The bones were discovered by hikers on Tuesday afternoon in a wash running through the hills, and crews spent about five hours excavating them on Wednesday, Los Angeles County Coroner's spokesman Craig Harvey said.
Harvey said personal effects including a backpack were found near the body but that it had not been identified. A forensic anthropologist would try to determine the gender, he said.
"They do not appear to have been buried; the possibility exists that this person died in the wash and over the years runoff deposited soil on and around the body," Harvey said, adding that investigators had estimated that the person died around two years ago. "We recovered a fairly complete skeletal set," he said. "There are some things we didn't get, but we got the important stuff - skull, mandible."
