JAKARTA - Two kayakers or small boat makers accidentally found a partial human skull in the Minnesota River, United States (US). It is claimed to be around 8,000 years old.
According to county police chief Scott Hable, the skull was washed away by drought in the Minnesota River about 110 miles west of Minneapolis.
Hable thought the skull might have something to do with missing persons or homicide, and he immediately turned the skull over to a medical examiner and eventually to the FBI.
There, a forensic anthropologist used carbon dating to determine how old the skull was, and the result was a young man who lived between 5500 and 6000 BC.
"We were really surprised that the bones were that old," said Hable
The anthropologist identified that the man's skull had depression, which may have been the cause of his death. Hable said the bodies would be handed over to Upper Sioux Community tribal officials.
However, Minnesota Indian Affairs Council Cultural Resources specialist Dylan Goetsch stated that neither the council nor archaeologists in the state were notified of the find.
Goetsch in his Facebook post revealed that the skull found was a small piece of history. Meanwhile, a professor of anthropology at Minnesota State University, Kathleen Blue said the skull must be the ancestor of one of the tribes who still live in the area.
He added that the young man's way of surviving was likely to eat plants, deer, fish, turtles and freshwater shellfish in small areas, rather than following mammals and bison in their migration.
“Perhaps there weren't that many people roaming Minnesota at that time 8,000 years ago, because, as I said, the glaciers only retreated a few thousand years before that. During that period, we didn't know much about it," Blue said as quoted by APNews, Monday, May 23.
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