Minnesota Woman
Minnesota Woman, also known as Pelican Rapids-Minnesota Woman (c. 5947–5931 BC), is the skeletal remains of a woman thought to be 8,000 years old. The bones were found near Pelican Rapids, Minnesota on June 16, 1931, during construction on U.S. Route 59. The bones were brought to Albert Jenks at the University of Minnesota, who identified them as the bones of a woman who was 15 or 16 years old, but who had never borne children. The woman had two artifacts—a dagger made from an elk's horn and a conch shell pendant. The conch shell came from a whelk species known as Sinistrofulgur perversum, which had previously only been known to exist in Florida. Discovery The road crew dug up the site without an investigation by archaeologists, so some of the exact details of the woman's death were hard to determine. The site indicated that the woman had not been ritually buried, and there was a thin layer of broken clam or mussel shells over the body. This led to the hypothesis that the woman had drowned, either by breaking through the ice or by falling off a boat, and that her body had been covered in mud at the