Posted on 08/27/2007 11:31:04 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Female bones excavated from the bubbling asphalt in 1914 used to be mounted in the museum, alongside a life-sized dummy purporting to resemble the woman to whom the bones had belonged. The exhibit was called La Brea Woman. La Brea means "the tar" in Spanish. La Brea Woman probably died from injuries inflicted by a blunt instrument: a piece of bone is missing from the top of her skull... Scientists believe that La Brea Woman died with her dog by her side, since canine bones were found near her remains. La Brea Woman is 9,000 years old, has a hole in her head and a broken jaw, and I feel connected to her... La Brea Woman was not part of the tribe that lived in the environs of the tar pits, where she ended up... About two years ago, the tar pits museum removed her exhibit from what is now an emergency exit between the "Invertebrates" case and the "Asphalt and People" case. Her exhibit was removed because the curator, John M. Harris, was worried that this display of historic remains might offend Native Americans or attract attention to her remains... "Actually, she had an ectopic tooth," Christopher Shaw tells me. He is the collections manager... "She had lost many teeth by then," Shaw says, turning the skull in his hands to show La Brea Woman's various defects. "The molar in her lower jaw is impacted." ...La Brea Woman is the oldest known Californian.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Glad to be of service. Thank you.
False. Not caucasian.
And this writer is critical of the creationist's agenda??? Gaia is the goddess of earth science??
Thanks! The early 20th c abstract is listed, but not online. :’)
http://www.scahome.org/publications/specialpublications.html#OccasPaps3
What was he? Did they ever get the chance to figure it out?
Yeah, I didn’t post the PC ramblings of the author when I selected the quote.
http://www.washington.edu/burkemuseum/kman/
The Controversy
Public interest, debate, and controversy began when an independent archaeologist, working on contract to the Kennewick coroner, decided the bones were ancient but might not be Native American. He described them as “Caucasoid” and sent a piece of bone to a laboratory to be dated. The final date indicated an age of 9,000 years, making Kennewick Man one of the oldest and most complete skeletons found in the Americas. Subsequent tests of other bone samples showed the skeleton to be somewhere between 5650 and 9510 years old. But if it is true that these human remains are thousands of years old, and are not Native American, then who was Kennewick Man? This question raised a number of other questions that have put Kennewick Man “on trial” in the public eye.
No, the tribes eventually lost in court. The skeleton is in the hands of scientists at this time.
No, the tribes eventually lost in court. The skeleton is in the hands of scientists at this time.
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That’ll teach me not to rely on dim memories from a single article decades ago.
Nah, I’ll still shoot my mouth off.
Put Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee on the case.
The Caucasian reference is well-described in James C. Chatters' book, Ancient Encounters. Jim was the first anthropologist to examine the skull, and he noted that some features appeared Caucasian--and the press ran wild with that.
What he was trying to describe was the differences between the skull and more recent Native Americans in the region. And those differences are more suggestive of Caucasian shape, but that is far from demonstrating Caucasian ancestry.
Much of the earliest skeletal material in the western US has that same look, and it most likely relates to a different migration than that which led to the rest of the Native Americans. Whether it is from an Early Coastal Migration is still unknown, but that is one possibility.
The skeleton is being studied by a team led by Doug Owsley from the Smithsonian, and they are doing what will be the most intensive analysis ever performed on a skeleton in North America. I saw a presentation by Owsley about a year and a half ago, and what they are doing is amazing.
I am still waiting for them to do DNA analyses--that will really help tell the ancestry. There is one perfect tooth in the mandible that would make a great specimen, but I am not aware of their plans or schedule for any such studies.
There is also a lot of good information online.
Hope this helps.
Thanks FRiend. I’m glad reason won out.
They had invented airplanes but not parachutes.
Not true. Arlington Springs Woman is the oldest Californian and also the oldest skeleton yet found in the Americas:
'Arlington Springs Woman', 13,000 Years Old Human Skeleton, California Island
Luzia (above) is the second oldest American (Brazil)
"The oldest human remains found in the Americas were recently "discovered" in the storeroom of Mexico's National Museum of Anthropology. Found in central Mexico in 1959, the five skulls were radiocarbon dated by a team of researchers from the United Kingdom and Mexico and found to be 13,000 years old". They pre-date the Clovis culture by a couple thousand years, adding to the growing evidence against the Clovis-first model for the first peopling of the Americas."
"Of additional significance is the shape of the skulls, which are described as long and narrow, very unlike those of modern Native Americans."
I’d say those long and narrow skulls were formed using tightly bound “skull boards” on the malleable skulls of infants by ancestors of the Maya—until they got it right with the ‘squashed look’ of the perfectly shaped head.
Nah. These skulls are 10-12,000 years to early.
I was trying to be funny.
What I should have said was that the skulls were formed by being bound to skull boards, but it wasn’t until the Maya, that the Amerinds finally got it right with the squashed look.
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