I was speaking with a recent college grad who has all the certainty of the young and credentialed.  He's pretty sure that everything we need to know about the wonders of life on Planet Earth is known.  For him, the only area in which new knowledge remains is technology.  I hope that, as the years go by, he develops a sense of wonder about the discoveries we still make as the Earth turns up hitherto unknown pieces of human history.  For example, in September 2021, in Minnesota's Renville County, kayakers came upon a human skull in the river, but not just any human skull.

Being good citizens, the kayakers handed the skull over to the sheriff's office.  You can imagine what they were thinking: maybe someone mourning the disappearance of a loved one will finally get closure.  Or maybe a murderer will be brought to justice.  Or maybe some unlikely hiker can finally get a proper burial.  Only the last possibility may prove to be true if you believe that an 8,000-year-old hiker still yearns (spiritually) for that proper burial.

Image: A skull by freepik.

I was not making a mistake when I typed "8,000."  Both the Midwest Medical Examiner's Office and the FBI's forensic anthropologist (assuming one still trusts the FBI about anything) have concluded that the skull belongs to a young adult male who may have suffered blunt force trauma to his skull, killing him, 8,000 years ago:

Officials used carbon-14 analysis and determined that the man was alive sometime between 5,500-6,000 BCE, nearly 8,000 years ago.

"Carbon-14 from the atmosphere via food is incorporated into bones while the bones are maturing. Through reviewing the Carbon-14, this individual would have had a heavy marine diet or a diet high in maize, pearl millet, or sorghum, which is outside the range of the American diet," the sheriff's office said.

Perhaps I should be more blasé about these things, but I think it's wondrous when the Earth tosses a treasure in our path and our technology allows us to recognize it for what it is.

Just as importantly, a discovery like this one is a reminder that those people whom we call "indigenous" because they were loosely spread out across the American continent when Europeans arrived were themselves colonizers.  After all, human history is the story of people either forcibly or gently and organically replacing each other in one geographic region or another.  This rather obvious fact matters today because of the endless virtue-signaling that is now the norm in leftist institutions as these institutions "remember" the Native Americans who occupied the land before the virtue signalers did:

Just once, I wish someone would stand up and shout, if you're feeling so guilty, give the land back.  And if you don't feel an obligation to give the land back, just keep quiet.  That's what you should always remember about the virtue-signalers — they never follow through.  Instead, they just want you to follow through.

See?  Find an interesting ancient skull; have equally interesting thoughts about modern political discourse.