Monday, Sep. 02, 2002

Human remains uncovered in Texas could be older than Kennewick Man

By The Associated Press

DALLAS - A teen-age girl from Brazoria County could be the oldest person ever found in Texas.

Scientists are debating the age of an ancient skull of a young woman, unearthed last year in a muddy ditch near Freeport. Preliminary analysis suggests the fossil could date back nearly 11,000 years.

If so, the skull would be among the oldest human bones known in North America, from a time when the first Americans had just arrived across a land bridge from Asia.

Some experts have questioned the 11,000-year date, which is based on a single radiocarbon analysis done at an Arizona laboratory.

"It's possible that the skull is that old," said Michael Collins, an archaeologist at the University of Texas at Austin. "But under the circumstances, you can put zero confidence in it."

Still, the discovery could be profoundly significant for understanding the earliest Americans, scientists said.

The Fish and Wildlife Service is notifying area tribes of the discovery, a spokesman said.

Hanging over the process is the specter of Kennewick Man, a 9,200-year-old skeleton found in Washington state in 1996. That discovery evolved into a years-long legal battle between American Indians, who want to rebury the bones, and scientists.

D. Gentry Steele, an archaeologist at Texas A&M University who was involved in the excavation, is one of eight scientists who sued nearly six years ago for scientific access to Kennewick Man. A U.S. District Court judge in Portland ruled Friday that scientists can study the bones.

Robert d'Aigle, the Houston archaeologist who excavated the Brazoria County skull, said he didn't want the find to become Texas' version of Kennewick Man.

The Brazoria story began in April 1999, when workers uncovered the skull and other remains while building a levee in the San Bernard National Wildlife Refuge. Suspecting it was human, they covered it with plastic and clay and left it for two years.

But Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act requires archaeological investigation of such remains, so d'Aigle arrived in spring 2001 to study them.

A survey of the site's geology suggested the bones could be more than 5,000 years old, d'Aigle said.

After notifying the Alabama-Coushatta tribe of his work, he unearthed the skull, some jawbone fragments, two vertebrae and a fragment of the left shoulder bone, all of which had been exposed during the construction work.

Steele then studied the bones and concluded they belonged to an adolescent or young adult female.

Steele and other academic scientists contributed to d'Aigle's final report, which was posted online at www.culturalresource.com this month.