Anthropologists at the Nevada State Museum, US, recently unearthed the oldest known mummy in North America, and they found it right on their own shelvest The mummy, known as the Spirit Cave man, had been found in a Nevada cave in 1940, but very recent advances in radiocarbon dating helped scientists to determine, to their amazement, that the remains which they believed to date back about 2,000 years, were in fact, more than 9,400 years old.

The mummy's age was determined by Ervin Taylor, an anthropology professor at the University of California at Riverside, who used a technique known as :ccelerator mass spectrometry' whereby, individual carbon atoms can be counted.

The mummy's great age and excellent state will provide critical new information on what life was like at the end of the Ice Age, anthropologists said. The cave man was wearing moccasins and was wrapped in shrouds woven from marsh plants so neatly, that they indicate that humans of that era used looms. The fishbones in his intestine speak volumes about his diet. Shortly, the mummy is expected to undergo intensive testing, including possible DNA analysis to inveitigate its genetic makeup. Although there are older mummies found in South America and North America, the Spirit Cave man is far older than the 5,000-years old famous Iceman mummy discovered in the Alps in 1991.

"All of a sudden, something that's not that interesting when it's 2,000 years old, is earth-shattering when it's 9,000 years old," said an enthused David Hurst Thomas of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who has researched the Spirit Cave man's period extensively.