Ancient Native bones found at UCSD = "perhaps the oldest skeletal remains found..."

[L. Coyote]

Ancient bones found at UCSD
By Tanya Sierra
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/northcounty/20080127-9999-1m27bones.html

January 27, 2008

Locked away in a museum safe near Escondido are perhaps the oldest skeletal remains found in the Western Hemisphere.

More than 30 years after the relics were unearthed during a classroom archaeological dig at UC San Diego, the county's Kumeyaay tribes are fighting to reclaim the bones that anthropologists estimate are nearly 10,000 years old.

OVERVIEW

Background: What may be the oldest skeletal remains found in the Western Hemisphere were discovered during a classroom archaeological dig on UCSD property in 1976. Kumeyaay Indians are trying to have the relics returned.

What's changing: The Kumeyaay and a UC San Diego committee met last week to discuss the issue and lay out benchmarks the tribes would have to meet to have the remains repatriated.

The future: If the Kumeyaay can prove the remains belong to their ancestors, federal law says the bones must be returned.
“We think it's the oldest multiple burial in the New World,” said UCLA anthropology professor Gail Kennedy, who participated in the 1976 dig with a University of California San Diego professor. “We don't know anything about these people other than they lived on the coast and they were fishermen.”

The remains, which a UC consultant says have been dated between 9,590 and 9,920 years old, make them older than Kennewick Man – ....

.....

[semillama]

1. I read about that. Fascinating discovery.

And it's a real conundrum. On one hand, it's a massive scientific discovery - I don't think any one has found a group of remains that old before - usually it's a single individual. This opens up so many avenues of inquiry on the early populations of the Americas. It's very important to study the remains.

On the other hand, they are human remains, and they should be treated with respect and dignity. The Kumeyaay have a pretty hard road ahead of them to prove affiliation - in order to prove it, the remains are going to need to be studied and compared to the Kumeyaay population, as well as studying the context of the burials and any artifacts associated with them. It would be a really interesting result if the study could in fact directly link the tribe to the burials - something I don't think has been done with any certainty before.