- Mammoth remains found in 2013 in New Mexico suggest humans settled in North America about 37,000 years ago.
- The discovery means humans might have been in North America 20,000 years before scientists previously thought.
- The fossils were recovered from what appeared to be an ancient butchering area, where bones looked “deliberately broken” by blunt-force fractures.
One of the most common beliefs among researchers is that humans first settled in North America 16,000 years ago. But according to a recent find fossilthat may not be true.
In 2013, a tusk was found in New Mexico, as well as a bashed-in mammoth skull and other bones that looked “deliberately broken” and had blunt-force fractures. Carbon-dating analysis suggests the pieces are roughly 37,000 years old, a discovery that could have significant implications in tracing humans’ earliest existence in the Americas.
The area where the remains were found is an ancient butchering site where humans appeared to process their kills, although it’s hard to determine what was done by humans and what was done naturally, said researchers at the University of Texas at Austin. Researchers also found birds, fish, snails, rodent teeth, a lizard and a bird at the site.
Previous research led scientists to believe the first humans that settled in North America belonged to the Clovis culture, who left behind stone-wrought tools 16,000 years ago.
However, carbon-dating analysis on collagen extracted from the mammoth bones dates the butchering site at around 36,250 to 38,900 years old. That means it’s the oldest known site left behind by ancient humans in North America.
The peer-reviewed findings were published in July in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
But that’s not the only interesting thing about the discovery, said Timothy Rowe, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences.
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The early humans who used the butchering site shaped bones into blades to break down the animals’ carcasses, according to Rowe. There are also signs that they rendered the animals’ fat over a fire.
“The real evidence that we have has to do with the breakage patterns, and how thorough they are,” he told USA TODAY. “They must have used rocks or hammer stones to bust the skeleton apart… These people would use whatever they could. This site indicates that humans attained a global distribution a long time ago, much earlier than once thought.”
How were humans able to kill and process such large animals?
Rowe said the humans responsible for slaying the mammoths could’ve been hunter-gatherers.
The adults were likely busy breaking down the mammoths’ body parts, which is a pretty involved process. They likely skinned them, broke their bones to make tools, and broke their bones down into small pieces and boiled them to extract grease, he said.
The children, if they were present, were probably out catching fish and learning to catch lizards and birds, he said.
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He also said there are a couple of possibilities regarding how they ended up with the mammoths: they may have come across the animals once they’d already died, ambushed the mammoths, or the animals may have been startled and ran over the edge of a cliff.
“We can’t tell really which of these scenarios was responsible for killing the two (mammoths),” he said, noting that the most likely scenario is that the humans ambushed them and processed them in that same spot.
Future discoveries about settlement in the Americas
Rowe said similar findings about human settlements dating so far back have been mostly ignored because they conflict with previous research, but now, he thinks there’s a good chance researchers will find evidence of humans farther back in time.
Researchers are on their way to rewriting what was previously thought about how people actually came to North America, Central America and South America, said Fumi Arakawa, who directs New Mexico State University’s University Museum and teaches anthropology.
When he was a student in the 1990s, Arakawa recalls learning about the Bering Strait Land Bridge and how people crossed it 14,000 to 16,000 thousand years ago. In the 2000s, discussions began about how earlier humans may have used a boat to get to North America, he said.
“Those people came from, probably, Northeast Asia,” he told USA TODAY. “I think the idea has been accepted by several archaeologists nowadays.”
“(This discovery) is not only for North American archeologists, but probably people who are working in Northeast Asia, Japan, or people who are very interested in that topic as well,” said Arakawa, who is from Japan.
Saleen Martin is a reporter on USA TODAY’s NOW team. She is from Norfolk, Virginia – the 757 – and loves all things horror, witches, Christmas, and food. Follow her on Twitter at @Saleen_Martin or email her at [email protected].
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism