A man & his bones

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) — A longtime Augustana University anthropology professor has launched a new career in retirement highlighting his ancient inventory.

Adrien Hannus now works as a consultant for museum exhibits, with the goal of spreading his lifelong fascination with pre-historic people and things to the rest of South Dakota.

Hannus is connecting old artifacts to our modern-day lives.

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These aren’t paperweights atop Adrien Hannus’s desk. They were cutting-edge technology back in the day.

“This is a hand-ax that dates about 700,000 years ago, from a site in Africa,” Hannus said.

Ancient axes and blades that carved civilizations.

“The stone tool is really one of the critical, critical points in human’s march through time,” Hannus said.

Hannus calls his new Sioux Falls-based non-profit, “A Man and his Bones.” So, where are the bones?

“The bones, yeah. In the closet. Very definitely, they’re hidden away,” Hannus said.

Hannus has made a career of unearthing old bones and artifacts hidden away for millennia. He’s a kind of modern-day Indiana Jones, with a passion for the past that began in childhood.

“Museums, to me, were the way of life. I mean, they were something that I looked forward to when we went on trips. We always went to museums,” Hannus said.

You’ll still find Hannus trekking to museums today. He’s currently working on setting up a new exhibit highlighting stone tools in the Archeodome at Mitchell’s Prehistoric Indian Village.

“We have never done anything over in Mitchell with ancient stone tools. We’re just discussing stone tools were made by people that lived at Mitchell one-thousand years ago and I thought, well, might be interesting to show a broader sweep of what kind of chronology it fits into,” Hannus said.

Prehistoric Indian Village board member Jerry Garry is using modern woodworking tools to help Hannus build the display.

“I just provide my time and materials based on designs that Adrien’s put together to build those. I find the challenge a lot of fun and it helps me enjoy the hobby I enjoy the most,” Garry said.

Hannus says these artifacts reveal how humans from long ago adapted to their ever-changing environment.

“Some of these tools they made, like this ax for instance, the climate was probably minus 100-degrees Fahrenheit in some parts of Europe,” Hannus

Hannus says people of today can take a cue from those who preceded us and rely upon human resourcefulness to nimbly adjust to major upheavals that may come our way.

“I keep saying when all the power supplies go out, then I can sit in the corner and chip my stone tools and go out and harvest my vegetables and everybody else will be dying to have me teach them how to do that,” Hannus said.

Another project Hannus is working on is sending educational kits, containing items like donated artifacts, to schools across South Dakota because Hannus says kids are natural-born anthropologists.

“The kids always embrace that enthusiastically. I mean, if you got in with a group of 8th, 9th graders or something, they just fix on it and be sitting there with their toothbrush scrubbing the artifact and stuff for hours,” Hannus said.

Hannus still maintains childlike enthusiasm for archeology, even as he’s on the verge of turning 81. Old artifacts keep him young.

“I’m told that I’m supposed to be old and doddering and so, I can’t quite bring myself to be old and doddering around,” Hannus said.

Hannus gained national fame when he was featured in the PBS series, Time Team America in 2009. But he says he wasn’t able to parlay that into lasting notoriety because he never hired an agent.