Kwäday Dän Ts'ìnchį

Named Kwäday Dän Ts'ìnchi (Southern Tutchone for searched person from a distant time) the body is a likely frozen 1670-1850 in late summer, called twenty-year man in a glacier in the northwest of the Canadian province in 1999 British Columbia discovered has been. At first it was believed that he had fallen victim to a blizzard that buried him under a layer of three meters of snow. It is more likely that he fell into a crevasse.

The well-preserved corpse was examined and it was found that coming from the coast where Tlingit lived at the time , it had stayed for several weeks in the high mountains, where it froze to death on the Samuel Glacier at an altitude of 1,600 m. With the help of the tools, clothing and nutrition knowledge of the elders of the surrounding First Nations of the province, from Alaska and the Yukon , the find could be classified more precisely. The body was buried in 2001, after the investigation was completed, according to local traditions and with a potlatch .

Find

On August 14, 1999, a body was discovered, consisting of a glacier in Tatshenshini-Alsek Provincial Wilderness Park ausaperte . The site was the Samuel Glacier in the St. Elias Mountains at the source of Fault Creek, where the body was about 1,600 m above sea level. The area is around 50 km from the mouth of the Chilkat River and around 80 km south of Klukshu , which is already in the Yukon . It lies in the mountain range that separates the Alaskan coast from the plateau in the Yukon. Three young men, Bill Hanlon, Warren Ward and Mike Roche, who were on the hunt for Dall sheep , first discovered wood above the tree line. They found traces of processing on the pieces of wood and searched the area with binoculars. The body was discovered. It was damaged by the ice, but showed no signs of decay. Ice movements had severed the torso and legs. The bones of the feet, scalp and hair and skull bones were also found separately. The organs of the abdomen were well preserved. The three explorers reported their find to the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Center in Whitehorse .

After consultations with archaeologists in Whitehorse and with the elders of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations and the Ministry of Small Business, Tourism and Culture , the body was packed in ice and taken to the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria . He was accompanied by representatives of the Champagne and Aishihik, in whose traditional territory the find was made.

The body has been studied by chemists, botanists, anatomists, microbiologists, and parasitologists. After consultations with the neighboring First Nations in the Yukon and northern British Columbia, the body was cremated in 2001 and the ashes returned to the Samuel Glacier. Before that, the internal organs and their contents were examined very carefully, as the corpse did not have to or was not allowed to be preserved. In particular, the chyme in the digestive tract contributed to numerous findings.

The roughly twenty-year-old man, who was also called the Canadian ice cream man or BC Iceman and who was soon given the name Kwäday Dän Ts'ìnchį (Long Ago Person found) - translated from South Tutchone: "Found person from a distant past" - , carried some artifacts that had been studied by archaeologists and anthropologists . In addition, there were other finds in the vicinity of the site that were made in the following summers.

Dating

Radiocarbon data based on the collagen of the bones led to various, uncalibrated determinations. 952 ± 28 years before present and 935 ± 75 years before present were measured, an average of 944 ± 80. This roughly corresponds to the time between 929 and 1089. The time of death was assumed to be between 1480 and 1850. The clothing revealed times between 1400 and 1490. A new attempt at dating in 2007 revealed the time between 1670 and 1850.

Genetic examination, relationship

The BC Iceman , the British Columbia ice cream man, was genetically examined. 241 members of the First Nations had their genes compared and it was found that 19 of them were related to the deceased, 17 of them from the wolf clan of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations . But possible relatives can also be found in South America. Other DNA tests assigned him to the North American Indians ( haplogroup A (mtDNA) ). So he was considered a close relative of the Dogrib and the Haida on Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands).

dress

The fur garment that bore the dead consisted of 95 sewn together with sinews skins of Arctic ground squirrel ( arctic ground squirrel ). Spermophilus parryi plesius, commonly called gopher , does not live on the coast, but is common in the hinterland. In the southern Yukon, almost all Indian women wore these skins until at least the 1970s. It was not possible to determine whether the skins came to the coast through trade and were processed there, or in the hinterland. The fur was patched on the way, as the processing marks show.

The headgear, a hat made of spruce fibers, clearly comes from the coast. It was probably made from wood fibers of the Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis). In addition, seeds of this tree species were found in the clothing, as well as traces of algae, which only occur on the coast. The shape of the hat was that of a flattened cone.

hair

The hair was examined for various traces. Their results contrasted significantly with those of the bones. In the case of the latter, it was found that the man had covered over 90% of his protein requirements for the last five to ten years of his life from the sea. These were fish and marine mammals. The hair on the other hand - the ones examined were about 8 cm long, which corresponds to about 8 months - showed that Kwäday Dän Ts'ìnchį had increasingly been eating meat from land mammals in the last months of his life.

Pollen, food, knowledge of the elderly

Small traces of Ketalachs , an animal whose age could be determined at four years, were found in the clothing . Remains of shellfish, probably crabs, were found in the stomach and lower intestines. Larger amounts of fish tapeworms were found in the intestines . These could have got into the digestive tract from eating raw fish, probably salmon.

In terms of pollen, there were those of Chenopodiaceae, which belong to the goosefoot family that today are counted among the foxtail family (Amaranthaceae). They alone made up 25% of the pollen. They could not be identified more precisely, apart from Glasswort (Salicornia, English: Queller ). The proportion of around a quarter of the pollen is well above the natural proportion in the area. This led to the assumption that the pollen was ingested with the food. This corresponds to the known fact that these plants, which are edible, have been and are in use for nutrition and medicinal treatment. With the support of the anthropologists Sheila Greer ( University of Alberta ) and Judy Brakel (Gustavus), elders of the Champagne and Aishihik, the Carcross / Tagish and the Teetl'it Gwitchin First Nation were interviewed. Alaskan elders from the coastal Tlingit communities in Klukwan , near Haines , and Hoonah , in the Chichagof Archipelago , were also interviewed. The older people hoped that their knowledge of edible plants, which are part of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), would be put into writing in this way and thus better preserved.

Some of the Canadian elders knew that dried red glasswort (Salicornia rubra) was used as food when traveling. The Alaskan Tlingit knew that beach asparagus (Salicornia perennis) had been harvested since at least the 1880s . The plant is known there as Suk kadzi, ('loose ribbon on the beach'). James Cook 's ship's doctor , Archibald Menzies , noted that the Indians gave them beach asparagus as a remedy for scurvy , which can be attributed to its richness in vitamin C.

The rest of the pollen from various grasses, from pine , West American hemlock , alder , birch and Artemisia were also found on clothing, but less Salicornia - and no Artemisia pollen. In contrast, two groups of algae were found in very small quantities that are common in the area in which the man died, namely red snow algae ( Chlamydomonas nivalis), which, as the name suggests, cause the blood snow with their red colored cells , and Troschiscia aspera.

No less than twelve mosses could be detected. The three most important were Fontinalis Hedw. (named after Johannes Hedwig ), then probably Fontinalis antipyretica, Sphagnum Sect. Acutifolia, and Andreaea cf. A. rupestris. These finds also point to the coastal region. Further finds of plant remains made the man likely to be well below the tree line.

Finally, two tiny remains of tree fibers were found that may have been inhaled or ingested with food. For a long time, the fibers of some trees have been processed into food by the coastal groups.

Macroscopic traces were also found, such as the fruit of a plant species called mountain sweet cicely (Osmorhiza berteroi), which is related to carrots . It was found that it is a fruit that only occurs on the coast below the tree line.

A hemlock needle eight millimeters long was also found . It was Tsuga mertensiana, a tree species that only occurs on the coast below 1000 m.

Tools

On larger objects next to the fur there was a carved stick and an atlatl , plus a leather bag with edible leaves and remains of a fish, and a knife with an iron blade. They were taken to Whitehorse . The blade is so corroded that it may run out of iron.

A 99 percent copper bead was made from unmelted metal. It is unclear whether it was part of a larger object. The material composition could allow an investigation of the origin, since traces of silver and arsenic were found.

The use of other wooden tools is unclear.

literature

• Richard Joseph Hebda, Sheila Greer, Alexander Mackie: Teachings from Long Ago Person Found: highlights from the Kwädąy Dän Ts'ìnchį Project . Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria, BC 2012 (English, [1] [PDF; accessed June 16, 2015]).
• Treena Marie Swanston: Past human health and migration: the analysis of microbial DNA associated with human remains recovered from a glacier in Canada , Thesis, Archäologie, University of Saskatchewan 2010.
• James H. Dickson, Petra J. Mudie: The life and death of Kwaday Dan Ts'inchi, an ancient frozen body from British Columbia: clues from remains of plants and animals , in: Northern Review, January 1, 2008 ( online ).
• Michael P. Richards, Sheila Greer, Lorna T. Corr, Owen Beattie, Alexander Mackie, Richard P. Evershed, Al von Finster and John Southon: Radiocarbon Dating and Dietary Stable Isotope Analysis of Kwaday Dän Ts'inchí , in: American Antiquity, 72/4 (October 2007) 719-733.
• Owen Beattie, Brian Apland, Erik W. Blake, James A. Cosgrove, Sarah Gaunt, Sheila Greer, Alexander P. Mackie, Kjerstin E. Mackie, Dan Straathof, Valerie Thorp and Peter M. Troffe: The Kwäday Dän Ts'ìnchi Discovery from a Glacier in British Columbia , in: Canadian Journal of Archeology 24 (2000) 129-147.

Web links

• Kwaday Dan Ts'ìnchí. A man from a melting Canadian glacier
• Kwäday Dän Ts'ìnchi Project at the British Columbia Ministry of Forests, Land and Natural Rescource Operations

Remarks

1. ^ Maria Victoria Monsalve and Anne C. Stonemt: DNA Lineage Analysis: Genetic Affinities of the Kwäday Dän Ts'inchi Remains with Other Native Americans , in: Center for archaeological investigations 32 (2005) 9-21, ISBN 0-88104-089- 4 .

Coordinates: 60 ° 0 ′ 0 ″  N , 138 ° 0 ′ 0 ″  W.