Rediscover the 6,500-year-old remains

A fairly complete 6,500 year old skeleton set found 85 years ago has been forgotten in the museum. When it was time to clean up the museum, people discovered it by chance.

Photo: Penn Museum

In 1929 or 1930, Sir Leonard Woodley, an archaeologist, led the team from the Penn Museum and the British Museum excavated Mesopotamia, in the Ur region, southern Iraq. Here they discovered 48 ancient Ubaid era tombs of the ancient Near East.

Woodley and his colleagues found a set of bones that were considered extremely rare because they date to 6,500 years. They wrapped the skeleton with wax and moved to London (England) for inspection, and the final destination for preservation was Philadelphia (USA). Here, the skeleton fell into oblivion, people did not even bother to record, the skeleton remained silent in a small room that the museum staff did not seem to look at.

By 2012, from the effort to digitize records of excavations in Ur, it was learned that the Penn Museum received two skeletons from Woodley, in which a skeleton dating back 2,000 years and the second bone to 6,500 years old.

UPI news agency said Dr. William Hafford, who is in charge of digitizing documents, named the 6,500-year-old skeleton Noah. The reason is that this skeleton is found in areas that are frequently flooded. The name Noah is derived from the story of the cataclysm in the Bible. But the skeleton is much older than the Bible.