Update on Natchez Man

Abstract

On October 6, 1846, M. W. Dickeson, a physician from Natchez, Mississippi, exhibited a collection of specimens of mastodon and sloth fossil bones that he had found in 1845 at the base of a bayou cut through the loess above the Mississippi River near his home. He had brought them to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia to which he donated them. Among the specimens was a fragment of human pelvis, implicitly also fossil, from a deposit of blue clay 61 cm below the animal fossils, which included mylodon (now Glossotherium harlani) and Megalonyx jeffersoni. After 144 years of controversy over the antiquity of “Natchez Man,” a sample of the pelvis has been dated by accelerator mass spectrometry to 5580 ± 80 B.P.