Mammoth fossils prove human presence in North America 37,000 years ago

The New Mexico site offers some of the strongest evidence that humans settled in North America much earlier than is generally believed.

The place where the massacre took place mammothsResearchers at the University of Texas at Austin found blunt-force fractured fossils, worn-edged bone flake knives, and traces of controlled fire.

And thanks to radiocarbon analysis of collagen extracted from bones mammoththe site also has an estimated age of 36,250 to 38,900 years, making it one of the oldest known sites of ancient human footprints in North America.

“What we have is incredible,” lead author Timothy Rowe, a paleontologist and professor at the Jackson School of Earth Sciences in Texas, said in a statement. “This is not a charismatic site with a beautiful skeleton on its side. He’s all destroyed. But this is history.” The results were published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

Uncertainty about human origins

The deposit was discovered in 2013, but there was no certainty of its human origin. It is known that it can be extremely difficult to determine what was created by nature, compared to human hands.

This uncertainty has led to debate in the anthropological community about when humans first arrived in North America. The Clovis culture, dating back 16,000 years, left behind intricate carved stone tools. But at older sites where stone tools are missing, the evidence becomes more subjective.

Despite the giant site mammoths There are no apparently related stone tools in the New Mexico massacres, Rowe and his co-authors found a wealth of supporting evidence by subjecting samples from the site to scientific analysis in a laboratory.

Among other findings, a CT scan performed at the University of Texas High-Resolution X-Ray Computed Tomography Center revealed bony scales with a microscopic network of fractures similar to those found in freshly cut cow bones and well-placed puncture wounds that would help drain fat from the ribs. and vertebral bones.

“There are really only a couple of effective ways to skin the cat, so to speak,” Rowe said. “The assassination patterns are quite characteristic.”

Two main populations

Moreover, chemical analysis of the sediment surrounding the bones showed that the fire particles originated from a long-term controlled burn, and not from lightning or wildfire. The material also contained crushed bones and burned remains of small animals, mostly fish (although the site is over 200 feet above the nearest river), as well as birds, rodents and lizards.

Based on the genetic evidence of the indigenous peoples of South and Central America and artifacts from other archaeological sites, some scholars have proposed that there were at least two founding populations in North America: Clovis and a pre-Clovis society with a different genetic origin.

The researchers suggest that the New Mexico location, with its age and bone tools rather than sophisticated stone technology, may support this theory.

(As reported by Europe Press)

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