admin Scientists at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia are actually cleaning the skeletons out of their closet. Museum staff recently rediscovered a 6,500-year-old human skeleton that had been locked underground for 85 years.
A 6,500-year-old skeleton has been discovered at the site of Ur in Iraq. Here the skeleton is covered with a layer of wax on the ground and completely elevated by the surrounding soil. Nestled in the storage room, the wooden box has no code or catalog card.But a recent effort to digitize some of the museum’s old documents has yielded new information about the history of the mysterious box and the skeleton nicknamed “Noah” inside.
Human remains inside a box discovered between 1929 and 1930 at the site of Ur, in present-day Iraq, by Sir Leonard Woolley and his team of archaeologists from the Penn Museum and the British Museum , according to the archives.
Woolley’s excavations are best known for the discovery of the famous Mesopotamian “royal cemetery”, which included hundreds of tombs and 16 tombs filled with cultural artifacts. But the archaeologist and his team also discovered tombs that predate the royal cemetery of Ur by about 2,000 years.
A lightweight plaster mixture was placed on top of the covered skeleton, a 6,500-year-old human remains discovered at the site of Ur in Iraq, to protect it during transport. The vertical bar has been cut out under the frame to make room for the support board Year.
In a flooded area, nearly 15 meters from the surface of the Ur site, the research team found 48 tombs dating back to the Ubaid period, about 5,500 BC. at 4000B.C.
Although remains from this period are extremely rare, even in 1929 Woolley decided to recover a single skeleton from the site. He covered the bones and surrounding soil with wax, put them in boxes, and transported them to London, then to Philadelphia.
The teeth of the 6,500-year-old skeleton are well-preserved, as seen in this view of the upper body and skull.
A set of lists outlined where the artefacts from the 1929 to 1930 dig were headed — while half of the artefacts remained in Iraq, the others were split between London and Philadelphia.
One of the lists stated that the Penn Museum was to receive a tray of mud from the excavation, as well as two skeletons.
But when William Hafford, the project manager responsible for digitalizing the museum’s records, saw the list, he was puzzled. One of the two skeletons on the list was nowhere to be found.
Further research into the museum’s database revealed the unidentified skeleton had been recorded as “not accounted for” as of 1990. To get to the bottom of this mystery, Hafford began exploring the extensive records left by Woolley himself.
After locating additional information, including images of the missing skeleton, Hafford approached Janet Monge, the Penn Museum’s curator of physical anthropology. But Monge, like Hafford, had never seen the skeleton before.
That’s when Monge remembered the mysterious box in the basement.
When Monge opened the box later that day, she said it was clear the human remains inside were the same ones listed as being packed up and shipped by Woolley.
The skeleton, she said, likely belonged to a male, 50 years or older, who would have stood somewhere between 5 feet 8 inches (173 centimetres) to 5 feet 10 inches (178 cm) tall.
Penn Museum researchers have nicknamed the re-discovered skeleton “Noah,” because he is believed to have lived after what archaeological data suggests was a massive flood at the original site of Ur.
New scientific techniques that weren’t yet available in Woolley’s time could help scientists at the Penn Museum determine much more about the time period to which these ancient remains belonged, including diet, ancestral origins, trauma, stress and diseases.
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