Basket Weaver Flappers Bobbed Their Locks But Used Them to Make Rope--Private Life of Early Arizonian Revealed

If any morbid undergraduate has any curious desire to examine the mummies of eight members of the oldest, least known Indians of pre-historic times, he may do so at leisure in the Peabody Museum where the venerable perserved corpses of antiquity are recovering from the ordeal of a strenuous autopsy to which they were subjected recently by Dr. G. E. Wilson, histology instructor at the Harvard Medical School. Rather, six of the bodies has their privacy imposed upon, results of which permit an expose of the private life of Arizona's Basket Maker Indians of 5000 B. C.

Most startling and important was the discovery of blood corpuscles in the mummified remains. This is the first occasion on which a corpuscle has ever been yielded by a mummy. In addition the remains were generally in such a good state of preservation that sand could be found in the lungs of petrified Indians. Lung disease was disclosed similar to that disease so common among the inhabitants of dusty cities. Tuberculosis germs were furthermore detected and it is supposed that the Basket Maker tribe fought against a high death rate.

Basket Maker flappers had bobbed hair, but they seem to have preserved their shown tresses because plenty of hair has been found in mummified baskets. Moreover, they made some use of it, weaving it into rope. The women did most of the basket making for which the tribe is famous. There was no clay pottery among them and they seem to have employed baskets for every conceivable domestic purpose.

These distinctive early Americans precede the cliff-dwellers of the southwest even. Little is known of them, but the research work is increasing in magnitude. The expedition which returned with the mummies was the first of its kind in connection with the Rasket Weavers, but Dr. Gale will study these mummies next summer concentrating on thyroid glands.