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Posted on 06/17/2015 2:35:54 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Thousands of years ago, a human -- probably hungry and right-handed -- found an old spear point amid these low hills and re-shaped it.
Last week [in 2013] University of Cincinnati student Liz Ceddia found it again: flaked in a distinctive pattern and still sharp enough to break skin...
The students are working with Ken Tankersley, a University of Cincinnati archaeology professor who first visited the area as a child. He keeps coming back to seek evidence of how climate change affects area flora and fauna. It's one of his major areas of research.
Big Bone Lick State Park -- its signs announce it as the "birthplace of American vertebrate paleontology" -- is the site of Tankersley's student dig, which is open to the public.
Here's the thing about archaeological digging and screening: It's just like digging for anything else, except more precise. There is a lot of mud, passing huge buckets loaded down with muck and wading around seeking more than a bit of heated stone or wood in the bucket. Students joke about their arm-muscle development...
The layers of soil being excavated, shovel by shovel and bucket by bucket, can show why some species, such as caribou, vanish from the landscape, then reappear.
Species that find their environment and food sources changing have three options, Tankersley said. They could move away (as the grazing caribou did, to the north); become more compact (to survive on less food); or die...
The bison lived here once, as did mammoths, beavers the size of black bears, and giant sloths the size of trees.
It’s mine.
I’ve been trying to find that spear tip for a very long time..
PS - as proof of ownership I offer the following: I am right-handed.
I’ve been to that park. “Lick” is apparently local for “crick”, and there are lots of bones found there. Still makes you wonder how many tourists from San Francisco make the trip east in eager anticipation, only to have their desires dashed.
No. A lick is a mineral deposit, often salt, that has come to the surface, attracting herbivores and other animals. These animals literally lick the earth to get needed minerals; like waterholes in Africa, however, predators stalk the licks to cull the weak, sick, and/or unlucky.
Same principle applies today when a hunter lays down a salt pan for deer.
The continental shelf must have been exposed, and the temps were, like always, warmer at lower latitudes and lower altitudes. Once underwater archaeology becomes more common — and it makes a nice end-run around the NAGPRA nonsense — all of the limits on the antiquity of humans in the Americas are going to look ridiculous. Of course, that’s just based on what little has been found so far and by the common basic human behaviors. :’)
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Thanks Marechal. That particular lick was set up for chubby animals, hence the name, big boned.
:’) Thanks. It sounds like a blues song title.
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