The Windover Bog bodies were discovered in 1982 by a backhoe operator clearing the land for a housing development. "It was only after the bones were declared very old and not the product of a mass murder that the 167 bodies found in a pond in Windover, Florida began to stir up excitement in the archeological world. Researchers from Florida State University came to the site, thinking some more Native American bones had been unearthed in the swamplands. They were guessing the bones were 500-600 years old. But then the bones were radiocarbon dated. It turns out the corpses ranged from 6,990 to 8,120 years old. It was then that the academic community became incredibly excited. The Windover Bog has proven to be one of the most important archeological finds in the United States." Source: Ancient Origins.
According to Nova (2006), "the remains, together with artifacts that look like they were deposited yesterday such as bone tools, a bottle gourd, and woven fabric shrouds, offer a rare portrait of life in an ancient hunter-gatherer-fisher community."
The Windover Bog "has proved to be one of the most important and productive 'wet' archaeological sites in the history of the nation," according to The Windover Archaeological Research Project (WARP). And the most mind-boggling thing about the discovery is that some of the bodies still contained traces of brain tissue:
"A most significant find came only weeks into the project when one of the project directors found a lump of slippery, dark brown material inside a skull. There was cautious speculation that it might be preserved brain tissue, but common sense said that would not be possible--that any tissue would have dissipated into the black peat thousands of years ago. Laboratory tests proved however, that cautious speculation had become reality. The material was, indeed, human brain tissue." (WARP)
DNA tests (see top video) supposedly showed that the remains were European. This would be a major discovery, to say the least, but I've been having a lot of trouble verifying it. In fact, I can't find much of anything about the DNA analysis at all and what I have found is suspiciously vague:
"Although scientists believed they had retrieved DNA from the fairly intact brain matter recovered from some of the human burials, subsequent research has shown that the mtDNA lineages reported are absent in all other prehistoric and contemporary Native American populations studied to date. [Emphasis added] Further attempts to retrieve more DNA have failed, and an amplification study has shown that there is no analyzable DNA left in the Windover burials." Source: About Archaeology.
I've read this particular passage two or three times and it's a masterpiece of handwaving and misdirection. The article makes it sound like DNA wasn't discovered after all ("scientists believed they had retrieved DNA"), but it then goes on to say that mtDNA lineages were discovered ("the mtDNA lineages reported") and subsequently analyzed. But the article then dismisses the analysis because it didn't match the expected results, i.e., because it didn't connect the Windover Bog people with "other prehistoric and contemporary Native American populations." In other words, the DNA results couldn't be accurate because they didn't show that the bog people were Native Americans.
This is just one article, of course, but it seems to have been written in a deliberate attempt to obfuscate the findings. If that's the case, then it suggests that the Windover Bog people were European after all.