We’re going on four months since Nancy Guthrie, Savannah Guthrie’s mom, disappeared, and we still have very few answers. We know she was taken from her house sometime between the night of January 31 and February 1 by a masked assailant, but we don’t know what happened to her, and no suspect or motive has been publicly identified.
But the search for Guthrie has brought about some surprising findings, including a human skeleton near her house. It’s just that this isn’t the kind of discovery that will help the investigation in any way.
Related: Who are Savannah Guthrie’s siblings?
The remains found, unrelated to the case, belong to a prehistoric human. In an interview with Fox News Digital, James T. Watson, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona, explained that a full skeleton was found, not the single bone that had been originally reported. The skeleton is believed to belong to someone who was buried between several hundred and 1,000 years ago, he said.
“Whether it is a thousand years old or 50 years old, these are human remains,” Watson confirmed. A local YouTuber named AJ Wysopal discovered an exposed bone while conducting his own search for Guthrie. When authorities arrived, they quickly established that the remains were indeed human, but that they were not connected to the Guthrie abduction.
Reports indicate there’s a known archaeological site nearby, with Watson confirming that ceramic artifacts found at the scene are consistent with examples found there. “All of that contextual evidence allowed me to be pretty sure that this individual was in fact Native American,” he said. “The ceramics really sort of drove home that point.”
The remains have been transferred to the Tohono O’odham Nation, a Native American tribe with a large reservation just west of Tucson.
According to Watson, the Sonoran Desert’s terrain and new movement on land that hasn’t been touched for centuries can lead to discoveries such as this one. “The desert there is a pretty harsh environment, and obviously it’s been settled for hundreds, thousands of years,” he told Fox News Digital. “There are literally probably hundreds of bodies that are discovered every year out in the desert.”
Which still makes it a place worth looking into. “So there [are] a lot of places that an individual could get lost or pass away — or hide a body,” Watson said. “I think…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.”
This comes after Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos made clear the case has not gone cold. “Right now, I think our focus is on the tips, the leads and the evidence we have in front of us,” he said. “Digitally — the camera footages as well as biological, the DNA and those types of things.”
“My team, I’ve said all along, they’re gonna solve this,” he added. “I fully 100% believe that.
He explained that it’s taking a while because there’s a lot of information to sift through. “I know we have DNA that is unknown who the contributor or depositor is, but I think they’re getting closer to finding out who that was,” Nanos told People. “When the labs tell us, ‘Hey, there’s nothing else we can do,’ well, then maybe we’ve got a problem… we’ve got a cold case… but right now, the labs aren’t telling us that,” he added.
“When you have the best minds of the country working on problems, I think they’re gonna solve them,” Nanos said. “It just takes a while.”
The reward for information about Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance stands at over $1 million.
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