Investigators looking for Nancy Guthrie stumbled onto human remains in the Arizona desert near her home… but the bones belong to someone who died roughly a thousand years ago, experts said.
A YouTuber discovered the remains on May 7 while conducting an amateur search for Guthrie less than five miles from her Tucson home.
What initially appeared to be a single exposed bone turned out to be an entire skeleton, buried in a riverbed in the Sonoran Desert.
Authorities determined the remains had no connection to Guthrie’s disappearance and called in University of Arizona anthropologist James T. Watson to assess the scene.
“Whether it is a thousand years old or 50 years old, these are human remains,” Watson told Fox News.
Watson said he was able to determine the remains were Native American based on ceramic artifacts found at the scene that are consistent with other known prehistoric archaeological dig sites in the area. He said the desert regularly yields human remains, from prehistoric burials to illegal immigrants who die trying to illegally sneak through the U.S.-Mexico border.
“There are literally probably hundreds of bodies that are discovered every year out in the desert,” he told Fox News. Powerful, dried riverbeds that sit for months and then flood violently during heavy rainfall regularly expose buried remains. Construction on previously untouched land does the same.
“There are a lot of places that an individual could get lost or pass away — or hide a body,” Watson explained. “As people start to poke into some of these crevices that don’t normally get poked into across the desert, they’re likely to find more individuals.”
Guthrie is believed to have been abducted from her home in Tucson’s Catalina Foothills neighborhood in early February. She has been missing for more than 100 days old and is presumed dead.