Defrosting the past
Ancient human and animal remains are melting out of glaciers, a bounty of a warming world
As he hiked near Colorado's Continental Divide in the summer of 2001, Ed Knapp noticed a strange shape jutting from a melting ice field at 13,000 feet. "It looked like a bison skull," the building contractor and amateur archaeologist recalls. "I thought, `That's strange. Bison don't live this high up.' "
Knapp brought the skull to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, where scientists last month announced that it was indeed from a bison--one that died about 340 years ago. "This was an extraordinary discovery," says Russ Graham, the museum's chief curator, adding that it could alter notions of the mountain environment centuries ago. "There's probably a lot more like it yet to be found."
And not just bison. Colorado isn't the only place where glaciers and snowfields are melting. Decades of unusual warmth in regions from Peru to Alaska--a trend some think is linked to emissions from cars and industry--have shrunk or thawed many of the world's 70,000 glaciers. As the ice recedes, a treasure-trove of human and animal artifacts is emerging, extraordinarily well preserved after centuries in the deep freeze. The fabrics, wood, bone, and DNA-rich tissue found on the mucky fringes of the ice are revising scientists' understanding of our predecessors' health, habits, and technology, and the prey they pursued.
"It's mind-boggling how many different fields are being advanced through studying these remains," says Johan Reinhard, a high-altitude archaeologist and explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society. Rare, spectacular finds like the frozen mummies he discovered in the Andes of Peru in the 1990s and the legendary 5,300-year-old "Ice Man," found at the edge of a receding glacier in the Alps in 1991, have offered time capsules of cultural and biological information. Now, as the ice continues to retreat, it is yielding not just occasional treasures but long records of humans and animals in the high mountains.
Vanishing act. The trick is finding such specimens before Mother Nature--and looters--take them first. Once uncovered, frozen remains can deteriorate within hours or be gnawed by animals. Moreover, they're often so well preserved when they emerge that people who come upon them don't even realize they're ancient.
That was the case when three men hunting sheep near a high glacier in British Columbia, Canada, three years ago saw what they thought was a dead animal. "It looked a little like sealskin buried in the ice," recalls Warren Ward, a teacher from nearby Nelson. "But when I looked closer I could see leather fringe from a coat and finger bones."
Figuring they had found the remains of another hunter, or perhaps a fur trapper, the men stowed a flint knife and other artifacts in a Zip-Loc bag and delivered them to local officials. Archaeologists later exhumed the fallen hunter's body, along with a woven hat, fur clothing, and what seemed to be a medicine bag. Carbon dating revealed that the hunter lived about 550 years ago. Dubbed Kwaday Dan Ts'inchi, or Long Ago Person Found, by people of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations (who may be his direct descendants), he is perhaps the best-preserved human from the period ever found in North America.
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