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.
(Buhl Woman was believed to have been a member of the same group as Kennewick Man and Spirit Cave Man. No facial reconstruction exists, James C. Chatters)
Found: July 1996, in On Your Knees Cave, Prince of Wales Island, Alaska
Age: 9,200 years
Discoverers: Kevin Allred and Timothy Heaton
Significance: By far the oldest human remains from Alaska or Canada, the Paleoindian bolsters the view that early immigrants journeyed over water by boat or other craft.
In a damp, cramped den called On Your Knees Cave offered shelter to people seeking refuge from the glacial climate. They camped here at least 10,000 years ago.
Black and brown bears had long occupied the cave, and perhaps the man who died here in his early 20s pursued a bear with obsidian-tipped spears. The hunter left little of his body behind - a lower jaw, some of his pelvis, ribs and backbones. No one can say how he died, but gnaw marks on his bones came from a carnivore that scavenged the remains.
Chemical signatures in bits of his jaw and pelvis reveal that Prince of Wales Island Man ate a diet heavy in seafood, rather than relying on the meat of abundant deer or bear. He had to hike a half mile to reach the coast from the cave, but tools found in and around the cave suggest that he and his cohorts were accustomed to long-distance travel.
Artifacts fashioned from a variety of exotic raw materials - obsidian, quartz, cherts and opal-like silica - that would have been unavailable on the island could mean that extensive trading had begun along the Pacific coast.
Though discovered just a few weeks before Kennewick Man, the Prince of Wales Island Man has traveled a much less contentious and controversial path to reveal a few clues about the earliest Americans. Alaskan tribal representatives agreed to have his remains examined and dated, and to participate in continuing excavations.