No New Pieces Found in Bone Puzzle

The chunks of earth got curious looks Friday as they were wheeled through the clinic with flashing cameras in tow. Inside the sterile and pastel-colored CAT scan lab, a technician recorded the patient’s name in a computer: Arlington Springs Woman. Her age: 13,000 years old.

Scientists interested in the remains of an ancient woman who lived on the Channel Islands made certain Friday that two thigh bones are all they have to reconstruct a life lived at the end of the last major ice age.

With a doughnut-shaped machine normally used to X-ray humans for trauma, spinal injuries and cancer, staff members at Santa Barbara’s Sansum Medical Clinic scanned two blocks of compacted earth excavated 40 years ago from a gully on Santa Rosa Island. The blocks contain, a team of scientists believes, the oldest human remains ever found in North America.

As suspected by anthropologist John Johnson, the bony fragments peeking out of the chunks were a kneecap and a 15-centimeter section of thigh bone. By adding that piece to a second piece from the same femur, Johnson determined the ancient woman stood between 4 feet, 11 inches and 5 feet, 2 inches tall.

Johnson, the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History’s curator of anthropology, said, “Our goal was just to answer what else might be in these blocks of earth. We now know that it was all there when it was originally found.”

Forty years ago, archeologists discovered the remains in the Arlington Canyon area of Santa Rosa Island. They tested the bones but left them in their original dirt and encased them in plaster for future archeologists to examine.

In March, scientists announced radiocarbon dating had determined that leg pieces excavated from the clay blocks in 1993 are probably 13,000 years old--1,400 years older than previously thought.