Old Bones Might Mean Big Bucks : Mexican Town Dreams of Fortune in Its Fossil Find

Some towns strike gold and build magnificent churches with glittering altars and tall spires.

Some towns strike silver and adorn their municipal palaces with heavy French furniture and oversize portraits of civic heroes responsible for revolutions or paved streets.

San Salvador Atenco struck bone. Sometimes you just have to make do.

San Salvador Atenco is a farming town that lies just beyond the northeast lip of Mexico City on Highway 132 to Texcoco. Take a right at the Atenco Hotel Inn. Everyone knows where it is.

The name San Salvador was tacked on by Spanish conquistadores who visited, sacked and burned the flourishing village 450 years ago. Until then the settlement was simply called Atenco, which in the language of the Aztecs who populated the area, means “waterfront.” A large lake once abutted the town, and an Aztec used Atenco as his personal harbor, history records. Since then, the lake has shrunk to practically nothing--and so have the fortunes of San Salvador Atenco.

But on Jan. 12, a discovery was made that local residents hope, pray and insist will reverse the town’s long slide. On that day, Marco Antonio Ramirez, while digging a new cesspool in his back yard, came across the bones of two prehistoric mammals, probably a mammoth and an extinct species of camel.

Among the identifiable pieces are a giant half jawbone with intact molar, remnants of an animal’s skull, several vertebrae, some limbs, a smashed hip bone and assorted broken ribs.

That might not seem like much on which to forecast millennial change; this is, after all, the third discovery of such bones in Mexico during the last two months. And for potential profit, the find hardly matches the historical discovery of silver at Taxco, or gold at El Oro or oil at Tampico. Nonetheless, residents of Atenco consider it a godsend.

“We think, maybe, well, that the bones can help move the town forward, that we can progress,” said Ramirez, the discoverer, shyly shuffling his feet in the manner of country folk ill at ease with strangers.

“Right!” chimed Victor Hernandez, the town council secretary and political adviser to the mayor. He was not at all disturbed by a visit from a reporter.

Tourist Lure

“We foresee getting tourists who go to the (Aztec) pyramids to also stop here and see the bones. We will build a museum. And a market where we can sell our crafts,” he explained.

The hopes that Atenco residents and officials invest in the bones reflect a desperate search for a way out of economic stagnation. As Mexico enters its sixth straight year of recession, gray old bones and giant molars seem as good a bet as anything to promote economic advancement. Unfortunately for Atenco, paleontologists are cautioning that whatever happens to the bones, important economic benefits are unlikely to flow from the discovery.

No matter--the citizens of San Salvador Atenco are clinging to their hopes. The townspeople have refused to give up the remains of the animals to big-city scientists until they get assurances that the bones will be pieced back together and properly housed for display in Atenco. Potential benefits from the discovery of other such relics in nearby towns came to nothing. The fossils were sent away to cities that already had major tourist attractions and museums, people in Atenco point out.

Bones in Dining Room

Until their fate is settled, the bones of Atenco are being kept on the dining room table inside the Ramirez’s cinder-block home.

“Either the scientists agree to fully excavate and then put the bones on exhibition here, or we should just cover up the hole and go about our business,” said Jose Guadalupe Rodriguez, a retired municipal worker.

Atenco, population 18,000, is a collection of not very prosperous villages. All but a few of its streets are dirt. Sewage flows in open gutters. The main library is in ruins, and old churches are cracked, while new ones are only half finished. The town’s first and only movie theater opened just last year.

Atenco’s youth customarily run off to Mexico City or Texcoco looking for jobs. Even the official village chronicler, who is supposed to record daily events in Atenco for posterity, lives in the capital.

Atenco has missed out on local bonanzas that had helped to improve the lives and livelihoods, at least marginally, of neighboring towns. In San Martin de Las Piramides, for example, pre-Aztec pyramids were discovered near the village. Now, even during the dry season, when the cornfields lie fallow and the wind whips up dust everywhere, idle farmers in San Martin can go and sell onyx bookends or serapes to a steady parade of tourists.

Rival Town

Or consider Chiconcuac, just across Highway 132. Chiconcuac was designated the regional market center--no one knows when or why--so that anyone from Atenco who wants to sell crafts or anything else on the street must walk over and rent stalls from the government there, contributing to the town’s already grander tax base. And, as if that weren’t enough, Chiconcuac is the site of the area’s largest textile mill. There is no such steady source of work in Atenco.

“In comparison to Atenco, Chiconcuac is paradise,” sighed Javier Garcia, a high school student in Atenco.

Residents of Atenco recall that eight years ago, Chiconcuac took possession of a set of prehistoric bones similar to the ones found by Ramirez--even though those remains were actually discovered within Atenco’s municipal limits. The farmer who discovered them lived close to Chiconcuac and mistakenly took them to the rival city hall.

But authorities in Chiconcuac, governing a town already blessed with some resources, did not see much benefit in the bones. The fossils are now stacked in the corner of the municipal library in Chiconcuac, uncared for and unappreciated, at least in the eyes of the citizens of Atenco.

“I can tell you one thing. Chiconcuac is not getting ahold of these bones,” said Hernandez, the Atenco town secretary. “They have had their chance.”

70-Year-Old Kidnaping

The bones of Atenco have interrupted the normally uneventful routine of the town and with it, the tranquillity of the Ramirez family. The last civic event to create such a stir occurred 70 years ago, when a Mexican revolutionary general rode into Atenco, swept a teen-age girl off the street and onto his horse and galloped away with his woman. A ballad, “La Valentina,” recalls the famous kidnaping.

The bones, about 30 in all, are laid out like a well-picked-over buffet on the Ramirez family’s table just in front of the refrigerator. Marco Antonio Ramirez lives among them all with his wife, three children and mother.

The children already have grown bored with the bones; when a reporter recently came to see the fossils, the tots sat watching cartoons on television without giving him or the bones a second look. Ramirez’s mother, Carolina Garcia Salas, is merely disgusted.

“Maybe they would make a good soup,” she said, looking up grudgingly from her knitting at the dingy clutter in her kitchen.

The bones attract visitors from as far away as Mexico City to the Ramirez home. Sometimes they peer uninvited through the back windows or pound on the metal side door until they are admitted to inspect the remains up close.

‘They Touch Everything’

“The people from Texcoco are the worst,” complained mother Garcia, returning intently to her knitting. “They won’t go away until they are let in. They touch everything. Some even sit and watch our television.”

There are more bones in the backyard, perhaps an entire skeleton or two underground. The would-be cesspool is covered by planks and plastic sheeting, but a peek into the hole reveals more remains embedded in the soft dirt of what was formerly a marshy lake-front.

The Ramirezes say they have nothing to gain by keeping the bones; they live on communal farm property, so the remains technically belong to the state. Even so, there are whispers in town that the bones are worth millions and that the Ramirezes will soon be rich.

Scientists in Mexico City say the bones probably date from 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, a time when mastodons, camels and horses roamed the then-pristine basin that is now Mexico City.

The animals, in their wanderings, frequently drank at the shores of lakes in the high valley. Sometimes they got stuck in the marsh, where they tired from futile attempts to free themselves and died. Thirty-five such impromptu burial spots have been found in the Mexico City basin alone.

Muted Official Response

The frequency of the findings helps explain the somewhat blase reaction of scholars to the Atenco discovery.

“You can hardly dig a hole around here without coming up with something old,” said Oscar Jorge Polaco, head of the fossil laboratory at Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History.

Polaco and his department have their own budget problems. Unless people in Atenco volunteer their labor to help the excavation, scholars will be unable to do further explorations of the hole behind Ramirez’s home. There are at least two other fossil discoveries ahead of Atenco’s on the institute’s list of priorities.

“Atenco will just have to get in line,” Polaco said.

In the meantime, Polaco is asking that the Ramirezes dig their cesspool elsewhere so as not to disturb fossils still in the ground. The Ramirezes are willing, although they note that putting the cesspool on the other side of the house will require longer pipes and thus more expense. And they also worry that they could come across more bones.

“What if this is some sort of animal cemetery?” asked Marco Antonio Ramirez. “We may never get our cesspool dug.”