Posted on 07/07/2014 8:43:10 AM PDT by Theoria
George Gill hands over the never-published photos of the infant he calls Chiquita.
Her fine blond hair arches over her wrinkled, leathery skin. Her arms are wrapped around her, a tiny mouth frozen in an “O.”
If she once had another name, Gill wouldn’t know it. After all, Chiquita has been dead for hundreds of years.
She is one of only a handful of known infant mummies in existence with a particular birth defect. Two such mummies, Chiquita and one known as the Pedro Mountain mummy, were found in Wyoming.
They both hold tantalizing clues about those who inhabited Wyoming’s past and what sort of lives they had. Both likely didn’t survive birth.
But clues are just that, and the mummies raise more questions than anyone can answer.
Gill has studied hundreds of human remains. For the noted anthropologist at the University of Wyoming, it’s his job and his passion.
But despite all his time excavating, protecting and curating human remains elsewhere and in Wyoming, he’s never come across remains like these.
“We never get preservation like that from any time, from any population,” he said. “Even war chiefs and very special burials are not preserved like these little people.”
But there’s a problem. Both are again lost and gone.
The first find
Chiquita came to light only because decades before, two prospectors were looking for gold and found something they didn't expect.
It was the early 1930s. Using dynamite, Cecil Main and Frank Carr blew open the entrance to a cave on the slope of a peak in the Pedro Mountains, about 65 miles southwest of Casper.
(Excerpt) Read more at trib.com ...
'The tests raised plenty of other questions for Gill. Chiquita, a name given to the mummy by Gill and fellow researcher Maxine Miller, was dated to about 1500.
Chiquita's DNA indicated that she was Native American -- something of a surprise, since she had blond hair. Gill still doesn’t know what to make of that. He thinks more could be discovered if the mummies were subjected to the latest and best tests.'
Bill Clinton would hit that.
Nope, not gonna go there. Wouldn't be prudent.
Yes! We gotta no bananas! Only Mummies...
The early French-Canadian explorer Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de La Vérendrye recorded these traditions when he encountered the Mandan some two centuries later. Lewis and Clark did likewise roughly a century after that.
There was much speculation at the time that these whites were descendents of Welsh Indians, variously described as a group of Welsh or Norman Welsh descendents who left Wales in the 13th century, sailed up the St. Lawrence Seaway, landed somewhere between modern day Duluth, Minnesota and Michigan's Upper Peninsula and their way further west with remnants of the Mandan tribe immigrating from the Ohio River Valley.
A blonde “Native American” from 500 years ago? It’s time to close down the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Elizabeth Warren's great-great-...-great grandmother.
“You know, if I were a single man, I might ask that mummy out. That’s a good-looking mummy” —Bill Clinton, looking at an Incan mummy (”Mummy Juanita”) at the National Geographic museum
https://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=utf-8&fr=slv1-msgr&p=clinton%20mummy&type=
If I remember correctly, Crazy Horse had light brown hair.
Hazel eyes, and very light skinned, long light brown hair.
Thanks Theoria.
The women were well-dressed and modest, covering their whole bodies by wearing a petticoat beneath a fringed cloak with sleeves. One of the women was "as white as a Castillian lady except that she had her chin painted like a Moorish woman." Coronado commented that they "tattoo their bodies and faces, and are large people of very fine appearance."
"Inca chronicles and legends persist that the Cloud People were tall fair (skin and hair) warriors. This is reinforced by an unusually large proportion of blond, fair natives in this zone who know of no European ancestry. However Julio C. Tello and anthropologists speculate the Chachapoyans may have been a jungle culture that migrated there through the Magdalena Valley of Columbia, and preferred the mountaintops. Whatever case, the Cloud People don’t fit the pattern of other Andeans. They lived behind walls in well crafted stone round houses with a pointed thatch “tepee” roof. One would suspect they farmed better land below the cloud forest, which wasn’t leached out and eroded, but lived on the peaks.
That particular tribe is very well known and their mummies have been x-rayed and studied. They come up in all the liturature as standard NA’s (but not Inca). The only thing white about them seems to be their tombs.
I looked up Julio Tello and he’s listed as an anthropologist native to Peru born about 1880. Given that he wasn’t an english speaker, it would be interesting to see what he wrote that was interpreted as describing the Cloud people in european terms.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
