The oldest human remains in Antarctica are more than 200 years old. The problem is that it doesn’t make any sense.

In 1912, the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott He arrived at the South Pole convinced that he would be the first to set foot on it. There he found an unexpected surprise: a tent with the Norwegian flag and a letter from Roald Amundsen They showed that someone had been more than a month ahead of him. The history of polar exploration is full of “firsts” that, with the passage of time, have ended up being revised.

The remains that should not be there. Antarctica has never had a permanent population. When humans arrived on its shores, it was already a continent too cold and isolated to be inhabited without modern technology.

That is why it is so disconcerting that the oldest human remains found there belong to a deceased woman. between 1819 and 1825just when the first documented explorations of the continent were just beginning.

A half-buried skull. The discovery occurred in 1985, when the Chilean biologist Daniel Torres Navarro found a skull partially buried on Yámana beach, Cape Shirreff.

Years later they appeared other scattered bonesincluding a femur, which probably belonged to the same person. Analysis suggests that she was a young woman, possibly of Chilean origin, whose death occurred sometime between 1819 and 1825.

The chronology turns the discovery into a puzzle. The problem is not only who that woman was, but when she died. The first confirmed observation of Antarctica is usually attributed to the Russian expedition of Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen in 1820.

If the dating of the remains is correct, the woman lived exactly during the period in which the first expeditions were just beginning to approach the continent. This temporal coincidence makes it extremely difficult to explain how he ended up in one of the most inhospitable regions on the planet.

The hypotheses and the mystery. Researchers are considering several possibilities. The first suggests that he could be part of a group of seal hunters from the 19th century who abandoned it after his death. The second proposes that she died on board a ship, was buried at sea (as was common then) and that the currents, together with scavenging birds, They would later disperse their remains to the beach where they were found.

None of these explanations have been proven and, four decades after the discovery, new remains have still not appeared that would allow us to reconstruct what happened.

The alternative. While that enigma remains open, another study invites us to review another of the great certainties about the continent. Researchers at the University of Otago maintain that Polynesian sailors, and in particular the explorer Hui Te Rangiorathey were able to reach the Antarctic waters already in the 7th century.

The hypothesis is supported by Maori oral traditions which describe a frozen ocean, large masses of ice and a dark, fog-covered landscape, descriptions that some specialists consider compatible with the Southern Ocean.

Between legends and archaeological evidence. The authors of the study make it clear that these traditions do not constitute a definitive demonstration that the Maori ever contemplated Antarctica. However, they do question the idea that the history of the continent began exclusively with European expeditions of the 19th century and claim the role of indigenous traditions in the reconstruction of the great oceanic explorations.

If this interpretation ends up being confirmed, the first human contact with the southern tip of the planet would be more than a thousand years ago to what usually appears in history books.

Two investigations that force us to look with different eyes. The two studies They speak of very different times, but they converge on the same conclusion: we still know surprisingly little about the first human contacts with the most isolated continent on Earth. One suggests that Polynesian navigators could have arrived much earlier than previously believed. The other remembers that the oldest human remains found there belong to a woman whose presence remains extraordinarily difficult to explain.

Two centuries after his death, the biggest mystery is not who he was, but why he appeared on the only continent where, quite simply, no one expected to find it.

Image | US Embassy, Bourrichon

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