An archaeology museum in Philadelphia has made an extraordinary find - in its own storage rooms.
The University of Pennsylvania's Penn Museum announced on Tuesday it had rediscovered a 6500-year-old human skeleton excavated from southern Iraq about 1930.
The complete remains, which had been kept in a coffin-like box, were missing documentation until researchers recently began digitising the museum's collection from an expedition to Ur, an ancient city near modern-day Nasiriyah.
Project manager William Hafford was matching objects with inventory lists from the Sumerian trek when he came across a description of a full skeleton he could not find.
He consulted Janet Monge, the chief curator of physical anthropology, who happened to know of an unlabelled, mystery skeleton in the basement area.
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"So we went, found the crate, opened it up and compared it to the field notes and the field photographs, and we had a match," Hafford said.
The body is believed to be that of a well-muscled man at least 50 who stood 178cm tall, according to Monge. She hopes a skeletal analysis, possibly including a CT scan, will reveal more about his diet, stresses, diseases and ancestral origins.
Complete human skeletons from the Ubaid period, from 5500-4000BC, are rare, partly because the region's burial practices and type of land did not lead to good preservation, Monge said.
The skeleton was cut into deep silt, indicating the man had lived after an epic flood. That led Penn researchers to nickname their rediscovery "Noah".
Archaeologists from the Ivy League university teamed up with researchers from the British Museum in 1922 for a dig led by Sir Leonard Woolley. Half the objects found over the next 12 years at Ur were sent to an Iraqi museum in Baghdad, while the other half was split between London and Philadelphia.
Coincidentally, in June, researchers at Bristol University in Britain discovered a box of materials from the same Ur expedition on top of a cupboard. Researchers determined the objects were 4500 years old, including pottery, seeds, carbonised apple rings and animal bones.
No one knows how the box got to Bristol, which had no connection to the Woolley dig.
