Buhl Woman
Found: January 1989, at a gravel quarry near Buhl, Idaho
Age: 10,600 years
Discoverers: highway workers
Significance: Having been reburied by Shoshone-Bannock tribes in 1991 before thorough study could occur, Buhl Woman underscores scientists' fears of losing access to ancient Paleoindian skeletons.
Dead before she turned 21, this young woman found a final resting place in a gravel bar beside the Snake River, where windblown sand and silt slowly covered her body. Her right cheek lay atop a pressure-flaked, pointed obsidian tool, perhaps made specially as a grave gift.
In life, Buhl Woman ate abundant bison and elk, as well as salmon heading upriver to spawn. Sloping surfaces and heavily worn enamel on her teeth unusual for someone so young indicate that her diet included frequent doses of sand or grit, as if her meat had been pounded or stoneground into a jerky.
Lines of interrupted growth on her thigh bone tell of stress from illness or malnutrition during childhood, but she grew to a height of 5'2" and otherwise enjoyed good health. What caused her death remains unknown.
(She is/was believed to be related to Kennewick Man).The Americans Indians, as we know them today, were not here prior to 4,000BC (six thousand years ago)