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<ul class="summary-list"><li>Passersby discovered <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/international/news/body-found-in-barrel-at-lake-mead-could-be-first-of-many-grim-discoveries-due-to-extreme-drought-and-receding-water-levels/amp_articleshow/91301622.cms">human remains</a>, likely from the 70s or 80s, in a rusty barrel near Lake Mead's shoreline on Sunday.</li><li>Forensic anthropologists say they expect to recover more human remains due to receding water and ice.</li></ul><p>A changing climate is revealing decades-old items once submerged in lakes or buried in glaciers, including human remains. For forensic anthropologists, who are tasked with retrieving them, a warming world may mean more discoveries unveiled by receding water and ice. It also means recovering victims of <keyword id="11896311" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="climate-change" source="Orion">climate change</keyword>.</p><p>On Sunday afternoon, boaters made a grim discovery along the shoreline of Nevada's Lake Mead: <a href="https://www.insider.com/body-barrel-lake-mead-homicide-victim-70s-or-80s-police-2022-5">human remains</a> inside a rusty barrel. More bodies could turn up, given that water levels have receded to historic lows amid a climate change-fueled <keyword id="12004858" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="drought" source="Orion">drought</keyword>, according to Jennifer Byrnes, a forensic anthropologist that consults with the Clark County coroner's office. "I would expect human remains of missing persons will probably be revealed over time, as the water level continues to recede," Byrnes told Insider. </p><p><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/us-declares-first-colorado-river-shortage-arizona-nevada-water-cuts-2021-8">Lake Mead</a> is one of the country's largest water reservoirs, providing water to some 25 million people. But water levels at Lake Mead have plunged <a href="https://www.snwa.com/water-resources/drought-and-shortage/index.html">150 feet since 2000</a>. According to the Southern Nevada Water Authority, the water level dropped to <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/27/us/water-intake-exposed-lake-mead-drought-climate/index.html">1,055 feet above sea level</a> last week, the lowest level since 1937.</p><div type="image" title="Aerial view of Lake Mead at 30% capacity on January 11, 2022." height="3803" width="5070" msid="91357278" hostid="261"></div><p><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/las-vegas-hilton-strip-travel-resorts-world-43-billion-resorts-world-2021-7">Las Vegas</a> <keyword id="11894211" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="police" source="Orion">police</keyword> said on Tuesday they believed the skeletal remains were of a homicide victim who died of a gunshot wound, the <a href="https://www.reviewjournal.com/crime/homicides/police-believe-man-found-in-barrel-at-lake-mead-died-from-gunshot-wound-2570915/">Las Vegas Review-Journal</a> reported. Though the victim's identity is still unknown, they were wearing clothes and shoes that dated back to the 1970s. "The barrel was likely dropped hundreds of yards off the shore back then," Lieutenant Ray Spencer from the Las Vegas police told <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/02/us/lake-mead-body-barrel-water-level-drought-climate/index.html">CNN</a>, adding, "That area is now considered the shoreline." According to CBS Las Vegas affiliate <a href="https://www.8newsnow.com/i-team/i-team-body-found-in-barrel-in-lake-mead-may-date-back-to-1980s-more-likely-to-appear-as-water-recedes-las-vegas-police-say/">KLAS-TV</a>, the location would have been dozens of feet underwater by the 1980s. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.</p><p>This is not the first time human remains have emerged due to changing climate, Eric Bartelink, a forensic anthropologist at California State University's Chico Human Identification Lab, told Insider. In 2016, his team <a href="https://www.kcra.com/article/skeletal-remains-folsom-lake-id-1996-drowning-victim/29464803">recovered remains</a> in Folsom Lake, near Sacramento, California. "The lake had receded so much that it was almost what would've been the middle of the lake," Bartelink told Insider. Bartelink and his team were ultimately able to identify the skeletal remains as a man from Russia who had gone missing in the 1990s. </p><p>"For us, it's really just potentially more opportunities to find missing persons and more likelihood that certain cases are going to be discovered," he said, adding, "It's just going to reveal more things that were in water that you normally wouldn't have access to very easily."</p><p>Byrnes told Insider that <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/antarctica-thwaites-glacier-ice-shelf-will-shatter-scientists-say-2021-12">melting glaciers</a> due to warmer average global temperatures are also unveiling previously lost relics and remains. She pointed to work done in the last decade by Hawaii-based <a href="https://www.dpaa.mil/">Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command</a> to <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/military-identifies-17-killed-in-1952-alaska-crash/">recover the remains of 52 service members</a> who died when their military transport plane crashed into an Alaska mountain in 1952.</p><p>"As the glacier melts and the glacier moves, more material comes up to the surface," Gregory Berg, the forensic anthropologist who led the team that examined the remains that emerged from the retreating glaciers, told <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-glacier-plane/as-glacier-melts-secrets-of-lost-military-plane-revealed-idUKBRE9690EK20130710">reporters at a news briefing in 2013</a>.</p><h2><strong>On the front lines of California's <keyword id="11898861" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="wildfires" source="Orion">wildfires</keyword></strong></h2><p>But rising temperatures, intensifying droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, and other extreme weather events can mean additional fatalities, and ultimately more calls to forensic anthropologists to recover remains under hazardous conditions.</p><p>Bartelink's team was responsible for recovering wildfire victims from blazes like the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/california-camp-fire-death-toll-most-destructive-in-history-2018-11">2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California,</a> and the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/30/california-wildfires-north-complex-record">Bear Fire in 2020</a> — really, victims of climate change. "This is sort of a newer challenge for us," Bartelink said, adding, "Climate change is exacerbating fire conditions and causing wildfires of unprecedented proportions in the state of California."</p><p>He estimates they've recovered more than 120 victims after these massive wildfires. Once the remains were removed from the smoke-filled site, his team examined and identified them. That meant witnessing considerable loss, Bartelink explained, but there were also moments of hope, like when his team found survivors in homes that weren't damaged by the fire.</p><div type="image" title="7A classic car destroyed by the Camp Fire in the town of Paradise, California, on November 27, 2018." height="3332" width="4443" msid="91357279" hostid="261"></div><p>Ancestral remains in Hawaii, which are traditionally <a href="https://www.civilbeat.org/2021/12/a-community-tries-to-save-hawaiian-burials-with-sandbags-as-sea-levels-rise/">buried along the shore,</a> are under threat from rising sea levels and beach erosion, Byrnes told Insider. "Encroaching seas are eroding those burials out and human remains are going to continue to be exposed," she said. In that way, washed-away shorelines are threatening sacred and culturally significant sites.</p><p>Beyond climate change's effect on casework, there are personal challenges to grapple with. Forensic anthropologists in the field are contending with the logistics of a warmer world. In Nevada, where Byrnes works, work sites tend to be hot: "That puts a mental stress on you to make sure you're taking care of yourself while you're trying to go through the process of documenting a site."</p>

Body found in a barrel at Lake Mead is the tip of the iceberg. Forensic anthropologists are now recovering human remains following droughts, sea-level rise, and wildfires.

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Archaeologists have long debated when and how the first people made it to North America from Asia.</li><li>Researchers previously thought early humans crossed the Bering land bridge from Siberia to Canada 13,000 years ago.</li><li>But artifacts discovered in a Mexican cave shift the timeline, revealing people may have been in North America 30,000 years ago.</li><li>The land bridge was impassable at that time, so the research suggests the first Americans arrived by sea.</li></ul><p>New evidence suggests people have been living in North America twice as long as archaeologists previously thought.</p><p>Stone tools and artifacts discovered in a remote cave in Zacatecas, Mexico, offer evidence that humans were on the continent as far back as 32,000 years ago, during the last ice age.</p><p>That upends the idea that the first people arrived in North America between 18,000 and 13,000 years ago after continent-hopping from modern-day Siberia via the Bering land bridge. The new finding, described in <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2509-0">a study</a> in the journal Nature on Wednesday, pushes that timeline back at least 15,000 years. It also shatters our previous understanding of how humans arrived in the North America: Since the land bridge was blocked during the last ice age and only opened after the ice started to recede, the new timeline means early people likely made their way on the ocean.</p><p>"We have enough evidence to challenge the existing paradigm," Ciprian Ardelean, the lead author of the new study, told Business Insider.</p><p><div type="image" title="archaeology cave north america" height="683" width="911" msid="77112054" hostid="261"></div></p><h2>A sheltered cave high in the mountains</h2><p>The 200-foot-wide cave in which Ardelean's team found the ancient tools, called Chiquihuite Cave, is nearly 9,000 feet up in the Astirello mountains. Locals in the area first guided him to the site in 2012, and there he found stone tools and traces of ash — evidence of early humans.</p><p>Ardelean returned with a team in 2016 and 2017 for further excavations, which yielded nearly 2,000 artifacts. They'd been buried 9 feet deep in the cave walls and floor. </p><p><div type="image" title="archaeology cave north america" height="1365" width="1820" msid="77112060" hostid="261"></div></p><p>The age of those artifacts suggests early people occupied Chiquihuite Cave on and off over 17,000 years — a period from about 30,000 to 13,000 years ago. Ardelean said it's likely humans used the site as a recurring shelter: a pit stop during seasonal migrations crisscrossing the continent.</p><p>The model this discovery challenges — that the first humans arrived in North America after crossing over land from Siberia — has been around since the 1930s. This line of thought suggests that humans slowly traversed southward, leaving behind distinct, grooved spear tips that became known as Clovis points.</p><p>It's known as the "Clovis-first" model of <keyword id="6360337" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="archaeology">archaeology</keyword>.</p><p><div type="image" title="Clovis points" height="565" width="1316" msid="77112066" hostid="261"></div></p><p>But starting in the mid-1970s, researchers began uncovering sites dating back more than 13,000 years. Those discoveries multiplied in subsequent decades. Scientists found fossilized human poop that's <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/320/5877/786.abstract">about 14,000 years old</a> in an Oregon cave. Artifacts from <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0141923">a settlement in southern Chile</a> were dated to be between 14,500 and 19,000 years old. A horse jaw bone that bore human markings suggested humans occupied the Bluefish Caves of Yukon, Canada <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0169486">24,000 years ago</a>.</p><p>But none of these discoveries pushed the timeline as far back as Ardelean's study.</p><p><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2491-6">A second paper</a> published Wednesday throws even more cold water on the "Clovis-first" model. For that research, two archaeologists looked at artifacts and traces of human occupation from 42 sites across North America. By dating those findings, the researchers modeled how and when people dispersed across the continent. They concluded that humans were "probably present before, during, and immediately after the Last Glacial Maximum" — that's the peak of the last ice age, which occurred between 26,500 and 19,000 years ago.</p><p>"As these older-than-Clovis sites increased in number, most archaeologists came to reject the Clovis-first model," Ruth Gruhn, an archaeologist who was not involved in the study, told Business Insider via email. "These two papers in Nature will finally put an end to it."</p><p><div type="image" title="archaeology stone tool north america" height="2021" width="2695" msid="77112068" hostid="261"></div></p><p>She added, "the evidence now indicates that people have been in the western hemisphere at least twice as long as archaeologists and geneticists believed."</p><h2>The first people in the Americas didn't cross the Bering Land Bridge</h2><p>If humans were on the continent before or during the peak of the last ice age, they could not have come via the Bering Land Bridge, since it would have been partially submerged or blocked by impenetrable ice sheets.</p><p>"Just because the bridge is considered a standard entry doesn't mean it's the only one," Ardelean said, adding, "the panorama of human arrivals during the Last Glacial Maximum is much more complex than we thought."</p><p><div type="image" title="bering land bridge" height="385" width="569" msid="77112073" hostid="261"></div></p><p>Lorena Becerra-Valdivia, an archaeological scientist at the Universities of Oxford and New South Wales and the lead author of the second paper, told Business Insider that "the new findings suggest that humans likely took a coastal route." </p><p>That means they were probably seafarers who <a href="https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/most-archaeologists-think-first-americans-arrived-boat-now-they-re-beginning-prove-it">arrived by boat</a>, possibly from modern-day Russia or Japan. Then they expanded south by sailing down the Pacific Coast. </p><h2>A migratory people who hunted terrestrial animals to extinction</h2><p>Regardless of early humans' route to North America, both Ardelean and Becerra-Valdivia think they were anatomically modern humans.</p><p>"Neanderthals had already disappeared from the fossil record by the time Chiquihuite Cave was occupied," Becerra-Valdivia said.</p><p>The archaeologists' own experience in the cave suggests its sheltered location helped these early hunter-gatherers survive during the ice age. Ardelean said summers in the area were too wet to do field work, so they conducted research in the winter. Outside, he said, temperatures would be below freezing temperatures and snow would fall.</p><p>"But the cave itself is well insulated, so no matter what happens outside, you could be inside in just your T-shirt. That speaks of the cave's potential as a shelter," he said.</p><p>About 14,000 years ago, when the climate started to warm further, early humans were finally able to thrive and expand across the Americas. They were likely fearsome predators, Becerra-Valdivia said, hunting land mammals like horses, camels, and mammoths to extinction.</p><p><div type="image" title="An artist’s reconstruction, based on recently discovered footprints, of prehistoric humans in present-day New Mexico hunting a giant ground sloth." height="575" width="1023" msid="77112075" hostid="261"></div></p><p>"This expansion likely had a major role in the dramatic decline of megafauna in the region," she said.</p><p><a href="http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/3/eaau4546">Some research</a> suggests early humans in South America may have even <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/giant-sloths-hunted-by-humans-bones-2019-3">butchered giant ground sloths</a>.</p>

Humans arrived in North America at least 15,000 years earlier than we thought, discoveries show — which suggests they came by boat

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Body found in a barrel at Lake Mead is the tip of the iceberg. Forensic anthropologists are now recovering human remains following droughts, sea-level rise, and wildfires.

Paola Rosa-Aquino

Humans arrived in North America at least 15,000 years earlier than we thought, discoveries show — which suggests they came by boat

Aylin Woodward

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