HUMAN SKULL ABOUT 8,000 YEARS OLD IS FOUND IN MINNESOTA RIVER

Two kayakers were enjoying the last glimmers of summer on the Minnesota River in September when they spotted an odd brown chunk along the bank. They paddled toward it and looked closer. It appeared to be a bone, so they called the Renville County Sheriff’s Office.

When Sheriff Scott Hable was told of the kayakers’ discovery near the city of Sacred Heart, about 110 miles west of Minneapolis, his mind raced to the first possible explanation: Maybe it was the remains of a missing person from a nearby county? “I don’t think anybody was anticipating the news to come,” Hable said.

The sheriff’s office sent the bone to a medical examiner and then to a forensic anthropologist with the FBI, who was not able to pinpoint an identity but did make a startling discovery Tuesday through carbon dating. The bone was part of a skull and most likely was from a young man who lived as many as 8,000 years ago, between 5500 and 6000 B.C., Hable said, citing the anthropologist’s findings.

“We have this sort of bizarre report that it’s ancient,” Hable said by phone Wednesday.

Kathleen Blue, a professor of anthropology at Minnesota State University, said Wednesday that the young man likely would have eaten a diet of plants, deer, fish, turtles and freshwater mussels in a small area, rather than following mammals and bison as they migrate for miles. “There’s probably not that many people at that time wandering around Minnesota 8,000 years ago, because, like I said, the glaciers have only retreated a few thousands years before that,” Blue said. “That period, we don’t know much about it.”

Minnesota has three other remains from that time that have been studied, she said, adding that it is rare for Native American tribes in the state to allow the bones of their ancestors to be examined for archaeological purposes.

The FBI anthropologist had examined a depression on the skull and determined that the man had sustained a severe head wound.

Blue noted that the edges of the wound appear smooth and rounded on the skull in pictures, indicating that it had healed and not been his cause of death.

“It would have been something he actually survived,” Blue said. “Bone has an amazing ability to try to sort of fix itself after there’s been a traumatic injury.”

She said the skull might have drifted in the river for thousands of years or been placed in a burial site close to the water and carried away over time.

Dylan Goetsch, a cultural resources specialist with the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council, said in a statement Thursday that the sheriff’s office “showed a complete lack of cultural sensitivity by their failure to reference the individual as being Native American, their treatment of the individual as a piece of history and their lack of tribal consultation.”

The skull is expected to be returned to Native American tribes in the state, Hable said.