Study: NO Evidence That Donner Family Resorted To Cannibalism

[matcom]

<snip>

RENO -- There is no physical evidence that the family that gave the Donner Party its name had anything to do with the cannibalism that they have been associated with for a century and a half, two scientists said yesterday.

Cannibalism has been documented at the Sierra Nevada site where most of the Donner Party's 81 members were trapped during the brutal winter of 1846-47, but 21 people, including all the members of the George and Jacob Donner families, were reported to have been stuck 6 miles away because a broken axle had delayed them.

No cooked human bones were found among the thousands of fragments of animal bones at that Alder Creek site, suggesting Donner family members did not resort to cannibalism, the archeologists said at a conference of the Society for Historical Archaeology in Sacramento.

''The Donner family ended up getting the stigma basically because of the name," said Julie Schablitsky, one of the authors. ''But of all the people, they were probably the least deserving of it."

The sawed and chopped animal bone fragments, recovered during an archeological dig over the past three years, do suggest ''extreme desperation and starvation," the study said. One of the animals eaten was a pet dog, presumably ''Uno," mentioned in some of the children's writings.

''The Donner Party's experience was bad, but it wasn't as bad as everybody's been told," said Schablitsky, an historical archeologist at the University of Oregon's Museum of Natural and Cultural History.

The findings by Schablitsky and Kelly Dixon, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Montana, do not necessarily disprove the accounts of cannibalism told by rescuers and survivors stranded in a winter storm in mountains southwest of Reno and north of Truckee, Calif.

If cannibalism did occur at the Alder Creek site, bones were not burned or boiled with the flesh, the authors said. Such bones endure in the ground a very long time; unburned or unboiled bones turn to dust relatively quickly.

''We thought for sure, based on all the accounts in the diaries and the relief journals and people's memories, that among the other animal bones, we'd definitely find other human remains" at Alder Creek, Schablitsky said in a phone interview. ''So the most significant find is really what we didn't find."

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/01/13/study_sees_no_evidence_that_the_donner_family_resorted_to_cannibalism?mode=PF

[underpants]

1. They died waiting for their steak at Chili's

:bounce:

[proud2BlibKansan]

2. My dad was a History teacher

and he used to say this is one of those stories you never see in a History book. It had been passed down by word of mouth, like an urban folk tale.