An 8,000-year-old partial skull discovered by two canoeists in Minnesota this summer is being given to Native American officials after investigations.

According to Scott Hable, a canoeist who also serves as the sheriff of Renville County, the specific location of the river where the find was located is around 180 kms west of Minneapolis.

Forensic anthropologists employed carbon dating to determine the skull’s age after Hable suspected it might be linked to a missing person or murder investigation. In the end, Hable determined that it was most likely the skull of a young man who lived between 5,500 and 6,000 BC.

“It was a complete shock to us that that bone was that old,” Hable told Minnesota Public Radio.

The anthropologist discovered a depression in the man’s head, which was “possibly suggestive of the cause of death.”

After the police chief announced the find on May 18, numerous Native Americans complained that sharing images of ancestral remains was insulting to their culture.

According to Hable, his staff removed the message because they “didn’t want it to be offensive at all.” Upper Sioux tribal community officials will now be in charge of the remains.

Cultural Resources Specialist Dylan Goetsch of the Minnesota Council on Indian Affairs stated in a statement that neither the council nor the state archaeologist had been notified of the discovery, which is required by state statutes governing the care and repatriation of Native American remains.

According to The New York Times, Kathleen Blue, an anthropology professor at Minnesota State University, claimed the same day that the skull is unmistakably from an ancestor of one of the last tribes in the area.

She believes the youngster lived in a small area and ate freshwater plants, deer, fish, turtles, and mussels, and did not migrate with animals or bison.

“Probably not a lot of people were walking around Minnesota 8,000 years ago because, as I said, the glaciers retreated a few thousand years before that. We don’t know much about this period,” Blue added.

Image Credit: Getty

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