New! Revealing the mystery of ‘Noah’: The amazing survival story of an ancient skeleton! (Video)

Scientists at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia are literally cleaning out the skeletons in their closets. The museum staff recently rediscovered a 6,500-year-old human skeleton that has been locked away in the basement for 85 years.

A 6,500-year-old skeleton was unearthed at the site of Ur in Iraq. Here, the skeleton was covered with wax in the field and lifted whole along with the surrounding earth.
Hidden away in a warehouse, the wooden box had no identifying numbers or catalog card. But a recent effort to digitize some of the museum’s old records yielded new information about the history of the mysterious box and the skeleton, nicknamed “Noah,” inside it.

The human remains inside the box were originally unearthed between 1929 and 1930 at the site of Ur in present-day Iraq by Sir Leonard Woolley and his team of archaeologists from the Penn and British Museums, according to records.

Woolley’s excavation is best known for uncovering the famous Mesopotamian “royal cemetery,” which included hundreds of tombs and 16 graves loaded with cultural artifacts. But the archaeologist and his team also discovered tombs that predated Ur’s royal cemetery by about 2,000 years.

A light plaster mix is placed over the covered skeleton, the 6,500-year-old human remains discovered at the Ur site in Iraq, to protect it during transport. Silt is already being cut away from beneath the skeleton to make room for the transport platform.
In a floodplain nearly 50 feet (15 meters) below the surface of the Ur site, the team found 48 tombs dating to the Ubaid period, roughly 5500 to 4000 B.C.E.

Although remains from this period were extremely rare even in 1929, Woolley decided to recover only one skeleton from the site. He covered the bones and the surrounding soil with wax, packed them up, and shipped them to London and then to Philadelphia.

The teeth of this 6,500-year-old skeleton are well preserved, as seen in this view of the upper body and skull.
One set of lists outlined where artifacts from the 1929-1930 excavations were headed; while half of the artifacts remained in Iraq, the rest were split between London and Philadelphia.

One of the lists said the Penn Museum would receive a clay tray from the excavation, as well as two skeletons.

But when William Hafford, the project manager responsible for digitizing the museum’s records, saw the list, he was baffled. One of the two skeletons on the list was nowhere to be found.

Further research into the museum’s database revealed that the unidentified skeleton had been recorded as “unaccounted for” in 1990. To get to the bottom of this mystery, Hafford began exploring the extensive records left by Woolley himself.

After locating additional information, including images of the missing skeleton, Hafford reached out to Janet Monge, curator of physical anthropology at the Penn Museum. But Monge, like Hafford, had never seen the skeleton before.

It was then that Monge remembered the mysterious box in the basement.

When Monge opened the box later that day, he said it was clear the human remains inside were the same ones packed and shipped by Woolley.

The skeleton, he said, likely belonged to a man, aged 50 or older, who would have been between 5 feet 8 inches (173 centimetres) and 5 feet 10 inches (178 cm) tall.

Researchers at the Penn Museum have nicknamed the rediscovered skeleton “Noah,” because he is believed to have lived after what archaeological data suggests was a massive flood at the original site of Ur.

New scientific techniques not yet available in Woolley’s time could help Penn Museum scientists determine much more about the period to which these ancient remains belonged, including diet, ancestral origins, trauma, stress and disease.