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Update on Natchez Man

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

John L. Cotter*
Affiliation:
Curator Emeritus American Historical Archaeology, University Museum of Archaeology/ Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104

Abstract

On October 6, 1846, M. W. Dickeson, a physician from Natchez, Mississippi, exhibited a collection of specimens of mastodon and sloth fossil bones that he had found in 1845 at the base of a bayou cut through the loess above the Mississippi River near his home. He had brought them to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia to which he donated them. Among the specimens was a fragment of human pelvis, implicitly also fossil, from a deposit of blue clay 61 cm below the animal fossils, which included mylodon (now Glossotherium harlani) and Megalonyx jeffersoni. After 144 years of controversy over the antiquity of “Natchez Man,” a sample of the pelvis has been dated by accelerator mass spectrometry to 5580 ± 80 B.P.

Résumé

Résumé

El día 6 de octubre de 1846, el médico M. W. Dickeson, de Natchez en el estado de Misisipi, preparó una exhibición de huesos fósiles de mastodontes y perezosos que él había encontrado en 1845. Este hallazgofue hecho cerca de su casa, en un corte geológico hecho en loess por un brazo del Río Misisipi. Eventualmente el doctor Dickeson donó estos fósiles a la Academia de Ciencias Naturales de Filadelfia. Entre ellos se encontró un fragmento de una pelvis humana que había sido considerada parte de dichos fósiles. Esta pelvis provenía de un depósito de arcilla “azul” a 61 cm debajo de un estrato de fósiles de animales que incluía mylodon (ahora Glossotherium harlani) y Megalonyx jeffersoni. Después de 144 años de disputas sobre la antigüedad del “hombre de Natchez,” esta pelvis ha sido datada por medio del acelerador espectrómetria de masas, el cual proveyó unafecha de 5580 ± 80 B.P.

Information

Type
Reports
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1991

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