France digs up bones from 6,000-year-old ‘massacre’
A shattered skull discovered among fractured and fossilized skeletons at the site of an archaeological dig in Alsace, north-eastern France.
Archaeologists had discovered the remains of victims from a 6,000-year-old massacre in Alsace in eastern France that was likely carried out by “furious ritualized warriors”.
The bones of the 6,000- year-old genocide in Alsace, in north-eastern France have been found by archeologists.
According to a team from the National Institute for Preventive Archeological Research (Inrap), the bodies of 10 people have been found in one of 300 ancient silos, used to store grain and other food.
The Neolithic group appeared to have had violent deaths, with multiple injuries to their legs, hands and skulls.
The way in which the bodies were piled on top of each other suggested they had been killed together and dumped in the silo.
The fossilised skeletons of two men with numerous fractured bones.
“They were very brutally executed and received violent blows, almost certainly from a stone axe,” said Philippe Lefranc, an Infrap specialist on the period.
The skeletons of five adults and an adolescent were found as well as four arms from different individuals.
The arms were probably war trophies, like those found at a nearby burial site of Bergheim in 2012, said Lefranc.
The mutilations indicated a society of “furious, ritualised warriors”, he said, while the silos were stored within a defence wall that pointed towards “a troubled time, a period of insecurity”.
Researchers examine human remains at the massacre site.
It is hoped genetic testing on the bones will reveal more information about the killings, but Lefranc said one theory was that a local tribe had clashed with a group arriving from the area around modern-day Paris.
“It appears that a warrior raid by people from the Parisian basin went wrong for the assailants, and the Alsatians of the era massacred them,” he said.
However, in the long run, it was the “Parisians” who had the last laugh.
The local tribe appears to have been supplanted by the newcomers at about 4,200 BC, as demonstrated by new funeral rites, pottery, and hamlets.
Rome Sinkhole Makes Extraordinary Archaeological Find
A sinkhole that appeared outside the Pantheon in Rome last week has revealed remnants of the original imperial flooring in Piazza della Rotonda.
The Roman Archaeologists have confirmed that the sinkhole that opened up in front of the Pantheon in recent days has brought to light the ancient imperial flooring in Piazza Della Rotonda.
In addition, the discovery of the seven travertine slabs, which are situated at about 2.5 meters below piazza level, is, in fact, a rediscovery.
The flooring was uncovered during works in the 1990s but was sealed up again after being documented by archaeologists who have now had a chance to re-examine the ancient remains.
“More than 20 years after their first discovery” – explains Daniela Porro, special superintendent of Rome – “the slabs of the ancient floor of the square in front of the Pantheon emerge intact, protected by a layer of fine pozzolan”, in what he described as “unequivocal proof of the importance of archaeological protection, particular in a city such as Rome.”
In imperial times the square was much larger than the current one, opening out in front of the Pantheon, the temple dedicated to all the Roman gods, built by Agrippa between 27 and 25 BC.
The area was completely transformed in the second century AD, under Emperor Hadrian, with the level of the piazza raised and repaved.
The ancient slabs/pavement unearthed by the Rome sinkhole in front of the Pantheon.
However, the appearance of another sinkhole in the city is also further evidence of why ancient Romans became master hydrologists specializing in systems of channeling and holding water like tunnels, cisterns, spas, bath-houses, channels, and aqueducts.
Only in January this year, The Local reported that a Rome apartment building has been evacuated and that a street was closed after “a sinkhole opened up” near the Colosseum.
Located on Rome’s famous Via Marco Aurelio, near the ancient Roman gladiatorial landmark, an apartment building, and two businesses were evacuated, and the street temporarily closed, as firefighters, police and housing authorities carried out emergency structural checks.
And The Local reported in February 2018 that a massive ten meters (33 feet) deep sinkhole occurred in the Balduina district, a residential area northwest of Vatican City, into which seven parked cars fell, with 22 families being evacuated from the residential area.
Another angle of the floor unearthed by the Rome sinkhole in front of the Pantheon.
Why on Earth, does this sinkhole phenomena occur so frequently in Rome, and not in say Naples or Milan? After the January 2020 sinkhole, the mayor of Rome, Virginia Raggi, told TG24 News that technicians were at something of a loss trying to explain the geological causes of the incident, and she said sinkholes (known as voragine) are a “major problem in central Rome.”
Traditionally, on average every year 30 fresh sinkholes, subsidence, and other collapses are recorded in Rome, but what is alarming, according to The Local, is that since 2008 the annual figure has “tripled.”
Searching for a cause, a 2018 Guardian article asked should we “blame the rain, the government or just geology,” not only for sinkholes but for increasing extreme weather events in Italy, in general?
The article opens with reference to a shocking statistic published in Roma Republica, that in the first four months of 2018, Rome suffered an astonishing “44 sinkholes,” once every two or three days, with an average of “90 sinkholes a year in Rome since 2010.”
Many blame the rain in Rome, because in 2018 it was the wettest six months in living memory, and this may have had catastrophic effects on Rome’s geology, as the city is founded upon a floodplain, and most of it still rests on a sandy, soft soil.
Water finds no resistance in penetrating this permeable substrate, especially now that its gravitational path of destruction is assisted with the cracks caused by the vibrations of thousands of cars, trucks, and scooters buzzing over the aquaplane.
In an attempt to safeguard the city’s residents, or at least to appear to be doing something to support what is a catastrophically neglected city, in 2018, it was announced that a multi-million-euro plan would be launched to fix its streets, but what was reported as ‘slow progress’ has now ground to a halt as Italian emergency authorities are presently struggling to build scaffolding around the perimeters of much more life-threatening, medical sinkhole.
Archaeologists Have a Lot of Dates Wrong for North American Indigenous History — But Are Using New Techniques to Get It Right
It was in 1492 that Columbus reached the Americas. Many Europeans had travelled before, but the century from then until 1609 marks the creation of the modern globalized world.
It gave Europe extraordinary wealth and genocide and disease to indigenous peoples across the Americas.
The dates and the estimates of the settlement in Europe are known from texts and sometimes illustrations, to use the failed colony on what was then Virginia’s Roanoke Island as an example.
However, one thing is missing. What of indigenous history in this traumatic era? Until now, the standard timeline has derived, inevitably, from the European conquerors, even when scholars try to present an indigenous perspective.
This all happened just 400 to 500 years ago – how wrong could the conventional chronology for indigenous settlements be? Quite wrong, it turns out, based on radiocarbon dating my collaborators and I have carried out at a number of Iroquoian sites in Ontario and New York state. We’re challenging existing – and rather colonialist – assumptions and mapping out the correct time frames for when indigenous people were active in these places.
Dating Iroquoia project member Samantha Sanft excavating at White Springs, New York.
Refining Dates Based on European Goods
Archaeologists estimate when a given indigenous settlement was active based on the absence or presence of certain types of European trade goods, such as metal and glass beads. It was always approximate, but became the conventional history.
Since the first known commercial fur trading missions were in the 1580s, archaeologists date initial regular appearances of scattered European goods to 1580-1600. They call these two decades Glass Bead Period 1. We know some trade occurred before that, though, since indigenous people Cartier met in the 1530s had previously encountered Europeans, and were ready to trade with him.
Archaeologists set Glass Bead Period 2 from 1600-1630. During this time, new types of glass beads and finished metal goods were introduced, and trade was more frequent. The logic of dating based on the absence or presence of these goods would make sense if all communities had equal access to, and desire to have, such items. But these key assumptions have not been proven.
16th-century European copper alloy beads from two sites in the Mohawk Valley.
That’s why the Dating Iroquoia Project exists. Made up of researchers here at Cornell University, the University of Georgia, and the New York State Museum, we’ve used radiocarbon dating and statistical modeling to date organic materials directly associated with Iroquoian sites in New York’s Mohawk Valley and Ontario in Canada.
First we looked at two sites in Ontario: Warminster and Ball. Both are long argued to have had direct connections with Europeans. For instance, Samuel de Champlain likely stayed at the Warminster site in 1615-1616. Archaeologists have found large numbers of trade goods at both sites.
Centuries-old maize sample, ready to be radiocarbon dated.
When my colleagues and I examined and radiocarbon dated plant remains (maize, bean, plum) and a wooden post, the calendar ages we came up with are entirely consistent with historical estimates and the glass bead chronology. The three dating methods agreed, placing Ball circa 1565-1590 and Warminster circa 1590-1620.
However, the picture was quite different at several other major Iroquois sites that lack such close European connections. Our radiocarbon tests came up with substantially different date ranges compared with previous estimates that were based on the presence or absence of various European goods.
For example, the Jean-Baptiste Lainé, or Mantle, site northeast of Toronto is currently the largest and most complex Iroquoian village excavated in Ontario. Excavated between 2003–2005, archaeologists dated the site to 1500–1530 because it lacks most trade goods and had just three European-source metal objects. But our radiocarbon dating now places it between about 1586 and 1623, most likely 1599-1614. That means previous dates were off the mark by as much as 50 to 100 years.
Other sites belonging to this same ancestral Wendat community are also more recent than previously assumed. For example, a site called Draper was conventionally dated to the second half of the 1400s, but radiocarbon dating places it at least 50 years later, between 1521 and 1557. Several other Ontario Iroquoian sites lacking large trade good assemblages vary by several decades to around 50 years or so from conventional dates based on our work.
Sturt Manning examining a sample in the Cornell Tree Ring Laboratory.
My colleagues and I have also investigated a number of sites in the Mohawk Valley, in New York state. During the 16th and early 17th centuries, the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers formed a key transport route from the Atlantic coast inland for Europeans and their trade goods. Again, we found that radiocarbon dating casts doubt on the conventional time frame attributed to a number of sites in the area.
Biases That Led to Misguided Timelines
Why were some of the previous chronology wrong?
The answer seems to be that scholars viewed the topic through a pervasive colonial lens. Researchers mistakenly assumed that trade goods were equally available, and desired, all over the region, and considered all indigenous groups as the same. On the contrary, it was Wendat custom, for example, that the lineage whose members first discovered a trade route claimed rights to it. Such “ownership” could be a source of power and status. Thus it would make sense to see uneven distributions of certain trade goods, as mediated by the controlling groups. Some people were “in,” with access, and others may have been “out.”
Ethnohistoric records indicate cases of indigenous groups rejecting contact with Europeans and their goods. For example, Jesuit missionaries described an entire village no longer using French kettles because the foreigners and their goods were blamed for disease.
There are other reasons European goods do or do not show up in the archaeological record. How near or far a place was from transport routes, and local politics, both within and between groups, could play a role. Whether Europeans made direct contact, or there were only indirect links, could affect availability. Objects used and kept in settlements could also vary from those intentionally buried in cemeteries. Above all, the majority of sites are only partly investigated at best, some are as yet unknown. And sadly the archaeological record is affected by the looting and destruction of sites. Only a direct dating approach removes the Eurocentric and historical lens, allowing an independent time frame for sites and past narratives.
Dating Iroquoia Project member Megan Conger excavating at White Springs, New York. Some locations have been under-explored, so far, by archaeologists.
Effects of Re-dating Indigenous History
Apart from changing the dates for textbooks and museum displays, the re-dating of a number of Iroquoian sites raises major questions about the social, political and economic history of indigenous communities. For example, conventionally, researchers place the start of a shift to larger and fortified communities, and evidence of increased conflict, in the mid-15th century.
However, our radiocarbon dates find that some of the key sites are from a century later, dating from the mid-16th to start of the 17th centuries. The timing raises questions of whether and how early contacts with Europeans did or did not play a role. This period was also during the peak of what’s called the Little Ice Age, perhaps indicating the changes in indigenous settlements have some association with climate challenge.
Our new radiocarbon dates indicate the correct time frame; they pose, but do not answer, many other remaining questions.
4,200-year-old burial of Bronze Age chieftain discovered under UK skate park
GLOUCESTERSHIRE, ENGLAND—BBC reports that two Bronze Age burials situated within a circular ditch were unearthed in southwestern England by a team including Andy Hood of Foundations Archaeology.
The first burial, placed in the center of the circle, contained the remains of a possible chieftain, who had been placed in the grave on his side in a crouched position.
The skulls and hooves of four cattle, a copper dagger with a whale-bone pommel, a stone wrist guard, an amber bead, and a flint and iron pyrite for starting fires were also found in the grave.
An excavation of the chieftain’s burial
The second grave, found near the first, held the remains of an older man placed in a seated position, and the skull and hooves of one animal.
Radiocarbon dating of the burials indicates the men lived around 4,200 years ago, and the artifacts in both burials indicate the men might have been members of the Beaker culture.
“It’s quite a significant investment of wealth to go into the ground,” Hood added. “There’s a chance that these animals were slaughtered as part of a ceremony related to the burial.”
The age and style of the burials, as well as artifacts found near the chieftain, suggest that these men were part of the Beaker culture, named for its beaker-like ceramic pots.
According to recent DNA studies, the people in this culture arrived from mainland Europe around 2400 B.C. They were an impressive lot who might have been the first to use copper and bronze in Britain, “so we think that their arrival is a fairly important moment in prehistory,” Hood said.
Some of the so-called “head and hoof” remains found in the chieftain’s burial.
The copper dagger that was found in the chieftain’s burial.
The Beaker culture commonly buried its dead with a “standard package” of grave goods: a beaker pot, a copper dagger, a stone wrist guard used by archers, a “strike-a-light kit,” amber beads and sometimes a cattle head and hoof offering, Hood said.
The chieftain had all these goods, except for the beaker pot, the archaeologists found. Because of the missing piece, “we think that this individual was a revered ‘specialist’ within Beaker society — somebody who wasn’t associated with the direct symbolism attached to the Beaker pot itself,” Hood said.
Even so, his grave goods were impressive and included: a copper dagger with a whale-bone pommel (the round knob at the end of the handle), a stone wrist guard, an amber bead, a flint and iron pyrite for starting a fire, and the cattle offerings.
The chieftain was buried at the center of a circular ditch that, at the time of burial, was a barrow, meaning that it had soil piled on top of it. Next to him, just off-center but still within the circular enclosure, were the remains of the older man, who was about 50 to 60 years old when he died.
Other news outlets have speculated that this older man was a shaman who may have been sacrificed to help the chieftain in the afterlife, but there is no evidence to support those claims, Hood said.
“The idea of him being a ‘shaman’ was postulated by some British newspapers,” Hood said, adding that “there is no evidence that he was sacrificed.”
Still, the older man’s burial is odd. “He was buried in an unusual ‘seated’ position — his legs were presently extending downwards towards the base of his grave pit,” Hood said. “We haven’t found a direct parallel elsewhere in Bronze Age Britain.”
Most people buried in Bronze Age Britain were arranged in a crouched position on their sides, as the chieftain was. So the older man’s proximity to the chieftain, as well as the man’s lack of a Beaker “package” and strange burial position, may remain a mystery for the ages.
Studies of bodies buried 500 years ago in Mexico reveal stories of 3 African slaves
The men excavating a new metro line in central Mexico City stumbled on a long-lost cemetery in the late 1980s. Documents showed it had once been connected to a colonial hospital built between 1529 and 1531—only about 10 years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico—for Indigenous patients.
Three stood out as archeologists excavated the uncovered skeletons. Their teeth were filed into shapes similar to those of enslaved Africans from Portugal and people living in parts of West Africa.
Chemical and genetic studies also suggest that these people are among the first African generation to arrive in the Americas, likely as early victims of the burgeoning transatlantic slave trade.
The skulls of the men buried in Mexico City whose bodies were found in the 1990s.
Tens of thousands of slaves and free Africans lived in Mexico during the 16th and 17th centuries. Today, almost all Mexicans have little African ancestry
Rodrigo Barquera, a graduate student in archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, suspected the remains might offer a window into lives often left out of historical records.
To confirm their origins, he and his adviser Johannes Krause extracted DNA and analyzed chemical isotopes, including strontium, carbon, and nitrogen, from their teeth.
Their DNA revealed that all three were men with ancestry from West Africa. (Researchers couldn’t connect them to particular countries or groups.) And the ratios of the chemicals in their teeth, which preserve a signature of the food and water they consumed as children, were consistent with West African ecosystems, the researchers report today in Current Biology.
“It’s really nice to see how well the different lines of evidence come together,” says Anne Stone, an anthropological geneticist at Arizona State University, Tempe, who wasn’t involved with the research.
All three skeletons, now at the National School of Anthropology and History in Mexico City, show signs of trauma and violence.
Remains of the three men show signs of physical abuse, such as the green stains produced by a gunshot wound.
The men were likely in their late 20s or early 30s when they died. Before that, one man survived several gunshot wounds, and he and another man showed a thinning of their skull bones associated with malnutrition and anemia.
The third man’s skeleton showed signatures of stress from grueling physical labor, including a poorly healed broken leg. These signs of abuse make it likely that the men were enslaved rather than free, Krause says.
The two men with malnutrition also carried pathogens linked to chronic diseases, according to a genetic analysis of the microbes preserved in their teeth.
One had the hepatitis B virus, and the other carried the bacterium that causes yaws, a disease in the same family as syphilis.
Both microbes were most closely related to African strains, making it likely the men caught these pathogens in Africa. Or perhaps they picked up the microbes on an overcrowded slave ship voyaging to the Americas, suggests Ayana Omilade Flewellen, an archaeologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the experiences of enslaved Africans and wasn’t involved in the study.
Such journeys killed millions between the 16th and 19th centuries. Either way, this is direct evidence that the transatlantic slave trade introduced novel pathogens to the Americas, Krause says, just as European colonization did.
The three men survived all these hardships. In fact, researchers still aren’t sure what killed them.
They were buried in a mass grave in the hospital’s cemetery that could be linked to an epidemic, perhaps of smallpox or measles. But researchers didn’t find DNA from deadly infectious diseases in their remains.
The men’s presence in a hospital for Indigenous people highlights the largely forgotten diversity of early colonies in the Americas, Flewellen says. “We need to break out of the binary of just Native [American] and European experiences” and remember that Africans were part of the story as well.
New Virtual Reality Experience Transports Viewer Inside Spanish Paleolithic Caves Seen By Only 50 People In 16,000 Years
In the caves of La Garma mountain in Northern Spain, there were only 50 other people, a novel archeological site with one of the most important international collections of rock art and archeological stays in the Paleolithic age.
Screen shot from virtual reality revel in within La Garma caves in Northern Spain
La Garma is a UNESCO World Heritage site as part of the Cave of Altamira and Paleolithic Cave Art in northern Spain. La Garma houses five levels of caves and is considered the most important Paleolithic archaeological discovery since the mid-twentieth century.
The cave’s lower gallery, which was discovered in 1995 features the world’s biggest example of paleolithic flooring. The flooring and ancient stays inside the cave have been neatly preserved through a landslide 16,000 years ago that sealed off the cave to the elements.
Two decades after the rediscovery and preliminary learning about the lower gallery at La Garma, scientists saw the need for additional study of the cave’s underground system-its microclimate and microbiology-and assessment of the state of conservation of the rock art.
Still of La Garma cave flooring in Memoria VR revel in
With the support of American shoe dressmaker Stuart Weitzman, who has been producing footwear in Spain for the reason that the 1970s, the World Monuments Fund has been working on a project to conserve and promote La Garma with Morena Films and Overlat studio.
A multidisciplinary team of experts have been studying the cave’s ecosystem and archaeological remains. Two short documentaries and a virtual reality experience have been produced to allow people to enjoy and learn about this extraordinary site.
Now anyone can “travel” to Northern Spain on a virtual consult with those hardly ever visited Spanish caves Memoria: Stories of La Garma, through award-winning VR director Rafael Pavón, is a new virtual reality revel in simply introduced through Viveport, the arena’s first limitless VR subscription service.
This VR experience is really the only way to learn about these fascinating caves due to the danger of the site.
Only 50 people have physically been able to enter them in the past 16,000 years and the caves are off-limits to the public but by mapping them for virtual experiences, they can now be viewed virtually by anyone.
Still from Memoria of cave drawings of animals in La Garma caves
Memoria premiered in 2019 on the Museum of Prehistory and Archaeology of Cantabria in Santander and it used to be this museum’s staff who worked with Rafael Pavon on the VR experience.
Narrated by Geraldine Chaplin (The Crown, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom), this VR film is an incredible story from the Paleolithic era about a community who on returning from hunting discovered that the La Garma caves they called home had been blocked off by a landslide, creating a time capsule.
Thousands of relics, from cave-wall paintings of animals and signs to animal bones, seashells, and artifacts carved in bone, remained undisturbed and intact for 16,000 years.
So what is the VR experience like, what equipment is required and how much does it cost? The Memoria: Stories of La Garma VR experience is impressive and is compatible with most VR headsets.
The user can “walk” around three spaces of the cave, captured with millimetric precision using laser scanners and photogrammetry.
The viewer will see paleolithic hunters, a mother, and her child and a cave lion who made his way deep into the cave to live his final days.
You can watch videos about the caves but the nature of VR means people can physically explore the caves, virtually pick things up, and become immersed, as if they were in the caves.
A UK viewer of the content makes an onetime purchase for 4.56 from Viveport and then can view the experience repeatedly.
Alternatively, Viveport has an unlimited VR subscription service called Infinity that can be purchased as a monthly ( 12.99) or annual subscription (works out as 8.99/month), allowing unlimited access to their entire range of content.
Thousands of ancestors’ remains, sacred objects to return home to North Dakota tribe
In a storage room at the University of Tennessee’s anthropology department, the remains of almost 2,000 Arikara and Mandan people rest in boxes, alongside the sacred objects buried with them centuries ago.
There, 65-year-old Pete Coffey, director of the Tribal Historic Preservation Office for the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, reunited with his ancestors in 2017.
“The only thing I can tell you is that I felt the presence of those ancestral spirits very strongly when I walked in there,” he said.
The Native American remains stored there were buried centuries ago along the Missouri River in South Dakota, according to a Federal Register report published in November. The 1,971 ancestors and 2,263 funerary objects have been traced to the Arikara and Mandan, who once lived in earth lodges along the river. The tribes, along with the Hidatsa, now live west of there on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota.
In the mid-1900s, archaeologists excavated the burial sites along the Missouri River in South Dakota as part of the Smithsonian’s River Basin Survey. The survey was an effort to gather as much archaeological information as possible before dams and reservoirs flooded areas along the Missouri River following the 1944 Flood Control Act.
An authentic reproduction of a Mandan Hidatsa earth lodge sits next to the Knife River Indian Villages interpretive center in North Dakota
For the MHA Nation, that meant thousands of their ancestors were taken out of the ground. An archaeologist who helped excavate the remains eventually transported them to the University of Tennessee, where they’ve been stored since before the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was passed in 1990. The act asked federal agencies and museums to take inventory of Native American remains and funerary and sacred objects in their possession and to work with tribes who have a claim to return the remains.
Coffey said NAGPRA gave tribes “the right to repatriate these remains which were taken with no thought of human decency, either by collectors or by archaeologists from museums and put on display.”
Coffey has been working with universities and museums across the U.S. that have reached out since the act was passed in the hopes of returning remains. Still, the MHA Nation is just one of the hundreds of tribal nations across the country working to reclaim their ancestors since the act was passed. The Federal Register regularly posts reports alerting tribes to collections.
Dustin Lloyd, the burial coordinator for the South Dakota State Historical Society’s Archaeological Research Center, said some members of the scientific community worried about losing data or information from burial grounds after the act was passed. But Lloyd said the issue is more human than that.
“These were people at one point,” he said. “They were family members, they were fathers, sons, grandmothers. That’s why protection in place is such an important aspect of NAGPRA.”
Reburial this summer
Since 1990, Coffey has helped reclaim tens of thousands of his Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara ancestors across the country. When remains are returned, he consults with tribal elders to determine where and how they should be buried. He said, for the most part, remains are simply put back into the ground, as all the prayers and ceremonies were performed at the original time of burial.
Sometimes, remains are returned to the sites near where they were originally taken. But when that’s not feasible, Coffey said, the remains are repatriated, or given back, to the tribe for reburial on their land.
This summer, the MHA Nation will rebury thousands more of their ancestors. Ellen Lofaro and Robert Hinde at the University of Tennessee started working on the repatriation of remains in 2016 and 2017, respectively. Lofaro, a curator of archaeology, said NAGPRA “not only gives tribes a voice at the table but a power to make decisions. Archaeologists did not always take their wishes and desires into consideration.”
The university contacted the MHA Nation to let them know they had thousands of remains and funerary objects in storage. The next year, 2017, Coffey came to see the remains for himself.
The university, the tribes, and the Army Corps of Engineers for the Omaha District — which owns the land where the remains were excavated — had to meet to determine how to proceed according to NAGPRA rules.
“We’re pretty grateful NAGPRA has a process we feel is successful in helping get these ancestors back to their families,” said Julie Jacobsen, cultural resources program manager for the Corps’ Omaha District.
Because the Corps is the largest land management agency in the U.S., they have “a lot of land with a lot of sites” where collections were excavated prior to NAGPRA. Making sure these collections are properly cared for by those managing them and working to get them repatriated is a “big responsibility,” Jacobsen said. She added that the collection at the University of Tennessee is abnormally large compared to most the Corps works to repatriate.
Overall, Coffey said working with the university and the Corps to repatriate the remains has been a very positive experience.
Jacobsen said the Corps is working to determine how many trailers will be needed to safely return the remains and sacred objects to the MHA Nation and to devise a security plan to protect the remains during the long drive from Tennessee to Fort Berthold.
Hinde said the remains are set to be transported home this summer when cold weather isn’t a factor. There, at Fort Berthold, the tribal ancestors will be laid back to rest.
500 Million-Year-Old Human Footprint Fossil Baffles Scientists
Hundreds of millions of years ago someone with shoes walked on an ancient trilobite.
The amateur fossil hunter William J. Meister found a lifetime discovery 43 kilometers west of Delta, Utah, in the summer of 1968, he found a fossilized human footprint about the size of a US 13 shoe (3.5″W x 10.25″L) stepping on a trilobite. Now, trilobites only existed between 260 to 600 million years ago, so this makes it the oldest human fossil footprint ever discovered!
Trilobites were small marine invertebrates related to crabs and shrimps. Scientists currently think humans emerged 1 or 2 million years ago and only began wearing such shoes a few thousand years ago.
This archaeological discovery could be sufficient to overturn all conventionally accepted ideas of human and geological evolution. According to science’s currently accepted timeline of human existence on this planet, humans advanced enough to wear shoes that would not have existed hundreds of millions of years ago. As one might expect, this sent shockwaves throughout the scientific communities with excitement for a new paradigm shift as well as skeptical denial.
Meister took the rock to a professor of metallurgy at the University of Utah, Melvin Cook, who suggested he show it to the university’s geologists. But none of the geologists were willing to examine it, so Meister took it to a local newspaper called The Deseret News and quickly became very well-known around the country.
This amazing find was presented on March 1, 1973, in a creation-evolution debate at California State University in Sacramento. The creationist team included Dr. Duane Gish of the Institute for Creation Research and Reverend Boswell of a local Sacramento church. The scientific team consisted of Dr. Richard Lemmon of the University of California at Berkeley and Dr. G. Ledyard Stebbins of the University of California at Davis. Reverend Boswell said:
“I have here something that pretty much destroys the entire geological column. It has been studied by three laboratories around the world and it’s been tested and found valid. It represents a footprint that was found at Antelope Springs, Utah while digging for trilobites.
The man was digging for trilobites, and these are trilobites here and here embedded. This is a brick mold of a trilobite footprint of a human footprint with a trilobite in it. The man stepped on a living trilobite, [thus burying] him in the mud.
These particular strata are dated Cambrian, supposedly 500 million years extinct before man arrived on the face of the earth. The interesting thing about this photograph is that there is also heel marks, which would indicate that they were made by modern man.”
In a news conference, the skeptical curator of the Museum of Earth Science at the University of Utah, James Madsen, dismissively said: “There were no men 600 million years ago. Neither were there monkeys or bears or ground sloths to make pseudo-human tracks. What man-thing could possibly have been walking about on this planet before vertebrates even evolved?”
Another astonishing trilobite fossil discovery was made in Antelope Spring, Arizona on July 20, 1968, by Dr. Clifford Burdick, a consulting geologist from Tucson, Arizona. He found an impression of a child’s foot in a bed of shale.
‘The impression was about six inches in length, with the toes spreading as if the child had never yet worn shoes, which compress the toes. There does not appear to be much of an arch, and the big toe is not prominent.’
This was shown to two geologists and a paleontologist. One geologist agreed it seemed to belong to a human being, but the paleontologist’s opinion was that no biological agent had been involved. Dr.Burdick affirmed:
“The rock chanced to fracture along the front of the toes before the fossil footprint was found. On cross-section, the fabric of the rock stands out in fine laminations or bedding planes. Where the toes pressed into the soft material, the laminations were bowed downward from the horizontal, indicating a weight that had been pressed into the mud.”
Mr. Meister claimed that when he had a geologist examine the print, the geologist offered him $250,000 for the print. Meister asked him, “What are you going to do with it if I sell it to you?” The geologist replied, “I’m going to destroy it, it destroys my entire life work as a geologist.”
It’s disappointing to think that some people would be willing to destroy such a monumental artifact that can reveal such a new perspective on our human heritage and origins.
Respected archaeological researcher, Michael Cremo, has written books on the subject of such examples of ancient artifacts and he has learned that certain scientific institutions, like the Smithsonian Institution, make great efforts to maintain the concept of recent human evolution. He has documented several instances where they deny, defame, and even exile archeologists for publishing their findings for peer review.
“In defense of the dates obtained by the geologists, Virginia Steen-McIntyre wrote in a letter (March 30, 1981) to Estella Leopold, associate editor of Quaternary Research: “The problem as I see it is much bigger than Hueyatlaco. It concerns the manipulation of scientific thought through the suppression of ‘Enigmatic Data,’ data that challenges the prevailing mode of thinking.”
Can you imagine the implications of mankind around the world learning or realizing we are hundreds of millions of years older than we thought and that we have been far more advanced than even we are today? The questions and answers beyond this metaphorically opened doorway could cause a rippling paradigm shift worldwide.
During one interview, Michael Cremo said:
“The reactions in your question are typical of a group that I call the fundamentalist Darwinists. They support the theory of evolution not for purely scientific reasons, but because it confirms their prior commitments to strict materialism. They do not want to hear me, and they do not want anyone else to hear me, so they say those kinds of things. Sometimes they try to stop me from lecturing at universities.”
Those really seeking the truth are open to new information to learn from and examine the scientific findings rationally without bias. We may have to dig deep within ourselves to find the answers to the questions: Who are we? Where did we come from? Why are we here?
