The mysterious bones on Livingstone Island
Livingstone Island (also known as Smolensk in Russian) is an Island in the Shetlands group. It is also the site of the oldest human remains ever found in Antarctica.
In the 1980’s a skull and femur were found lying on the beach at Cape Shirref. Chilean researchers were able to determine that they were the bones of an indigenous woman (a Mestizo) from southern Chile who died at the age of 21.
But Chile is 1000km (600 miles) away and the bones are 175 years old!! The indigenous Chileans had traditional bark canoes but it is highly doubtful they could have made it so far through rough seas. A more likely scenario is that she was taken there by sealers either willingly or unwillingly and left.
The sealers did have a close, sometimes violent relationship with the Chileans so it is possible that she could have been a guide though I suspect more likely she was kidnapped.
These bones mark the first human habitation of Antarctica that we know of and at the time of her death she was suffering from nutritional stress, anaemia, and an external otitis (inflammation of the ear), so perhaps she had been abandoned there to slowly die.
I wonder what her thoughts were when she was left there so far from home? Seems a lonely death at the end of the world.