Arlington Springs Man

As Arlington Springs Man (also known as Arlington Man and Arlington Springs Woman ) are called human remains in 1959 on the island of Santa Rosa off the coast of California were discovered.

Find

The fossil was discovered by Philip C. Orr, then curator of anthropology at the Museum for Natural History in Santa Barbara . He found the bones protruding from the earth in an eroded canyon called Arlington near a spring on Santa Rosa, part of the Channel Islands . However, he left them in situ for the time being and had the site inspected by scientists in order to avoid any doubts about the stratigraphic context . The excavation revealed two femurs , a humerus and an unidentified bone , 11.4 meters below the surface . There were no additional finds such as animal bones or stone tools. Orr identified the remains as those of a man based on the femur. The first chemical investigations showed fossilization of the bones, which indicated an old age. Radiocarbon dating of the coal in the find layer showed an age of 10400 ± 200 and 10000 ± 200 years Before Present . The bones were unsuitable for radiocarbon dating according to the state of the art at the time. Orr wrapped the bones in soil from the find layer and stored them in his museum pending better dating methods.

Later investigations

The collagen from the thigh bone was determined in 1989 by Reiner Berger and Reiner Protsch to be 10800 ± 810 years and thus to an age similar to that of coal; the work of Protsch, who has been convicted of numerous incorrect dates, is, however, not considered serious.

Because of the location, there was a possibility that the bones had been washed up there and were actually younger than the surrounding coal. To dispel this uncertainty, Orr's successor, John R. Johnson, tried to re-date the bones using modern methods; however, they were also hardly suitable for improved radiocarbon dating. No useful DNA could be found either. However, the scientists found the bones of an extinct giant deer vole ( Peromyscus nesodytes ) in the soil in which Orr had packed the find , which was in better condition than the human bones. The mouse bone was dated to 11,490 ± 70 years. An accelerator mass spectrometry of osteocalcin in human bone yielded a result of 6.610 ± 60 years, which in turn collagen 10,960 ± 80 years. In 1994 new excavations found the skeleton of a dwarf mammoth on Santa Rosa. From this, Johnson concluded that when humans arrived in the late Pleistocene, they encountered dwarf mammoths on the island. Santa Rosa and three neighboring islands formed a large island called Santa Rosae at that time because of the lower sea level . For the same reason, the waterway between the island and the California coast was also less wide.

The bones were re-measured in 1999 using computed tomography and compared with statistical data. The anthropologist Phillip Walker concluded from these data that it was the remains of a woman and that she should therefore be correctly called Arlington Springs Woman .

2001 Johnson undertook new excavations on Santa Rosa to determine the stratigraphy of the site more precisely. It turned out that layers above and below were older than the actual find layer. The bones could therefore have been washed to their place of discovery by the watercourse in the immediate vicinity with younger material. In combination with the dating of the newly found layers and the mouse bone, he comes to a possible time span between 11,200 and 11,580 years. This corresponds to a calibrated age of 13,200 to 13,500 years. This would make the bones of Arlington the oldest human bones ever found on the American continent. This in turn would mean that even then the Paleo-Indians would have had to own watercraft in order to cross the Santa Barbara Canal .

In September 2006, John R. Johnson and Philipp Walker corrected their assessment of the sex of the find. A second anthropologist identified the bones as male, and Johnson discovered in the records of the late explorer Orr the dimensions of the now-lost head of the femur, which was more masculine in size. So it is more likely to be a man.

literature

• E. James Dixon: Bones, Boats and Bison: Archeology and the First Colorization of North America. University of New Mexico Press, 1999. pp. 129 ff.
• Debra E. Dandridge: First Lady of the New World: Arlington Springs Woman. In: Mammoth Trumpet. Center for the Study of the First Americans, Department of Anthropology, Texas A&M University. Volume 21, Number 4, September 2006.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Jon Erlandson: Early hunter-gatherers of the California coast. 1994, p. 186.
2. ↑ John R. Johnson: Ancient Bones May Rewrite History ( Memento of the original from June 13, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
3. ↑ Steve Chawkins: Ancient Bones Belonged to a Man - Probably. LA Times , September 11, 2006.