Oldest Mummy 'Found' on Museum Shelf
Anthropologists at the Nevada State Museum said today that they had unearthed the oldest known mummy in North America -- and they found it right on their own shelves.
The mummy, known as the Spirit Cave man, was found in a Nevada cave in 1940, but advances in radiocarbon dating made only recently allowed scientists to determine, to their amazement, that the remains they had thought dated back about 2,000 years were in fact more than 9,400 years old.
The mummy's great age and excellent state of preservation will provide critical new information on what life was like here at the end of the ice age, including a previously unsuspected sophisticated level of textile weaving and clues to the identity of some of the continent's earliest settlers, anthropologists said.
"We anticipate that this will bear greatly on what we know about the peopling of the New World," said Amy Dansie, an anthropologist at the museum who has been working on the mummy.
The Spirit Cave man is in fact only half a mummy -- mainly the skin of his head and shoulder were actually mummified -- but he nonetheless provides a wealth of information about the times he lived in. He was wearing moccasins and was wrapped in shrouds woven from marsh plants so neatly that they indicate the people of that era were using looms. The fish bones in his mummified intestines say much about his diet.
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In coming months, the mummy is expected to undergo intensive testing, including possible DNA analysis, that will help determine its genetic makeup and much more about the ancient environment of the Great Basin, which is mainly in Nevada and Utah.
The Spirit Cave man's great age is surpassed by mummified remains more than 10,000 years old that have been found in South America, and by
human skeletal remains in North America that are also more than 10,000 years old. But he is far older than the famous Iceman mummy discovered in the Alps in 1991, which is about 5,000 years old.
The discovery that he is so much older than previously suspected suggests a plethora of hidden treasures that may yet come to light as museums re-examine their collections, anthropologists say.
"All of a sudden, something that's not that interesting when it's 2,000 years old is earth-shattering when it's 9,000 years old," said David Hurst Thomas of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who has researched the Spirit Cave man's period extensively.
The Spirit Cave man's age was determined by Ervin Taylor, an anthropology professor at the University of California at Riverside, who was working on a new method of testing ancient hair using a technique known as accelerator mass spectrometry, which allows scientists to count individual carbon atoms.
When the new results on the mummy came in, anthropologists thought they must be mistaken because it was found to be so much older than expected, Ms. Dansie said, and they had additional tests done on the textiles buried with it to be sure.
"It's a big surprise," said Robson Bonnichsen, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans and a professor of anthropology at Oregon State University. "It's a very pleasant surprise. This individual will provide real insight into what the people of the time looked like and what life style they had."
The Spirit Cave man was discovered by two archeologists, S. M. and Georgia Wheeler, a couple who were working for the State of Nevada; they have since died -- never knowing the magnitude of their find.
The mummy found in a cave about 13 miles east of Fallon, was lying on its side, wrapped in a skin robe and sewn into two mats woven of a marsh plant called tule. It appears that the very dry environment of the cave, in addition to the protection of the mats, allowed the body to be so well preserved.
The Spirit Cave man was about 5 feet 2 inches tall, was apparently in his 40's, had a fractured skull and suffered from horrible abscesses of his tooth roots that indicate he had terrible gum disease, anthropologists say.
Genetically, he appears to differ significantly from modern American Indians; in particular, he has a long cranium and long small face that seem to be more closely related to Southeast Asian peoples, Ms. Dansie said. That genetic type resembles other extremely early skeletons found in North America, she said.
Aside from the Spirit Cave man's own state of preservation, it is the astoundingly intact textiles, woven with a method known as diamond-plating, that were found with him that are causing the most excitement.
"What's remarkable about it is the textiles are in an amazing state of preservation," said Ronald M. James, Nevada's state historic preservation officer. "One bag you could easily accuse them of having bought at a market in Arizona last year."
The fragments of textiles that museum officials display -- the mummy itself is kept out of public view because it is so delicate and out of respect for Native American sensibilities -- bear a striking resemblance to the open pouch-like African bags that are popular today.
"This means there was a heritage of textile production which predates what we'd known," Mr. James said. "The implications are remarkable."
The marsh plants and other materials found with the Spirit Cave man also provide an improved snapshot of the environment of the Great Basin around the period when the ice age lakes of the area were drying up and it was rapidly turning into the desert that dominates it today, anthropologists say.
"This was an important period all over the planet," Ms. Dansie said. "This represents a time period when all humans all over the planet were faced with the same kind of challenge," and the mummy shows that in North America "the response to the challenge was as sophisticated as anywhere on the planet."
The mummy had been kept in a sealed box since its discovery, and Ms. Dansie and the museum's curator of anthropology, Donald R. Tuohy, said they had purposely not opened it over the decades in order not to damage it until testing technology got promising enough to make it worthwhile.
Now they are looking forward to all kinds of new data on the Spirit Cave man expected to be brought together in a conference in October. State officials said they needed to get permission from the Bureau of Land Management, on whose land the mummy was discovered, to proceed with testing, and said they would also talk with Native American groups about it. It remains in question whether the mummy might be an ancestor of modern American Indian groups, in which case it would fall under laws on the burial of Indian remains, or belonged to another genetic group.
"It was complete serendipity that it turned out to be important for early humans," Mr. Thomas of the American Museum of Natural History said of the mummy. "You never do know what direction the angel of light is going to descend."
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