Spirit cave man

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The Spirit Cave Man is one of the oldest mummies found in America . It is about 9400 years old, but it shows features that do not match those of other Indian finds from this period. Archaeologists discovered the man's remains in 1940 in Spirit Cave , a grotto in the US state of Nevada . They are now kept at the Nevada State Museum in Carson City .

location

The west-facing Spirit Cave is 20 km east of the small town of Fallon and is located in the Grimes Point - Hidden Cave area , an archaeological site with petroglyphs that are up to eight thousand years old . The grotto is about 7.5 m wide, 4.5 m deep and on average 1.5 m high.

description

The archaeological team and researcher couple Sydney and Georgia Wheeler worked in 1940 for the administration of the Nevada State Parks to find and protect archaeological sites in the area of ​​the post-glacial Lake Lahontan from possible destruction by guano mining .

On August 11, 1940, in the northeast corner of the Spirit Cave grotto, about 30 cm below the surface, they found a large, hemp- wrapped woven mat made of tule , a reed plant into which some human bones had been hammered. The Wheelers retrieved the mat and buried the bones again; this find was called grave 1. Under grave 1 there was a second body, which was also wrapped in a woven mat. This site was called grave 2. In the 1.80 m long, 1.20 m wide and 1.15 m deep grave pit lay the remains of a black-haired man about 1.60 m tall on a pad of fur.

The man, around 45 to 55 years old, was probably one of the elders of his clan. He wore a coat and moccasins made of leather . A woven mat was wrapped around his head and shoulders. A similar mat around the lower half of his body was tied under his feet.

Due to the dryness in the spirit cave, the Spirit Cave man was partly skeletonized and partly dry mummified. The skull and shoulder were covered with skin and hair. Herringbones were found in the bowels . 58 remains of textile fibers and fur were found in the cave. With the dead person lay two luggage bags, artfully made from a fibrous marsh herb, which were probably made on a loom , a device that, according to previous doctrines, was only developed thousands of years later. The bags contained bones and ashes from burned people whose age and gender have not yet been determined.

The Spirit Cave man had multiple skull fractures . One fracture reached from the left side of the forehead to behind the mummy's left ear. At the center of two other fractures was a round dent that could have been caused by a blow with a blunt object, a club, or a round stone. The more than a year old, severe skull fractures were only partially healed. His right hand had healed fractures in two places. His spine was deformed from birth and likely caused significant back pain. He suffered from frequent tooth abscesses. Just before he died, three of his teeth were badly infected. The abscesses drained through an open wound in the cheek. The infection spread to the entire body through the bloodstream. His tribesmen looked after him. Shortly before his death, they fed him small fish that had probably been boiled and pureed beforehand.

Because of its high quality textiles, the body was dated by the Wheelers to an age of no more than 3000 years and was stored unnoticed for 54 years in a wooden box in the Nevada State Museum.

In 1994, the anthropologist Royal Ervin Taylor of the leading University of California, Riverside at 17 finds from the Spirit Cave is a radiometric dating by. He determined that the mummy was around 9415 +/- 25 years old. At this point, she was older than any other mummy discovered in North America. The anthropologists Douglas Owsley and Richard Jantz compared the main features of the skull from the Spirit Cave with those of a total of 34 population groups from around the world, including ten Indian tribes . According to their morphological comparisons, the Spirit Cave man seems most likely to be a descendant of the indigenous people of Japan , the Ainu . It resembles the remains of Kennewick Man in 1996 on the banks of the Columbia River near the city of Kennewick in southern US -Bundesstaats Washington was found.

literature

  • Heather Joy Hecht Edgar: Paleopathology of the Wizards Beach Man (AHUR 2023) and the Spirit Cave Mummy (AHUR 2064). In: Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 40 (1), 1997, pp. 57-61 ( online ).
  • B. Sunday Eiselt: Fish remans from the Spirit Cave paleofecal material - 9,400 year old evidence for Great Basin utilization of small fishes. In: Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 40 (1), 1997, pp. 117-139 ( PDF , 59 MB).
  • Richard L. Jantz, Douglas W. Owsley: Pathology, taphonomy, and cranial morphometrics of the Spirit Cave mummy. In: Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 40 (1), 1997, pp. 62-84 ( PDF , 59 MB).
  • Donna L. Kirner at al .: Dating the Spirit Cave mummy - The value of reexamination. In: Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 40 (1), 1997, pp. 54-56 ( PDF , 59 MB).
  • Sydney M. Wheeler: Cave burials near Fallon, Nevada. In: Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 40 (1), 1997, pp. 15-23 ( PDF , 59 MB).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Pat Barker, Cynthia Ellis, Stephanie Damadio: Summary of the Determination of Cultural Affiliation of Ancient Human Remains from Spirit Cave, Nevada ( Memento of the original from May 11, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link became automatic used and not yet tested. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 101 kB). Bureau of Land Management, Nevada State Office, July 26, 2000 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.blm.gov
  2. ↑ a b Dowd Muska: Scalping Science Sensitivity Run Amok May Silence the Spirit Cave Mummy Forever. ( Memento of the original from December 8, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Nevada Journal, February 1998 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / nj.npri.org
  3. ↑ a b archeology, bag of ashes. In: Der Spiegel No. 19, 1996
  4. ^ Oldest North American Mummy
  5. ↑ Anthropology, My God, that's him. In: Der Spiegel No. 28, 1997

Coordinates: 39 ° 24 ′ 6.7 ″  N , 118 ° 38 ′ 20.5 ″  W.

personal data
SURNAME Spirit cave man
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Mummy, found in Nevada
DATE OF BIRTH around 75th century BC Chr.
DATE OF DEATH around 75th century BC Chr.