found at Florida African American Cemetery

WJCT Public Media reports that recent excavations have confirmed the presence of 29 grave shafts detected last year during a ground-penetrating radar survey at the site of North Greenwood Cemetery, an African American cemetery that operated from 1940 to 1954.

Archeologists looking at a “forgotten” Clearwater cemetery say that they have found almost 30 grave shafts.

Archaeologists from the Florida Public Archaeology Network, based out of the University of South Florida, and Tampa engineering firm, Cardno Inc., provided a final update on the North Greenwood Cemetery excavation Friday.

The process was done to verify the location of unmarked graves in the African-American cemetery that was identified previously.

“We’ve located a total of 29 graves, and that confirms the data of the results of the ground-penetrating radar survey that was conducted last year, in February and August,” said USF archeologist Jeff Moates.

The archaeologists opened three large areas for excavation, and, in addition to the graves, found a number of artifacts, including two dimes from 1942 and a penny from 1940.

According to the Tampa Bay Times, the North Greenwood Cemetery was in operation between 1940 and 1954, explaining the coins from that time period.

The land was sold to make room for Pinellas High School and a city pool. The remains of 350 people were moved to Parklawn Memorial Cemetery in Dunedin, but nearby residents of the Clearwater Heights neighborhood felt that the bodies in unmarked graves were left behind.

The excavation revealed that may indeed be the case.

“We’ve uncovered material that you would expect to be associated with graves,” said Moates. “There’s evidence of coffin hardware, decayed remains of coffins, concrete vaults, associated gravestone or headstone materials that are in a kind of a disturbed state.”

“We found an intact aluminum grave marker in the name of the deceased individual, Mr. William Ridley, who was buried in 1951,” Moates added.

Once the community knew that the excavation process was happening, people like O’Neill Larkin, 81, wanted to share their memories of North Greenwood.

“He remembers playing on this cemetery as a boy, there was a popular swimming hole located nearby and Stevenson Creek,” said Moates. “But he remembers coming through here and hunting rabbits and quail and pigeon with his friends. He also had a friend who was a Boy Scout, who unfortunately died on a Boy Scout trip, and was buried in the cemetery.

“And so it’s just stories like that, that the community were able to come by and connect, share with us connecting the memories of this place to the actual physical remains of what they remember to be here.”

North Greenwood is just the latest in a number of forgotten Black cemeteries around the region and state that are being investigated following the discovery of the Zion Cemetery in Tampa in 2019.

Archaeologists will conduct a further study of the recovered objects and share their findings with the City of Clearwater and the local chapter of the NAACP.

City Found 360 Feet Below Missouri City, Giant Human Skeleton Found

When coal miners at Moberly, Missouri were drilling a shaft 360 foot deep, broke into a cavern revealing “a wonderful buried city,” multiple sources reported in 1885.

Masonry and artefacts in extraordinary rude design have been found. Like stone tables, bronze and flint knives, stone and granite hammers, metal statues, metallic saws and a stone fountain that flowed with “perfectly pure water”, which was found to be impregnated with lime.

“Lying beside the fountain where portions of a human being and from the measurement of the bones, it concluded that when alive the figure was three times the size of an ordinary man and possessed of wonderful muscular power and quickness. “, according to the St Paul Daily Globe.

The Semi-Weekly South Kentuckian published the measurements of the giant’s leg, “The bones of the leg were measured, the femur measuring 4 and 1/2 feet, the tibia four feet and three inches. The head bones had separated in two pieces, the sagittal and cornal suturis having been destroyed”

The city was arched in by a hard and thick stratum of lava. The civilization used a regularly laid out road system enclosed by walls to travel around. A hall was discovered wherein were stone benches, tools of all descriptions for mechanical service.

The searching party spent twelve hours in the depths and only gave up explorations because of the oil in their lamps being low. No end to the wonderful discovery was reached.

The statues were not accurately made as those made by the mechanics in the year 1885, however, they demonstrated much skill and evidence of an advanced civilization.

The facts above are vouched for by Mr David Coates, the recorder of the city of Moberly, and Mr George Kealing, City Marshall, who were of the exploring party.

I could find no record of the 2nd exploration. Perhaps in the historic papers on film, in the town of Moberly, information may still exist.

In order to find 8 newspaper stories, I needed to search “stratum of lava” 1884-1886.

In an odd coincidence the terms “cave + Missouri”, “Missouri + cave + coal mine”, “Missouri cave fountain”, “Missouri gaint” and countless other rational terms would not locate these articles on the library of congress website.

It seems you need to be clever in your search terms in order to locate historical articles that are relevant.