TUPPER LAKE — State Police issued a correction Wednesday: Bones uncovered on the Wild Center museum property in May, which police previously reported to be from a bear, are actually human remains.

State Police Public Information Officer Jennifer Fleishman said there was a separate location where bear bones were found in Tupper Lake and that the wrong set had been referenced when talking to the Enterprise for an article published Jan. 3.

The bear bones were discovered by a homeowner on Country Club Drive in August and reported to State Police in September. The State Police forensic lab determined them to be from a deceased bear.

The human bones were dug up by an excavating crew from Kentile Excavating of Tupper Lake while it was moving dirt from a Wild Center overflow parking lot, near L.P. Quinn Elementary School and Beth Joseph Cemetery.

Fleishman wrote in an email that more related bones were found around the same time in the front yard of a private residence, where fill dug up from behind the parking lot had been dropped.

Fleishman said the human bones were sent out for carbon dating.

Curt Stager, a professor at Paul Smith’s College who is currently teaching a class on carbon dating and has studied the process for years, said carbon dating will be able to definitively tell if the bones belong to an ancient indigenous person or someone from the modern age.

“It shows you when that person died, and that can tell you whether you treat it as a crime or an archaeological find,” Stager said.

But, narrowing down how old bones are is not an exact science. Stager said there is a difference in carbon dating organic objects before and after World War II, because nuclear pollution during the bomb tests of the mid-Cold War era has altered the carbon-14 levels in plants, animals and humans worldwide.

According to Smithsonian Magazine, “Between 1955 and 1963, the use of atomic bombs doubled the amount of carbon-14 in our atmosphere. … Every eleven years, the amount of that carbon-14 in the atmosphere would decrease by half.”

“If it is a modern person, their carbon-14 date has been messed up by nuclear testing that contaminated the atmosphere, and they can actually look like they’re from the future,” Stager said.

Stager said vintage wine appraisers even use carbon dating to see if a wine is as old as a seller says it is.

“With the wines and things, there’s actually a nuclear pollution graph you can look at of how the amount of the offset would change over the years,” Stager said. “There’s a possibility you could match how oddly dated the (bone) is and get an estimate.”

Stager said there have been people in the Tupper Lake area since the Ice Age, and noted that Tupper Lake was home to the oldest known human artifact found in the Adirondacks: a spear point 10,000 to 12,000 years old.