First Americans

Spirit Cave Man may unravel mystery of early migration

Archaeologists want to further examine mummified remains despite objections from American Indians.

By Sean Whaley
Donrey Capital Bureau

CARSON CITY -- One of Nevada's earliest known residents -- Spirit Cave Man -- has a face to go with his name after more than 9,400 years of anonymity.

He looks out on the modern world from the basement of the Nevada State Museum in the capital, the center of a controversy pitting scientists who want to conduct DNA testing on his remains against American Indians who claim him as one of their own and want him untouched and reburied.

The decision of whether to allow testing of Spirit Cave Man rests with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the director of the Nevada State Office. A decision could come any time, but regardless, a lawsuit is likely to follow.

The politically charged decision has made work on the partially mummified remains of Spirit Cave Man controversial, including the artistic rendition of his bust that state museum officials had commissioned but thus far have kept from public view. The bust was created by Sharon Long, a Reno sculptor with training and experience in forensic facial approximations.

Spirit Cave Man, along with the more publicized 9,200-year-old Kennewick Man found along the banks of the Columbia River in Washington, may provide clues to the first immigrants of the Western Hemisphere.

Found in a cave east of Fallon in 1940 in the Grimes Point area, Spirit Cave Man is the oldest mummified remains discovered in North America. He is also one of the best dated early humans in the New World, the result of radio carbon testing on seven separate samples of bone, hair and a finely woven reed mat in which he was buried. He apparently was in his mid-40s when he died. He had a bad back and had suffered but survived a skull fracture when he was buried 9,415 years ago. He was found wearing finely made moccasins from three types of animal hide. He stood 5-foot-2 and was mummified accidentally in the dry air of the cave, not intentionally like mummified remains found in Egypt or Chile.

His remains were thought to be only about 2,000 to 3,000 years old when they were discovered by S.M. and Georgia Wheeler more than five decades ago. Spirit Cave Man was first dated in 1994 at the University of California, Riverside, and stunned state museum officials announced the discovery in April 1996.

There are some scientists who argue Spirit Cave Man may not be related to Native Americans now living in western Nevada, but instead represents an earlier migration of humans.

Before further study of Spirt Cave Man can occur, however, the federal government must respond to the request by the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe to return the remains under the American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The law, passed in 1990, requires human remains held by museums and researchers to be returned to Indian tribes that can make a valid claim for them.

Pat Barker, an archaeologist with the Nevada State Office of the BLM, said research conducted thus far, along with Native American oral traditions that suggest Spirit Cave Man is a Paiute ancestor, are being weighed and evaluated.

"Our job is to evaluate the tribe's claim and see if it is reasonable or not," he said. "The law does allow the completion of scientific studies that are deemed important to the nation as a whole, regardless of the affiliation decision. So even if the decision is that Spirit Cave Man is affiliated with the tribe, tests may still be allowed if they are determined to be in the national interest."

Amy Dansie, an archaeologist with the state Museums and History Division, which has possession of the remains of Spirit Cave Man, said one theory suggests two different groups of people may have lived in this region of Nevada and the West more than 9,000 years ago.

Evidence for this comes from another set of ancient remains found at Pyramid Lake, known as Wizards Beach Man, who is 9,225 years old.

An artistic rendition of the visage of this other ancient resident also was created by Long. The skulls, and the two busts, suggest different populations, Dansie said.
"We have newly developing information all the time that entry into the New World may be much older than previously thought," she said. "Spirit Cave Man could be the remanent of the fist migration, and Wizards Beach Man may represent a second."

The two men have the same basic Southern Asian origin, but they are two different peoples, Dansie said. "Spirit Cave Man looks more like the non-Mongoloid, non-Asian native Ainu of Japan," she said.

Physical evidence, both from Kennewick Man, who has a spear point imbedded in his pelvis, and the skull fracture of Spirit Cave Man, suggests violence among early humans, Dansie said.

"We have an accumulating level of evidence that there was conflict between two groups 9,000 years ago," she said. The Spirit Cave Man culture, as identified by the finely woven tule mats, seems to disappear around 9,000 years ago, she said.

"They either died out or moved on," Dansie said. Humans are generally thought to have migrated to the Western Hemisphere over an ice bridge between Siberia and Alaska about 12,000 years ago, but some archaeologists are now arguing there is evidence suggesting migrations occurred thousands of years earlier.

Paiute Indians dispute the interpretations of archaeologists and say there is a clear link between Spirit Cave Man and their tribe. Tribal traditions also say that burials are sacred and need to be respected, said Mervin Wright, chairman of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, in an interview last year.

"No matter what your belief, if your ancestor or relative is put to rest, you want to have dignity and respect to allow that person to rest in peace, whether he is 50,000 years old, 1 million years old or just put in the ground yesterday," he said.

Native American concern about the care of Spirit Cave Man's remains rose to such a high level that questions were even raised about the artistic renditions created by Long. But Spirit Cave Man, who is not on public view in the museum, was created without any damage to his remains. His skull was CAT-scanned at the Carson-Tahoe Hospital, information that then was used to create a resin model of the cranium.

Dansie said she respects the views of Native Americans, but as a scientist she seeks to know more about Spirit Cave Man.

"We have the same values about burial in our culture," she said. "But the history of America is tied up in this. Spirit Cave Man, Wizards Beach Man and Kennewick Man are pivotal points for whether or not we will ever be able to really explore the early history of America."

Scientist: Oldest American skull found

By Jeordan Legon
CNN
Wednesday, December 4, 2002 Posted: 8:56 AM EST (1356 GMT)

The "Peñon Woman III" skull was found near Mexico City International Airport.

(CNN) -- Researchers said it may be the oldest skull ever found in the Americas: an elongated-faced woman who died about 13,000 years ago.

But perhaps more significant than the age, researchers said, is that the skull and other bones were found while a well was being dug near Mexico City International Airport. Because the remains were discovered outside the United States, scientists will be able to study the DNA and structure of the skeleton without the objection of Native American groups, who can claim and rebury ancestral remains under a 1990 U.S. law.

"Here Mexico is providing the opportunity to see what clues these bones can yield about man's arrival in the American continent," Mexican anthropologist Jose Concepcion Jimenez Lopez said.

The oldest skull in the Americas up to now, believed to be that of "Buhl Woman," was found in 1989 at a gravel quarry in Idaho. Scientists said it dates back 10,500 to 11,000 years. But researchers scarcely studied those bones before the Shoshone-Bannock tribe claimed and reburied them.

The "Peñon Woman III" -- which scientists believe is now the oldest skull from the New World -- has been sitting in Mexico City's National Museum of Anthropology since 1959.

At the insistence of geologist Silvia Gonzalez, who had a hunch that the bones were older than previously thought, the remains were taken to Oxford University to be carbon-dated. And indeed, tests proved Gonzalez's assertion.

Scientists said they believe that the Peñon Woman died anywhere from 12,700 to 13,000 years ago at the age of 27.

Emboldened by her finding, Gonzalez will try to prove her theory that the bones of the Peñon Woman belong not to Native Americans, but to descendants of the Ainu people of Japan.

She said she bases her hypothesis on the elongated, narrow shape of the Peñon Woman's skull. Native Americans, she said, are round-faced with broad cheeks. "Quite different from Peñon Woman," she said.

She said she believes descendants of the Ainu people made their way to the New World by island hopping on boats.

"If this proves right, it's going to be quite contentious," said Gonzalez, who teaches at John Moores University in England and received a grant last week from the British government to conduct her research. "We're going to say to Native Americans, 'Maybe there were some people in the Americas before you, who are not related to you.' "

Gonzalez's theory is controversial but gaining credence in scientific circles, where up to now many believed hardy mammoth hunters were first to arrive in the Americas 14,000 to 16,000 years ago by crossing into Alaska from Siberia.

Gonzalez and other scientists said they believe people may have arrived in America as much as 25,000 years ago. She points to evidence of camps -- man-made tools, a human footprint and huts dating back 25,000 years -- that have been found in Chile as evidence of man's imprint on the Americas long before mammoth hunters.

Searching for answers to coastal migration

Gonzalez will embark on a three-year journey to prove her theory. As part of that journey, she will travel to Baja California to study the Pericue people, who shared the same elongated faces of the Peñon Woman. She said she believes that the Pericue, who for unknown reasons went extinct in the 18th century, may hold the answers to coastal migration of man from Asia to America.

The bones of the Peñon Woman will have DNA extracted to compare it with genetic matter of the Pericue, she said. Scientists also said they hope to study clothes fibers found near the skeleton and try to piece together how the woman died. Gonzalez said the skeleton does not show any wounds or obvious injuries.

"We still have a long way to go," she said. "But we have a good start."

Dr. Chatters on Kennewick Man

Stephen A. McNallen

I received an email from a Runestone subscriber last week which really caught me by surprise. Dr. James Chatters, the only human being to have done any real study on the bones of Kennewick Man, was going to speak that coming Saturday in Sacramento - right down the road from us! Within hours we had alerted several AFA members and made preparations to show up for the presentation.

The large hall was well-filled with students, university staff, and other interested men and women. Dr. Chatters began somewhat awkwardly, but soon warmed to his topic and gave us a treasure trove of information on Kennewick Man and the peopling of the Americas. Much of this material was new to us, and relates directly to the AFA's involvement in the case now before the federal court.

As an objective scientist, Dr. Chatters was careful not to suggest that the famous skeleton had any direct European connection - although he did not rule that out, and in fact specifically listed Europe as a possible origin for Kennewick Man's people.

Mitochondria X

One of the more interesting revelations concerns mitochondrial DNA. Heretofore, scientists had analyzed Indians in terms of four standard mitochondrial haploid groups, called A, B, C, and D. Recently one more classification, called X, has been added. Mitochondria X is rare in American Indians, but occurs in the archaic, Caucasoid skeletons of ancient America. It is typically found in Europe and in the Middle East. Dr. Chatters admitted that this indicated some sort of connection between these far-separated populations, but cautioned that the nature of that relationship is not clear.

Morphology of Nevada Finds

Another significant statement had to do with Wizard Beach Man, one of Kennewick Man's contemporaries, who was found in a shelter cave in Nevada. According to Chatters, the Wizard Beach skull is the "most Indian" of any of the remains from the archaic period - but it is on the "very fringe" of the morphological range associated with American Indians. The implication is that the other skeletons from the archaic period are even less Indian than this, and do not overlap the Indian category at all.

Spirit Cave Man (who is currently being claimed by the Paiutes), on the other hand, has a skull very much like that of Kennewick Man. He is described as most resembling a person from a "western Eurasian" population. I found this an interesting phrase; just what would you call the western part of Eurasia? Might it not simply be...Europe? To top it off, Spirit Cave Man displays mitochondria X, connecting him with the people of Europe and the Middle East.

Three Routes

Before moving on to the question-and-answer session, Dr. Chatters summed up the three routes by which Kennewick Man might have come to the Americas. One is a coastal trek around Southeast Asia and across the Bering Strait. The second - which Chatters himself appears to prefer - has his people coming across the top of Eurasia in a band extending from Europe to Siberia, and the third route is over the "Atlantic Crescent" from Europe.

The Indians and the Corps of Engineers

I raised my hand and asked if Chatters would comment on Indian legends describing a non-Indian people present before their own arrival. He admitted that this was a widespread feature of the oral lore, and gave an example the "red haired giants" of Nevada, as well as the "light skinned, mean-spirited people" who preceded the Indians in the Pacific Northwest. To still other Indians the older group was the "stick people," and their artifacts and burials were of no concern to the newcomers who displaced them. In the case of the red haired giants, that displacement was by murder and genocide, in what is now known as Lovelock Cave.

Chatters found it interesting, too, that while Indian remains would sometimes sit in a storage locker for several years before their respective tribes would get around to claiming them, this was not the case when it came to Kennewick Man. They wanted him right away, immediately! Could it be they know who he is - and want to get him out of sight as quickly as possible before people start asking awkward questions about who was here, and when?

Whatever the motivations of the Indians, Chatters saw no secret in the behavior of the Army Corps of Engineers, which until recently was the custodian of the bones. He described their colonel as a stereotypical caricature of the military man, who knew what his mission was: as Chatters put it, "to keep the Indians happy." Unfortunately, keeping the Indians happy has enjoyed a higher priority than little details like truth, impartiality, or justice!

All in all, it was an illuminating evening - a microcosm of the Kennewick Man case, all compressed into an hour-long lecture. The mystery and the scientific attempts to pierce it, the frantic attempts to cover up the facts, the bright promise of a whole new paradigm for the settling of this continent - all were present. Only the ending of the story was not revealed to us. We shall have to wait and see the conclusion in store for ourselves, and for this individual who has spoken to us through more than ninety centuries!

(James Chatters did most of the work on Kennewick Man...Ironically, he lives in Kennewick, Washington.)

THE SI-TE-CAH - THE AMERINDS' WHITE ENEMIES ACCORDING TO INDIAN BELIEF

A cave near Lovelock, Nevada, (about 80 miles north east of the city of Reno in that state) has produced several sets of mummies, bones, and artifacts buried under several layers of bat excrement - the desiccated bodies belonged to a very tall people - with red hair. Once again, only White Nordics fit the bill with regard to stature and hair color.

In fact, red-haired enemies feature in local Indian legends - or what were thought legends until the discovery of the Lovelock mummies. (The locals Indians are the Paiutes, the same ones who object to the scientific investigation of the Spirit Cave Mummy). According to these legends, the red haired enemies centered on these tall troublemakers whom they called the "Si-Te-Cah."

Significantly, the name Si-Te-Cah means "tule eaters" - tule being the fibrous reed which is the base material of the mats in which the Spirit Cave Mummy was buried. Tule is no longer found in the region and was likely imported along with the people who used it.

According to the Paiute, the red-haired peoples were warlike, and a number of the Indian tribes joined together in a long war against them. According to the Indian legend, after a long struggle, a coalition of Indian tribes trapped the remaining Si-Te-Cah in what is now called Lovelock Cave. When they refused to come out, the Indians piled brush before the cave mouth and set it aflame. The Si-Te-Cah were incinerated.

Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, daughter of Paiute Chief Winnemucca, related many stories about the Si-Te-Cah in her book "Life Among the Paiutes."

On page 75, she relates: "My people say that the tribe we exterminated had reddish hair. I have some of their hair, which has been handed down from father to son. I have a dress which has been in our family a great many years, trimmed with the reddish hair. I am going to wear it some time when I lecture. It is called a mourning dress, and no one has such a dress but my family."

In 1931, further skeletons were discovered in the Humboldt Lake bed. Eight years later, a mystery skeleton was unearthed on a ranch in the region. In each case, the skeletons were exceptionally tall - much taller than the surrounding Amerinds.

There is a small display on the Si-Te-Cah in the Lovelock museum today, but it ignores the evidence which indicates that the Si-Te-Cah were not Amerinds. The Nevada State Historical Society also displays some artifacts from the cave.

Posted on the PreClovis.Net mailing list
Courtesy of Topper Research Volunteer Ann Judd

S.C. dig challenges theory of first Americans

Evidence suggests a diverse wave of migrants trekked here earlier than experts once believed . . . By HENRY EICHEL Columbia Bureau [name of paper unknown -ed.]

MARTIN, S.C. -- From a pair of 6-foot-deep pits, a team of archaeologists and volunteers has spent the last month sifting hundreds of tiny stone flakes from the gray sand, trying to unravel one of the continent's oldest mysteries: Who got here first?

For decades, most scientists believed the first Americans were big-game hunters who crossed a now-disappeared land bridge across the Bering Strait from Siberia during the last ice age about 11,500 years ago. Supposedly, today's American Indians are all descended from these ancient people. But the discoveries at the Topper Site in rural Allendale County, about 85 miles southwest of Columbia, are part of a growing body of evidence that could overturn that theory.

Scientists are starting to believe that people may have arrived in the New World thousands to tens of thousands of years earlier, in many waves of migrations and from many different places. Stone Age America may have been a more crowded and racially diverse place than we thought.

At the heavily wooded dig site earlier this week, University of South Carolina professor Albert Goodyear opened a plastic bag and took out a pale yellow rock about the size of a person's little finger. Pointing to the stone's sharp, beveled edges, Goodyear said, "Nature can't make this; a human being has to do it very carefully. He would have had to take like a split beaver tooth, or a tiny hard bone with a sharp tip, and he'd have to pressure the flakes off. You've got to be good."

The person who worked this piece of rock camped at this spot between 12,000 and 18,000 years ago, and possibly even earlier, said Goodyear, director of the Topper excavations. That was a time when huge ice sheets covered what is now the northern United States, and South Carolina was a much colder place, with spruce and fir forests that resembled present-day Canada.

Mammoth and mastodon roamed the forests, as did now-extinct species of bison, camels and tiny horses. "They all would have been here," Goodyear said, "but whether these people used them or not, we don't know." Unlike some other prehistoric sites where archaeologists have found human skeletons, animal bones, charcoal from ancient campfires and even the remnants of huts, none of those things appear to have survived in the acidic soil at the Topper Site. All that has remained are hundreds of small stone blades and the rocks from which they were chipped.

"They're little razor blade-type things," Goodyear said. "People might have set several of them into a wooden or a bone handle and used it as a knife to cut something soft, like fish." They are identical to blades discovered in Siberia that have been proved to be 20,000 years old, he said. Little blades like that were also typically used to groove and splinter antlers, mastodon tusks and wood.

If one could ask these prehistoric people for their biggest artifact, Goodyear said, "they might produce a hardwood spear with a 4-inch long antler tip on it." But, he said, "We won't find any in these sands." This year's dig wraps up today, but Goodyear has his eye on a spot in the Savannah River swamp a half mile to the north, where geologists have dated a peat bog to 18,000 years. "If there are any antler or wood artifacts, they'll be preserved in peat," he said.

Some things can be safely assumed about the people who once camped here. They were hunter-gatherers, because at that time, that's what everyone in the world was. Agriculture didn't catch on in a big way until about 6,000 years ago. So, they wandered a lot, looking for food. They traveled light. They wouldn't have needed much in the way of shelter in the summer, although they may have made huts out of animal hides for the winter. Were they the ancestors of modern Indians?

"There's a good chance they weren't," said Goodyear. "Some of the skulls that are showing up (at other sites) are not the typical Mongoloid types. They could still be from Asia, but from an old archaic population that migrated into the Western Hemisphere and died off." Ted Tsolovlos, 52, of Columbia, one of the 15 volunteers at the site this week, said, "I think ice age man was probably closer to God, in a sense, and that there was something magical about that time. We're finding these certain little facts about this culture. How did they see the world?"

For the past two years, through USC's Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, Goodyear has recruited volunteers from the public to sign up for a week or more to help with the excavation. They each paid $366, which included camping, lunch and dinner, evening lectures and a T-shirt. "I never thought I would enjoy digging in the dirt. But it's so much fun; you never know what you're going to find next," said Wanda Stover, a 48-year-old Bank of America officer from Charlotte who returned to the site for her second year.

In her pre-teen years, she said, she read Nancy Drew mysteries and other books set around archaeological digs and began a lifetime fascination with the subject. Then last year, she found the Topper Site expedition's Internet page and signed up. Goodyear will start taking applications for next year in January, giving preference to people who have been before. This year's 75 slots filled up by March.

For the next three weeks, geologists from around the country will comb the entire site, which is on land owned by Clariant Corp., a maker of industrial dyes. "They're going to interpret the age of the place based on the geological layers," Goodyear said. "That's a very important study that needs to be done for this site to gain widespread acceptance within the profession." Goodyear has been exploring the site since 1981. It's named for David Topper, a local landowner who first guided Goodyear and fellow USC archaeologist Thomas Charles to it. What made the heavily wooded hillside attractive to archaeologists were the outcroppings of chert, an impure form of flint. "You find a chert quarry, you'll find early man, because they were dependent on these rocks," Goodyear said.

Excavations since 1981 showed the quarry was a magnet for humans, with each layer of soil revealing an earlier culture. Two feet down, Goodyear found several 10,000-year-old spear points, and beneath those, some "blanks'' - rojectile points in their preliminary stages that had been broken and thrown away. "But I had never dreamed there was anything earlier," Goodyear said, because there weren't supposed to have been any people in North America before 11,000 years ago. But in 1998, Goodyear read in an archaeological journal about discoveries at a site called Cactus Hills, 45 miles southeast of Richmond, Va.

There, tests on charcoal from prehistoric campfires, along with stone tools and other evidence, showed that the site was occupied by humans at least 15,000 years ago. Earlier, in southern Chile, archaeologists had discovered the remnants of a 12,500-year-old hunting camp. That encouraged Goodyear to dig some deeper test holes. "In just a few hours," he said, "I was finding things I'd never seen before."

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