Glacial Minnesota Woman: A Glimpse into the Past
Eight thousand years ago, a teenage girl steps onto the lake ice unaware of the growing network of spiderweb cracks growing under her feet. A sickening crack and she is gone. People go missing every day, glaciers melt and make lakes, lakes dry up and eventually, the groundwork is laid for a new tomorrow. Most residents of Minnestoa are comparative newcomers to the United States. Immigration to Minnesota in the 1850s caused the nation’s largest population boom, an increase of 2,831 percent! Though Minnesota became a state in 1856 there is one resident who has been here significantly longer. In 1931 a road construction crew working on U.S. Route 59 near Pelican Rapids, Minn. made an interesting archeological discovery. While excavating a varved deposit, silts in horizontal layers formed at the bottom of glacial lakes, a human skull was found at a depth of nine feet. More digging revealed a nearly complete skeleton. Finding human remains on road construction may seem unusual, but unfortunately this wasn’t the case in 1931. Harry Siggerud, the last living person from the crew, was interviewed in the 1970s, where he said finding skeletons of First Nations peoples was commonplace, five or six being found on this site. Siggerud noted that this skull was visibly different, saying “but these bones..., were much larger, the bones themselves, and the head, was much different. The head was longer and, I’d say, more shaped like an ape...long, teeth and the body structure, was short and heavier bones, all the way around.”
