EARLY AMERICAN

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 10, 13 January 1933, Page 8

EARLY AMERICAN

r AN AGE-OLD MURDER

IMPORTANT FIND

Twenty thousand years" ago, when late Neanderthal men were hunting in Assyria and Egypt was a.wilderness inhabited by equally' primitive savages, a 17ryear-old girl, who had something of :the Mongol and- something of the ape about, her, was killed and -perhaps -thrown into a glacial lake in what is now .Ottertail County, Minnesota. It was not the crime but the victim that held the attention of the National Academy of Sciences at tho last sessipn of its autumnal meriting, held at the University of Michigan. Fox- .this Minnesota girl is one of the most important anthropological discoveries ever made in America, so far as both her antiquity and her type are concerned, says the "New York Times." Dr. A. E. Jenks of the University of Minnesota told how a gang that was building a highway througn the dried silt of what had been the bottom of the lake had unearthed some of the girl's bones. He recovered more last summer. Near her was an antler dagger, but this was probably hers, and not the weapon with which she had been killed. The shell pendants that she wore on her heati. and around her neck, and the shell apron that hung from her waist also were .found, although not'intact. In her shoulder blade is a nick that mutely testifies to her murder. In his reconstruction of a 20,000-year-old crime Dr. Jenks advanced the theory that she was shot from the front through 'the right lung and probably through the heart by an arrow that left its mark on the shoulder blade. Or perhaps it was a s^ear that: killed her. : ' Was she in a canoe or on a raft or on the ice<when the end camo! Even the anthropologists at tho meeting more concerned with the girl us a specimen than as the subject of a belated coroner's inquest, could not help wondering. With much of this ancient skeleton before him Dr. Jenks has been able to make a study which shows tliat Nature was experimenting with men anfl probably forgetting them while ice still covered most of America. Those who listened to him found no difficulty in clothing the girl's bones with imaginary living flesh. "She was different from the squaws of to-day. The Mongolian in her was more apparent. Her flat nose, her rounded nostrils suggested those of an ape Her largo teeth did not add to her bcautv They had been.inherited from a huma'ri type more primitive than herself.