An anthropologist isn’t surprised a YouTuber found a human bone near the house from which Nancy Guthrie, mother of Today’s Savannah Guthrie, disappeared on February 1. In fact, James T. Watson said hundreds of bodies turn up every year in the desert surrounding Tucson, Arizona.
Alec Wysopal was live-streaming on YouTube on May 7 when he came across a bone in a dry river bank a few miles from Nancy’s house, as The New York Times reports. He called 911, and authorities responded to the scene and determined the human remains were not related to the Nancy’s disappearance and would spur a “prehistoric anthropological investigation.”
Watson, curator of bioarchaelogy at the Arizona State Museum and an anthropology professor at the University of Arizona, said the bone dated back to between 650 and 1250 A.D., a period when the Hohokam people lived in the area, according to the Times.
And in a new interview with Fox News Digital, Watson said a skeleton and ceramic artifacts were unearthed where Wysopal found the bone. “All of that contextual evidence allowed me to be pretty sure that this individual was, in fact, Native American,” he said. “The ceramics really sort of drove home that point.”
The remains have been transferred to the Tohono O’odham tribe, descendants of the Hohokam people, per Fox News Digital.
And many more bodies will likely turn up in the area, Watson told the outlet. “The desert there is a pretty harsh environment, and obviously, it’s been settled for hundreds, thousands of years,” he said. “There’s a lot of places that an individual could get lost or pass away or hide a body. … As people start to poke into some of these crevices that don’t normally get poked into across the desert, they’re likely to find more individuals. … There are literally probably hundreds of bodies that are discovered every year out in the desert.”
Watson said Wysopal did the right thing by reporting the discovery to the authorities, and he urged others to treat remains with respect, saying, “Whether it is a thousand years old or 50 years old, these are human remains.”
