A skull fragment found by kayakers along the muddy banks of the Minnesota River turned out to be from a man who lived 8,000 years ago and may have been killed by a blow to the head, according to an FBI forensic expert.
The skull fragment was exposed last September because a drought had caused the river’s water level to recede, according to Minnesota Public Radio. The two kayakers turned it over to the Renville County Sheriff’s Office, which first passed it along to the local medical examiner, then to the FBI, thinking it could be remains of a missing person. What they learned next stunned the small southern Minnesota community some 110 miles west of Minneapolis.
“That it was human, it was that of a young man, and, most surprisingly, that it was, they thought, about 8,000 years old,” Renville County Sheriff Scott Hable told MPR. “It was a complete shock to us that that bone was that old.”
Two kayakers on the Minnesota River happened upon a fragment of a human skull last year.
Now, an FBI forensic anthropologist estimates the bone belonged to a man who lived nearly 8,000 years ago.
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A report from the FBI determined that the skull had a depression likely caused by a severe head wound that was “perhaps suggestive of the cause of death.” Hable characterized the wound as “blunt force trauma.”
Kathleen Blue, a professor of anthropology at Minnesota State University, told The New York Times the man likely would have eaten a diet of plants, deer, fish, turtles, and freshwater mussels.
“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.”
Blue speculated that the skull might have drifted in the river for thousands of years or come loose from a burial site near the river.
Minnesota Indians blasted the local sheriff’s department for sharing a photo of the skull online, claiming it was disrespectful to their ancestors.
Minnesota Indian Affairs Council Cultural Resources Specialist Dylan Goetsch complained that Minnesota’s tribal communities only learned of the discovery after seeing the sheriff’s Facebook post, which he called “unacceptable and offensive.”
Hable said his agency will turn the remains over to Upper Sioux Community tribal officials.
“We had no idea but we were alerted to the fact that that Facebook post was offensive to one or more people and so we have since taken that post down,” Hable said. “We didn’t mean for it to be offensive whatsoever.”