UB biologist returns ‘Young Lady in Cave’ remains to Alaskan tribe

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Charlotte Lindqvist is used to handling ancient DNA.

An evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo, she’s extracted genetic information from the tooth of a Paleolithic-era polar bear and analyzed the bone of what’s thought to be among the oldest confirmed domestic dogs in the Americas.

Still, even that couldn’t fully prepare her for the responsibility she found herself tasked with this past summer: transporting 3,000-year-old human remains across the Alaskan panhandle to their final resting place. 

Lindqvist, PhD, professor of biological sciences in the UB College of Arts and Sciences, repatriated the individual now known as Tatóok yík yées sháawat (Young Lady in Cave) to her distant descendants, the Tlingit people of southeastern Alaska.

“As a biologist, you want to hold onto any ancient DNA samples in case you can possibly learn more from them in the future. However, these remains meant something to this community and returning them was the right thing to do,” Lindqvist says. “And I felt that it was very important to bring it there personally.”

The remains, a small fragment of a femur bone, were discovered in a cave near Alaska’s Wrangell Island during an expedition by the U.S. Forest Service and University of South Dakota in 2003. Initially believed to belong to a bear, Lindqvist’s team discovered in 2018 that the bone in fact belonged to a young woman with a genetic connection to Tlingit people and other Alaskan Native tribes along the coast. 

After leading a study on the discovery that was published last year in the journal iScience, Lindqvist made plans to return the remains to the Wrangell Cooperative Association (WCA), a federally recognized Alaskan tribe that includes Tlingit people.

Already heading to the region for a field trip with other UB researchers this past June, Lindqvist made a detour to Wrangell Island to deliver the remains personally, as well as hold a public presentation about the discovery. 

“It meant a lot to everyone here that Charlotte traveled to Wrangell to personally deliver the remains to the tribe,” says Gina Esposito, an archeologist with the U.S. Forest Service in Alaska who was involved in the 2003 cave excavation. “The collaboration and respect between the scientific community, the WCA, and the Forest Service stands out to me as one of the most successful aspects of this project.”

The relationship between the scientific community and Native American tribes has, historically, been fraught. Scientists have often failed to get informed permission to research Native remains and artifacts.

There have been efforts to improve this. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 requires institutions that receive federal funding to return Native American remains to descendants and culturally affiliated tribes, while the American Society of Human Genetics released guidance in 2020 on responsibly researching ancient human DNA. 

Following Lindqvist’s discovery that the bone fragment belonged to a human, WCA was asked for permission to further study the remains, as well as to name the individual. WCA Tribal Administrator Esther Ashton served as a co-author on the study and it was agreed that the study’s data will only be made available to the scientific community upon request and not used for commercial purposes.

“I think it was very important to have the Wrangell Cooperative Association part of this whole process,” Lindqvist says.

Lindqvist credits the pre-existing cooperation between the scientific community and the Tlingit people, which dates back to the discovery of 10,000-year-old human remains in On Your Knees Cave in 1996. That 12-year research project ended in reburial and a festival celebration attended by Native people and scientists. 

Esposito says she and her Forest Service colleagues, such as District Ranger Tory Houser, continue to nurture that relationship through attending tribal council meetings, working with Native youth and participating in joint field trips.

“I believe all these little interactions over decades have built trust and, for me, even friendships,” she says. “It’s a testament to all the people involved that the Young Lady in the Cave collaboration has been so rewarding and positive.”

Tatóok yík yées sháawat’s genetic connection to Tlingit people and other tribes along the coast corresponds with Native American oral tradition about their ancestors, Lindqvist notes.

“According to Tlingit oral stories, they've been there since time immemorial. Now, the genetics is confirming that they've indeed been there for a long time,” she says.

The research has also shed light on how humans spread across the Americas after traveling into the continent via the Bering land bridge. Also found in Tatóok yík yées sháawat’s coastal cave was a bone of a dog that lived approximately 10,000 years ago. Lindqvist’s analysis of the dog’s Siberian lineage supports the theory that the first humans — and their dogs — to migrate southward did so through an ice-free coastal route along Alaska’s Pacific border, rather than an ice-free in-land route through Canada. 

As for Tatóok yík yées sháawat, Lindqvist says it’s impossible to know much about her life or how she died. What's certain is that the cave she was found in was used by humans for thousands of years.

“Whether it was used as a burial site or actually some kind of living space, it’s hard to say,” she says. 

While her work has implications on human prehistory, Lindqvist’s main research focus — and the reason she analyzed the cave bones in the first place — is how Ice Age-induced climate change impacted southeastern Alaska’s ecosystem. The purpose of her field trip this past summer was to core lake sediments on Alaska’s Baranof Island. 

“The deeper you get into the lake, the further back you go in time,” Lindqvist says. “We're going to use the mud from those cores to get an idea of how the ecosystem responded to Ice Age climatic changes, hopefully going back to the last glacial maximum.”