Spirit Cave mummy
The Spirit Cave Man is one of the oldest mummies found in America. His remains were discovered in the cave Spirit Cave 20 km east of Fallon, Nevada, Churchill County, of which archeology team and research couple Sydney and Georgia Wheeler. They have an age of about 9400 years, and have characteristics that do not match the characteristics of Native American remains of this era. The remains of Spirit Cave Man are kept in the Nevada State Museum in Carson City.
Location
The west-facing rock grotto Spirit Cave is located in the area Grimes Point - Hidden Cave, an archaeological site with up to eight thousand years old petroglyphs. The cave is about 7.5 m wide, 4.5 m deep and an average of 1.5 m high.
Description
The Wheelers were working in 1940 for the management of Nevada State Parks to find archaeological sites in the area of post-glacial Lake Lahontan from possible destruction by the guano mining and preserve it.
On August 11, 1940, found in the northeast corner of the cave Spirit Cave about 30 cm below the surface of a large, wrapped with hemp woven mat of Tule, a reed plant into which some human bones were taken. The Wheelers retrieved the mat and buried the bone again; this Fund was named grave first grave under 1, a second body, which was also wrapped in a woven mat was. This site was called grave 2. In the 1.80 m long, 1.20 m wide and 1.15 m deep grave pit lay on a pad made of skins, the remains of a black-haired, about 1.60 m tall man.
The approximately 45 to 55 -year-old man was probably one of the elders of his clan. He was wearing a fur coat and moccasins made of leather. A woven mat wrapped around his head and shoulders. A similar mat around his lower body was tied under his feet.
Due to the drought in the Spirit Cave of the Spirit Cave Man was partially skeletonized and partially trockenmumifiziert. Skull and shoulders were covered with skin and hair. In the intestines there were fish bones. 58 Textile fibers and fur remains were found in the cave. The dead were two luggage bags and artfully crafted of a fibrous swampweed that were probably produced on a loom, a device that has been developed according to previous doctrine only millennia later. The bags containing bones and ashes of burned people whose age and gender have not yet been determined.
The Spirit Cave Man had several skull fractures. A fracture ranged from the left side of the forehead to behind the left ear of the mummy. At the center of two other fractures, there was a round dent that could come from a blow with a blunt object, a stick or a round stone. The more than a year old, severe skull fractures were only partially healed. His right hand pointed at two points on healed fractures. His spine was deformed from birth and probably caused significant back pain. He suffered from frequent Zahnabszessen. Shortly before he died, were heavily infected three of his teeth. The abscess drained through an open wound in the cheek. About the bloodstream, the infection spread to the entire body. His tribesmen care of him. Shortly before his death, she fed him small fish that had been previously probably cooked and mashed.
The body has been dated by the Wheelers because of its high quality textiles to an age of 3000 years, and pitched 54 years unnoticed in a wooden box at the Nevada State Museum.
In 1994, the anthropologist Royal Ervin Taylor of the University of California, Riverside on 17 artefacts from the Spirit Cave by radiometric dating. He noted that the mummy about 9415 / - was 25 years old. At this time she was older than any other mummy discovered in North America. The anthropologist Douglas Owsley and Richard Jantz compared the main features of the skull from the Spirit Cave with those of a total of 34 populations from around the world, including ten Indian tribes. According to their morphological comparisons, it appears to be a descendant of the original inhabitants of Japan, the Ainu to act in the Spirit Cave man most likely. It resembles the remains of Kennewick Man was found in 1996 on the banks of the Columbia River near the town of Kennewick in the south of the U.S. state of Washington.