Two quad riders visiting Argentina's southern Patagonia region have found 3,000-year-old bones on a beach .
"There was nobody at all on the beach. We saw tracks of pick-up trucks ... and moved forward with the quads. Then we found the skulls," quad rider Adrian Garcia told local broadcaster Todo Noticias.
The bones of about 20 people were scattered in the sand near Colombo beach in Valdes Peninsula.
The quad riders thought that the bones they found on the weekend could belong to victims of Argentina's 1976-83 dictatorship, and alerted police.
But the bones turned out to belong to nomadic hunter-gatherer Tehuelche indigenous people who settled in Patagonia 12,000 years ago, the national news agency Telam reports.
Scientists had analysed the bones 11 years ago and reburied them on the beach "to respect the wishes" of the Tehuelches who had created a cemetery there, said Nestor Garcia, a director charged with the conservation of protected areas in Patagonia's Chubut province.
Winds were believed to have uncovered the bones in the protected area where the quad riders entered without permission.
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