Practically 8,000-year-old cranium present in Minnesota River

A partial cranium from almost 8,000 years ago that was discovered by two kayakers in a river last summer will be returned to Native American officers in Minnesota

ByThe Associated Press

21 May 2022, 19:10

• 3 min read

REDWOOD FALLS, Minn. -- A partial cranium that was discovered final summer by two kayakers in Minnesota will probably be returned to Native American officials after investigations decided it was about 8,000 years previous.

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

Pondering it might be related to a missing person case or murder, Hable turned the cranium over to a medical expert and finally to the FBI, where a forensic anthropologist used carbon courting to find out it was doubtless the skull of a young man who lived between 5500 and 6000 B.C., Hable said.

"It was a whole shock to us that that bone was that old,” Hable told Minnesota Public Radio.

The anthropologist determined the man had a despair in his cranium that was “perhaps suggestive of the reason for dying.”

After the sheriff posted about the discovery on Wednesday, his workplace was criticized by several Native People, who stated publishing images of ancestral remains was offensive to their culture.

Hable said his workplace removed the submit.

"We didn’t mean for it to be offensive in anyway,” Hable stated.

Hable stated the remains will probably be turned over to Higher Sioux Neighborhood tribal officials.

Minnesota Indian Affairs Council Cultural Sources Specialist Dylan Goetsch mentioned in a statement that neither the council nor the state archaeologist had been notified in regards to the discovery, which is required by state legal guidelines that govern the care and repatriation of Native American stays.

Goetsch said the Facebook submit “showed a complete lack of cultural sensitivity” by failing to call the person a Native American and referring to the stays as “a little bit piece of history.”

Kathleen Blue, a professor of anthropology at Minnesota State University, said Wednesday that the skull was definitely from an ancestor of one of many tribes still living in the area, The New York Instances reported.

She mentioned the young man would have probably eaten a diet of crops, deer, fish, turtles and freshwater mussels in a small region, fairly than following mammals and bison on their migrations.

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