Claim of mammoth bones brings treasure hunters to East River in New York City
NEW YORK
Ask people what you might find buried in the muck at the bottom of
New York City’s East River and they’d likely say “mob boss” before thinking of mammoth bones.
But several groups of treasure hunters have taken to the waterway in recent weeks after hearing a guest on comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast claim a boxcar’s worth of potentially valuable prehistoric mammoth bones was dumped in the river in the 1940s.
Despite a lack of evidence to back up the story, treasure seekers using boats, diving apparatuses and technology like remote-operated cameras have gone searching, in hopes the murky waters are hiding woolly mammoth tusks.
“I think the chances are just as good as the lottery. And people buy those tickets every day,” said Don Gann, 35, of North Arlington, New Jersey, a commercial diver who’s been out on the water since early last week with his brother and two workers.
It all started when John Reeves, an Alaskan gold miner with a passion for fossils, came onto “The Joe Rogan Experience” for an episode that aired Dec. 30 to talk about his land, where he has personally uncovered numerous ageold bones and tusks. In the first half of the 20th century, under previous ownership, digging for gold unearthed a trove of prehistoric mammal remains.
Some of that material was brought to New York City decades ago to be handed over to the American Museum of Natural History. Reeves cited a draft of a report put together by three men, including one who worked at the museum, that included a reference to some fossils and bones deemed unsuitable for the museum being dumped into the river.
“I’m going to start a bone rush,” Reeves told Rogan, before reading from the draft and giving out a location: East River Drive, which is now known as the FDR Drive, at around 65th Street.
“We’ll see if anybody out there’s got a sense of adventure,” he said, later adding, “Let me tell you something about mammoth bones, mammoth tusks - they’re extremely valuable.”
After the episode aired, the American Museum of Natural History threw water as cold as the East River on the tale.
“We do not have any record of the disposal of these fossils in the East River, nor have we been able to find any record of this report in the museum’s archives or other scientific sources,” it said in a statement.
When reached by The Associated Press, Reeves refused to talk and instead told a reporter to read the pages of the draft he had posted on social media before hanging up. He didn’t answer other calls and emails.
The pages posted on social media identify three men as the authors: Richard Osborne, an anthropologist; Robert Evander, who formerly worked in the American Museum of Natural History’s paleontology department; and Robert Sattler, an archeologist with a consortium of Alaska Native tribes.
Reached by The Associated Press, Sattler said the story about the dumped bones came from Osborne, who died in 2005.
The document cited by Reeves was real, he said, and written in the mid-1990s. But it wasn’t something intended for an academic journal. It was a starting point for something — maybe a book — based on Osborne’s knowledge of a period in Alaska when mammoth remains were being discovered in plenty. Osborne’s father worked at a company involved in the digging.
Sattler said Osborne spent time around the operation as a young man and probably heard the story about surplus bones being dumped in the river secondhand. Sattler said he didn’t have any specifics beyond Osborne’s recollections.
Mammoth remains discovered in Alaska wound up at the American Museum of Natural History, including some still on display today.
The section of the Manhattan shoreline where Reeves claimed the bones were dumped underwent major changes in the 1930s and 1940s, as the East River Drive, later renamed for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was constructed on fill and pilings. The highway opened fully to drivers in 1942, raising questions about how someone would have dumped a huge trove of bones without disrupting traffic.
Gann said he’s seen about two dozen other sets of fossil hunters in the time he’s spent searching for mammoth remains out on the East River.
Visibility in the East River is extremely poor, he said. On a good day, you can see maybe a foot in front of you. The current at the bottom is strong.
But the avid diver, who appeared in Discovery’s “Sewer Divers,” has a thing for searching out unusual finds — although mammoth bones are admittedly on a different scale than finding a Paul Revere spoon at an estate sale.
“I’ve hunted for weird artifacts my entire life, so this one, it just kind of fits into my repertoire,” Gann said.
He and his crew haven’t found anything, which he admits is disappointing, but it has spurred him to do some of his own digging into history. He’s switched his sights to a location off the southern part of Brooklyn, saying it’s a more likely site for cargo to be dumped than the
East River off Manhattan.
WASHINGTON
The Supreme Court said Friday it will consider strengthening protections for workers who say their employers fail to accommodate their religious beliefs and practices.
The court will take a new look at how to interpret federal law that requires obliging the religious observance of workers unless doing so would impose an “undue hardship” on the employer. Religious groups say Supreme Court precedent sets too low of a threshold for employers to make the “undue hardship” claim, and conservative justices have been looking for a case that would allow them to review that decades-old decision.
The court’s decision to take the case came as the justices seemed to fill out their docket for the term, which usually runs through June. The court took eight new cases, including one
BEIJING
China on Saturday reported nearly 60,000 deaths in people who had COVID-19 since early December following complaints it was failing to release data, and said the “emergency peak” of its latest surge appears to have passed.
The toll included 5,503 deaths due to respiratory failure caused by COVID-19 and 54,435 fatalities from other ailments combined with COVID-19 since Dec. 8, the National Health Commission announced. It said those “deaths related to COVID” occurred in hospitals, which left open the possibility more people also might have died at home.
The report would more
DUBAI,
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
Iran said Saturday it executed a former highranking defense ministry official and dual IranianBritish national, despite international warnings not to carry out the death sentence. The execution further escalated tensions with the West amid the nationwide anti-government protests shaking the Islamic Republic.
The hanging of Ali Reza Akbari, a close ally of top security official Ali Shamkhani, suggests an ongoing power struggle within
Iran’s theocracy as it tries to contain the demonstrations over the September death of Mahsa Amini. It also harkened back to the mass purges of the military that immediately followed that will have justices return to the question of how to assess whether statements made online are “true threats” that are not protected by the First Amendment.
The religious accommodation case could provide yet another example of how the Roberts court has been overwhelmingly protective of religious rights. Already this term, it has considered whether a designer of wedding websites can tell same-sex couples she will not create sites for them. The website dispute is billed as a free-speech case but was spurred by the designer’s religious beliefs about marriage.
Last term, the court said a school board in Washington state discriminated against a former football coach when it disciplined him for postgame prayers at midfield, and that Maine cannot bar religious schools from receiving public tuition than double China’s official COVID-19 death toll to 10,775 since the disease was first detected in the central city of Wuhan in late 2019. China has counted only deaths from pneumonia or respiratory failure in its official COVID-19 death toll, a narrow definition that excludes many deaths that would be attributed to COVID-19 in other places.
China stopped reporting data on COVID-19 deaths and infections after abruptly lifting anti-virus controls in early December despite a surge in infections that began in October and has filled hospitals with feverish, wheezing patients.
The World Health Organization and other governments appealed for
Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Akbari’s hanging drew immediate anger from London, which along with the U.S. and others has sanctioned Iran over the protests and its supplying Russia with the bombcarrying drones now targeting Ukraine.
“This was a callous and cowardly act, carried out by a barbaric regime with no respect for the human rights of their own people,” British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said.
Foreign Secretary James Cleverly summoned Iran’s chargé d’affaires in the United Kingdom and separately warned: “This will not stand unchallenged.”
The United Kingdom sanctioned Iran’s prosecutor-general, Mohammad grants extended to other private schools.
The new case concerns Pennsylvania evangelical Christian Gerald Groff, who joined the U.S. Postal Service in 2012 as a Rural Carrier Associate, a noncareer job in which he fills in for career employees.
His job became a problem when the service entered into an agreement with Amazon to deliver packages on Sundays, when Groff said he observes the Sabbath.
The courts relied on the Supreme Court’s 1977 decision in Trans World Airlines v. Hardison, which found that employers need show only a “more than a de minimis cost,” meaning trivial or inconsequential, to qualify as an “undue hardship.” Religious groups for years have criticized that low threshold, saying almost any inconvenience to the company counts. information after reports by city and provincial governments suggest as many as hundreds of millions of people in China might have contracted the virus.
The peak of the latest infection wave appears to have passed based on the decline in the number of patients visiting fever clinics, said a National Health Commission official, Jiao Yahui.
The United States, South Korea and other governments have imposed virustesting and other controls on people arriving from China. Beijing retaliated on Wednesday by suspending issuance of new visas to travelers from South Korea and Japan.
Jafar Montazeri, on Saturday night “with immediate effect” over Akbari’s execution.
Iran similarly summoned the British ambassador after the execution.
Iran has alleged, without evidence, that Akbari served as a source for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, known popularly as MI6. A lengthy statement issued by Iran’s judiciary claimed Akbari received large sums of money, his British citizenship and other help in London for providing information to the intelligence service.
However, Iran long has accused those who travel abroad or have Western ties of spying, often using them as bargaining chips in negotiations.