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Yuha Man’s skeleton was stolen before it could be dated
But a busted finger pointed to the truth
Morlin Childers, amateur archaeologist extraordinaire.
In 1971, Morlin Childers — an amateur archaeologist who had discovered the mysterious sunken ship under the surface of Laguna Salada — brought Imperial Valley College archaeology instructor Dr. Erlinda Burton and her field class to the site of a large and mysterious rock cairn he’d found in a prehistoric rock quarry, north of the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. After a lengthy survey, they began an official excavation of the cairn.
By day’s end, the cairn’s purpose was clear. It had been used to cover the body of a Native American who had died thousands of years earlier. The “Truckhaven Man,” as he would become known, had been intentionally buried in a shallow depression that was then covered with small boulders. Unfortunately, the weight of the boulders had crushed the partially-decomposed skeleton. So to determine its age, the archaeologists had to carbon-date its tooth enamel, which indicated an approximate age of 5000 years. Although a full report of the excavation was never produced, the Truckhaven Man burial contributed to the understanding of prehistoric human activity, burial customs, and material culture in the California desert region during the Late Archaic period.
Five months later, Childers turned his attention to another cairn, forty miles south of the Truckhaven site in the Yuha Desert. The four-day-long Yuha Desert operation was once again led by Dr. Erlinda Burton. It got underway on October 23rd, 1971. In a 60-page report delivered to the Bureau of Land Management, Erlinda Burton, Morlin Childers, and Michael Barker provided precise details of the excavation:
“The cairn was 12 feet 8 inches long and 10 feet wide. The first human remains were encountered 19 inches below the ground level, where a fragment of a human femur was exposed. The skeleton was found extended on its back, with the skull lying on the left side, and its face oriented east. The lumbar and pelvic regions, the feet, and both lower legs were missing, only portions of both femoral shafts, minus distal and proximal ends, were recovered. The highly-fragmented skull was stabilized with shellac, the femoral shafts removed and wrapped in aluminum foil, and placed in foil lined boxes.”
Site of the Yuha Man burial.
The report also carried an astonishing announcement. Tests carried out on the caliche — a natural layer of calcium carbonate that had grown over time on the surface of the Yuha Man’s skeleton — indicated that it was approximately 21,500 years old (plus or minus 1500 years). A few days later, the New York Times reported, “A person who died about 20,000 years ago and was buried beneath a pile of rocks may provide scientists with the oldest human skeleton found in the Western Hemisphere.”
Childers was aware of the race to find the hemisphere’s earliest human inhabitant. From 1959 until today, the oldest official human remains still belong to the Arlington Springs Man, whose 13,000 year old skeleton was discovered on the northern end of California’s Santa Rosa Island. Since then, thousands of stone tools have been found and determined by the use of relative dating methods to be far older than 13,000 years. But the conservatively-minded archaeological community favors the accuracy of direct methods like the radiocarbon dating of bones, and questions the accuracy of relative or indirect methods, like stratigraphy — analysis according to the surrounding geologic strata — or the testing of caliche. So genuine skeletons like the ones discovered by Morlin Childers and others are the gold standard — if the bones can be carbon-dated.
Childers’ Yuha Man discovery would have pushed humanity’s arrival in the California desert back from 13,000 to 21,500 years, and would have challenged long-held beliefs about human migration into North America. Perhaps not surprisingly, the claim was not widely accepted by the archaeological community. A subsequent BLM publication noted two previous discoveries that had been debunked: “A bone from a woman found in the La Brea tar pits that was initially believed to be 23,000 years old was later determined to be 10,250 years old. And in Peru, the remains of a mummified man that were initially thought to be 17,500 years old were later determined to be just 500 years old.”
The controversy attracted the attention of dozens of other scientists; they wanted to run additional tests on the remains. But before that could happen, the Yuha Man’s skeleton mysteriously vanished. Since the Yuha Man’s remains had been excavated from land that was managed by the BLM, the FBI got involved. A newspaper reported that the federal agents conducted interviews, but ultimately the investigation came to a dead end. Hard facts were hard to come by, but it was established that the remains had been secured in a locked storage room at the Imperial Valley College, and that only four people had keys to the room.
The Yuha Man’s skull, after discovery but before disappearance.
The actual age of Yuha Man might thus have remained a scientific mystery, had not the fickle finger of fate intervened. Or at least, the fractured finger of fate: prior to his disappearance, Yuha Man had lost a finger, and the thieves had left it behind. And while it never pointed out the guilty parties, that detached digit did point to the truth about its original owner: carbon dating placed it at 5000 years old, not 21,500.
Childers was undeterred by the revelation. A couple years after Yuha Man’s disappearance, he was exploring a wash near the Mexican border when he stopped to gaze up at a 60-foot cliff that had been carved by floodwaters just a day or two before. Hurricane Kathleen had pummeled eastern San Diego County, dropping nine inches of rain on Mount Laguna. As the floodwaters rushed down the mountain toward the Salton Sea, they had picked up and carried away thousands of years of sediment from the wash Childers was exploring, and as he peered at the side of the cliff, he noticed a Native artifact was embedded in it. The excavation that Childers and Herbert Minshal subsequently carried out in Pinto Wash recovered eighty Paleolithic stone tools. But the tools, being inorganic, had to be dated using relative methods that were known to be less precise. In their report about the discovery, Childers and Minshal said the artifacts they’d found were determined to be 50,000 years old. But once again, the archaeological community ignored their extraordinary findings.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Yuha Man’s skeleton was stolen before it could be dated
But a busted finger pointed to the truth
Yuha Man’s skeleton was stolen before it could be dated
But a busted finger pointed to the truth
Morlin Childers, amateur archaeologist extraordinaire.
In 1971, Morlin Childers — an amateur archaeologist who had discovered the mysterious sunken ship under the surface of Laguna Salada — brought Imperial Valley College archaeology instructor Dr. Erlinda Burton and her field class to the site of a large and mysterious rock cairn he’d found in a prehistoric rock quarry, north of the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. After a lengthy survey, they began an official excavation of the cairn.
By day’s end, the cairn’s purpose was clear. It had been used to cover the body of a Native American who had died thousands of years earlier. The “Truckhaven Man,” as he would become known, had been intentionally buried in a shallow depression that was then covered with small boulders. Unfortunately, the weight of the boulders had crushed the partially-decomposed skeleton. So to determine its age, the archaeologists had to carbon-date its tooth enamel, which indicated an approximate age of 5000 years. Although a full report of the excavation was never produced, the Truckhaven Man burial contributed to the understanding of prehistoric human activity, burial customs, and material culture in the California desert region during the Late Archaic period.
Five months later, Childers turned his attention to another cairn, forty miles south of the Truckhaven site in the Yuha Desert. The four-day-long Yuha Desert operation was once again led by Dr. Erlinda Burton. It got underway on October 23rd, 1971. In a 60-page report delivered to the Bureau of Land Management, Erlinda Burton, Morlin Childers, and Michael Barker provided precise details of the excavation:
“The cairn was 12 feet 8 inches long and 10 feet wide. The first human remains were encountered 19 inches below the ground level, where a fragment of a human femur was exposed. The skeleton was found extended on its back, with the skull lying on the left side, and its face oriented east. The lumbar and pelvic regions, the feet, and both lower legs were missing, only portions of both femoral shafts, minus distal and proximal ends, were recovered. The highly-fragmented skull was stabilized with shellac, the femoral shafts removed and wrapped in aluminum foil, and placed in foil lined boxes.”
Site of the Yuha Man burial.
The report also carried an astonishing announcement. Tests carried out on the caliche — a natural layer of calcium carbonate that had grown over time on the surface of the Yuha Man’s skeleton — indicated that it was approximately 21,500 years old (plus or minus 1500 years). A few days later, the New York Times reported, “A person who died about 20,000 years ago and was buried beneath a pile of rocks may provide scientists with the oldest human skeleton found in the Western Hemisphere.”
Childers was aware of the race to find the hemisphere’s earliest human inhabitant. From 1959 until today, the oldest official human remains still belong to the Arlington Springs Man, whose 13,000 year old skeleton was discovered on the northern end of California’s Santa Rosa Island. Since then, thousands of stone tools have been found and determined by the use of relative dating methods to be far older than 13,000 years. But the conservatively-minded archaeological community favors the accuracy of direct methods like the radiocarbon dating of bones, and questions the accuracy of relative or indirect methods, like stratigraphy — analysis according to the surrounding geologic strata — or the testing of caliche. So genuine skeletons like the ones discovered by Morlin Childers and others are the gold standard — if the bones can be carbon-dated.
Childers’ Yuha Man discovery would have pushed humanity’s arrival in the California desert back from 13,000 to 21,500 years, and would have challenged long-held beliefs about human migration into North America. Perhaps not surprisingly, the claim was not widely accepted by the archaeological community. A subsequent BLM publication noted two previous discoveries that had been debunked: “A bone from a woman found in the La Brea tar pits that was initially believed to be 23,000 years old was later determined to be 10,250 years old. And in Peru, the remains of a mummified man that were initially thought to be 17,500 years old were later determined to be just 500 years old.”
The controversy attracted the attention of dozens of other scientists; they wanted to run additional tests on the remains. But before that could happen, the Yuha Man’s skeleton mysteriously vanished. Since the Yuha Man’s remains had been excavated from land that was managed by the BLM, the FBI got involved. A newspaper reported that the federal agents conducted interviews, but ultimately the investigation came to a dead end. Hard facts were hard to come by, but it was established that the remains had been secured in a locked storage room at the Imperial Valley College, and that only four people had keys to the room.
The Yuha Man’s skull, after discovery but before disappearance.
The actual age of Yuha Man might thus have remained a scientific mystery, had not the fickle finger of fate intervened. Or at least, the fractured finger of fate: prior to his disappearance, Yuha Man had lost a finger, and the thieves had left it behind. And while it never pointed out the guilty parties, that detached digit did point to the truth about its original owner: carbon dating placed it at 5000 years old, not 21,500.
Childers was undeterred by the revelation. A couple years after Yuha Man’s disappearance, he was exploring a wash near the Mexican border when he stopped to gaze up at a 60-foot cliff that had been carved by floodwaters just a day or two before. Hurricane Kathleen had pummeled eastern San Diego County, dropping nine inches of rain on Mount Laguna. As the floodwaters rushed down the mountain toward the Salton Sea, they had picked up and carried away thousands of years of sediment from the wash Childers was exploring, and as he peered at the side of the cliff, he noticed a Native artifact was embedded in it. The excavation that Childers and Herbert Minshal subsequently carried out in Pinto Wash recovered eighty Paleolithic stone tools. But the tools, being inorganic, had to be dated using relative methods that were known to be less precise. In their report about the discovery, Childers and Minshal said the artifacts they’d found were determined to be 50,000 years old. But once again, the archaeological community ignored their extraordinary findings.
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