Starting in October, online sites of varying levels of legitimacy started posting stories about human remains found in Antarctica. Very old human remains. What is the body of an early 19th-century young Chilean woman doing in the Great White South?
Eye-catching AI images of perfectly preserved women suggested lost histories and forgotten worlds. But is there anything to it?
Illustration from Jules Verne’s ‘An Antarctic Mystery.’ The idea of finding human remains or man-made ruins in Antarctica has been a staple of fiction, pseudo-archaeology, and conspiracy theories for over a century.
Bones on the beach
In 1985, a real Chilean biologist named Daniel Torres Navarro was collecting marine debris on a beach at Cape Shirreff, on Livingston Island in the South Shetlands. There, half-buried in the pebbles of the rocky beach, he found an algae-covered chunk of human skull.
Navarro conducted a thorough search of the area but couldn’t find any other remains. He carefully collected the skull in several fragments and brought it to Santiago, where University of Chile anthropologist Claudio Paredes reconstructed the skull and performed an initial examination, dating it to about 175 years old.
Navarro took Paredes back to the find site during the 1987-88 field season, when Navarro found the diaphysis — the long, middle shaft — of a human femur. They were due to leave the very next day, so it wasn’t until 1993, when Navarro returned to the area again, this time to study fur seals, that he could search the site where he’d uncovered the leg bone. There he found what is, for now, the last of the remains –another long bone.
So there you have it: three pieces of bone and a whole lot of questions.
A barren-looking Cape Shirreff, where the skull was found on what is now called Yamana Beach. Photo: NOAA Photo Archive
Hello? Whose bones are these?
Paredes examined the cranium in a report to the Antarctic Institute of Chile. Based on the teeth and the ossification of sutures in the skull, which is considered the most reliable method for estimating age from remains, the person in question was between 18 and 25 years old.
It’s when we get to the sex and race determinations that things get a little tricky. Paredes determined that the owner of the skull had been female, based on eight physical characteristics. Of these, six fell in the range considered more common in females, one fell in the male range, and another was undetermined.
Skeletal remains can be used to determine sex with fairly high, though not perfect, accuracy. However, that rate falls without the pelvis, the most important marker. A 2023 review paper found experts only had a 76.6% accuracy rate in determining sex from the cranium alone. So while the skull indicates female traits, it could very well have belonged to a man.
The reconstructed skull, in residence at the Scientific Department of the Instituto Antártico Chileno, in Chile. Photo: Daniel Torres Navarro
The problem with skull measuring
The race determination is, well, a whole can of worms. Forensic anthropology is a field that has evolved significantly over the past 30 years since Paredes examined the skull. Scientific consensus increasingly rejects skull measurements as reliable indicators of racial background.
There are physical traits, even skeletal, that can hint at a person’s racial background. But using skull measurements to determine if a subject is “mongoloid,” as they did then (hint: we don’t use that word anymore) is closer to pseudoscientific Victorian-era eugenics than it is to modern, evidence-based forensic anthropology.
Even accepting skull measurements as legitimate, there is significant ambiguity in the ID of the skull. Of the 14 measurements that were standard at the time, Paredes was only able to take nine. Navarro himself admitted that post-mortem deformations “could have affected some cranial measurements” and that the high number of missing teeth “would hinder racial determination.”
With all of those caveats established, the researchers concluded that the cranium showed both “mongoloid” and “caucasoid” traits, which they believed indicated mixed descent. This, Navarro theorized, would match an early 19th-century Southern Chilean person who was, as many are in that region, descended from Indigenous people and white sailors.
In a later 1999 article on his find, Navarro says that there are plans to conduct DNA analysis on all three of the skeletal remains. If this analysis was ever performed, I have not been able to find it.
Men like Samuel George Morton were some of the founders of scientific racism. Morton was obsessed with measuring skulls and categorizing races from them. Photo: From Morton’s ‘Crania Americana’
Rewriting Antarctic history?
So, the find is real. The age is reliably a young person. The sex is likely, but not certainly, female. Of race, the less said, the better.
However, this find does not, as some recent articles claimed, “rewrite human history.” Even if we accept the racial and sexual identification of the remains, there are several ways they could have ended up on a beach in the South Shetlands.
First, it is possible that the remains were of someone who died at sea, and their body washed up on the island. One specific incident is relevant: On September 4, 1819, San Telmo, a 74-gun Spanish navy ship, sank in the Drake Passage. All hands — some 644 people — were presumed lost.
Not long after, Captain William Smith discovered the South Shetland Islands. But when he actually landed on a later visit, he found man-made wreckage already there — the battered remains of the San Telmo. If wooden boards from the ship could wash up on the beach, why not a body?
Then, of course, there were sealers. Not long after Smith named the South Shetlands, sealers arrived to exterminate the local pinnipeds. From 1820 to 1824, some 60-75 British sealers were living and hunting on Cape Shirreff. They left behind ruined huts, glass bottles, harpoons, carved figures, and broken stoves. But, several of the new articles are quick to point out, there weren’t female sealers! How could a woman’s remains have ended up there?
The ‘San Telmo’ sank in 1819, sending 644 sailors to a watery grave — or, perhaps, a lonely beach. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
A woman in a sealer camp
In fact, it is neither impossible nor even unlikely that a young Chilean woman might find herself aboard a sealer on the wrong side of the Drake Passage.
While uncommon, it was not unheard of for a married woman to join her husband at sea in the 19th century. Whaling ships, for example, might carry the captain’s wife, and some, like Mary Brewster and Mary Chipman Lawrence, even left detailed diaries of their lives at sea on these vessels.
Indigenous women, in particular, might find themselves at sea for less savory reasons. In the South Pacific whaling trade off Southern Australia, European sailors would bring, voluntarily or no, Aboriginal women with them as both “wives” and workers. In 1819, a passing ship reported seeing European sealers go ashore on the mainland and seize aboriginal women, bringing them back to their sealing camp on Kangaroo Island.
A missionary in Tierra del Fuego reported a similar practice in 1889: “The sealers think nothing of kidnapping a Fuegian woman, [and] imprisoning her on board for the whole sealing season.”
It’s a grim fate to contemplate, but not an unlikely one. It’s also possible that she went sealing disguised as a man. This practice isn’t just a fictional trope, but a reality born out in historical records. A study on women in 19th-century whaling found four cases of women masquerading as men, and those were only the ones who were found out.
There was intense sealing activity on the South Shetland islands in the 19th century. Photo: Ximena Senatore-Connolly, ‘Antarctic Historical Sealing and Material Culture’.
Dangerous territory
Navarro found the skull in 1985. Most of the papers on it came out in the 1990s. Why is it showing up on a rash of online sites now? I don’t know for certain, but I know that the current interest spike started in July, on the Spanish-speaking internet.
The skull might be a curiosity or conspiracy-starter here, but for Chile, it may be more significant. Chile is one of the nations that signed the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. The treaty formally froze all territorial claims and theoretically prevents any future ones. But proof of early exploration or even indigenous settlement would be a significant bulwark to Chile’s existing claim. Countries like Russia, the United States, and Brazil have asserted their right to make future claims. Those with existing slices of the pie are anxious to shore up their perceived legitimacy.
About two months after Spanish sites revived the Antarctic skull story, it crossed over, slightly garbled, onto the English web. The English articles dialed up cultural depictions of Antarctica as a place of myth. Since its discovery, it has featured in the works of early science fiction authors like Jules Verne, and the horrors of Edgar Allen Poe and HP Lovecraft. That haunting mystique continues today as alien/Nazi/flat earth conspiracies in the scarier corners of our culture.
So it’s with all of this in mind that I urge skeptical caution when approaching stories like this. Don’t get me wrong, the remains are a cool find. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
