Spirit of yore

Anthropologists at the Nevada State
Museum, US, recently unearthed the
oldest known mummy in North
America, and they found it right on
their own shelvest The mummy,
known as the Spirit Cave man, had
been found in a Nevada cave in 1940,
but very recent advances in radiocarbon dating helped scientists to
determine, to their amazement,
that the remains which they
believed to date back about 2,000
years, were in fact, more than 9,400
years old.

The mummy's age was determined by Ervin Taylor, an anthropology professor at the University of
California at Riverside, who used a
technique known as 'accelerator
mass spectrometry' whereby, individual carbon atoms can be
counted.

The mummy's great age and
excellent state will provide critical
new information on what life was
like at the end of the Ice Age, anthropologists said. The cave man was
wearing moccasins and was wrapped
in shrouds woven from marsh plants
so neatly, that they indicate that
humans of that era used looms. The
fishbones in his intestine speak volumes about his diet. Shortly, the
mummy is expected to undergo
intensive testing, including possible
DNA analysis to inveitigate its
genetic makeup. Although there are
older mummies found in South
America and North America, the
Spirit Cave man is far older than the
5,000-years old famous Iceman
mummy discovered in the Alps in
1991.

"All of a sudden, something
that's not that interesting when it's
2,000 years old, is earth-shattering
when it's 9,000 years old," said an
enthused David Hurst Thomas of
the American Museum of Natural
History in New York, who has
researched the Spirit Cave man's
period extensively.