PhysOrg looks at the remains of what UT Austin researchers have determined was a 37,000-year-old mammoth hunt in New Mexico, a place where scientists didn’t think humans existed until tens of thousands of years later:
The researchers revealed a wealth of evidence rarely found in one place. It includes fossils with blunt-force fractures, bone flake knives with worn edges, and signs of controlled fire. And thanks to carbon dating analysis on collagen extracted from the mammoth bones, the site also comes with a settled age of 36,250 to 38,900 years old, making it among the oldest known sites left behind by ancient humans in North America.
“What we’ve got is amazing,” said lead author Timothy Rowe, a paleontologist and a professor in the UT Jackson School of Geosciences. “It’s not a charismatic site with a beautiful skeleton laid out on its side. It’s all busted up. But that’s what the story is.”
…
Rowe does not usually research mammoths or humans. He got involved because the bones showed up in his backyard, literally. A neighbor spotted a tusk weathering from a hillslope on Rowe’s New Mexico property in 2013. When Rowe went to investigate, he found a bashed-in mammoth skull and other bones that looked deliberately broken. It appeared to be a butchering site. But suspected early human sites are shrouded in uncertainty. It can be notoriously difficult to determine what was shaped by nature versus human hands.
…
Among other finds, CT scans taken by the University of Texas High-Resolution X-ray Computed Tomography Facility revealed bone flakes with microscopic fracture networks akin to those in freshly knapped cow bones and well-placed puncture wounds that would have helped in draining grease from ribs and vertebral bones.
“There really are only a couple efficient ways to skin a cat, so to speak,” Rowe said. “The butchering patterns are quite characteristic.”
In addition, chemical analysis of the sediment surrounding the bones showed that fire particles came from a sustained and controlled burn, not a lightning strike or wildfire. The material also contained pulverized bone and the burned remains of small animals—mostly fish (even though the site is over 200 feet above the nearest river), but also birds, rodents and lizards.
—
You can read more of the research (and see pictures of the findings) here, at Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
[via reddit]