Dr. Todd Surovell presents the First People and Last Mammoths in Wyoming

just a couple quick announcements thank you everyone for joining us for our third and final presentation of the Draper after-dark series here please silence or turn off your electronic devices and cell phones inevitably there's always one or two that happens to go off we're grateful for the support from the Nancy chair Nancy Carol Draper charitable foundation in Sage Creek Ranch for making all these talks possible the quality and the caliber of speakers that were able to bring in year after year has only been made possible through this support and we thank all of you for coming out on your evening and spending that with us tonight these lectures are being recorded and will be uploaded to our Draper youtube channel so if you've missed any of the previous talks from this year or from last year you can find them there over at YouTube just search Draper Natural History Museum you'll see our bear logo click on that and that will give you access to all of our lectures so today we're going to hear from dr. Todd Sarah Bell dr. servo is a professor in department head at the department anthropology at the University of Wyoming before coming to the University of Wyoming in 2003 dr. survival was the director that George C frizzen Institute of archeology and anthropology born and raised in Northern Virginia dr. servo holds a BA in anthropology in zoology from the University of wisconsin-madison and earned his master's and PhD in anthropology from the University Arizona specializing in paleo-indian period the first people of new world archaeology he is also an expert in stone tool technology and human colonization of the new world and the Pleistocene extinctions he is the author of one buck and more than 50 published articles his major research efforts include the excavation of a twelve thousand eight hundred year-old Barger Gulch site a Folsom camp site in Middle Park Colorado and the dhoka ethanol archaeological project a study of nomadic reindeer herders in Mongolia he has participated in archaeological fieldwork throughout the American West as well as in Israel in Denmark and is currently excavating the leprae I'm gonna butcher this one l'p rail and Bishop mammoth sites in Converse County please give docked to serve a warm welcome thank you and thanks for coming today those of you standing in the back there are still some seats I see some in the back row and some in the front if you need a place to sit um it's really nice to see a full room I'm always impressed by how passionate people are in the state of Wyoming about about the human pasts in Wyoming so today I'm going to talk about the human past but also about mammoths as well and really where mammoths and humans intersected I'm gonna start my talk by talking about these bones right here I learned about these bones in June of 2014 I was in Douglas Wyoming at the Wyoming pioneer Memorial Museum in one case in the back room were these bones and what you see standing there in the back is the humerus of a Columbian mammoth right here radioulnar which is the lower front limb bone and foreground kind of fuzzy is Amanda bore the lower jaw these bones intrigued me and immediately I wanted to know how they got there where they came from where they were found and really I'm gonna start with these two questions and they're gonna sort of be central questions to organize my talk and then third I want to talk about why do I care there are a lot of bones in museums right but these bones really caught my attention and in fact I spent four years trying to figure out exactly where these things came from and I want to tell you why so I'm an archaeologist right I study past people why would I be interested in mammoth bones well let's start with an issue of what is a mammoth mammoths are extinct animals in the order Probus IDIA this is a group of mammals that includes the elephants mammoths mastodons and gompa theer's you've heard of mammoths and you've probably heard of mastodons I'd be surprised if you've heard of gompa thiers gompa --there is this animal on the right here all of these were native to North America although gompa theer's were much more common as you got further south very common from the fossil record America and South America mammoths tend to occur more commonly in Western North America and mastodons in eastern North America and Wyoming the mammoths we had were a species we call the Columbian mammoth not the woolly mammoth wooly mammoths were further north up along the ice fund and we had these animals here only about 15,000 years ago mammoths were roaming the plains of Wyoming this mammoth that you see here is one of the largest ones ever found you can see it on display in Casper at the Tate Museum on the campus of Casper College mammoths first arrived in the new world about 1.8 million years ago they came across the Bering Land Bridge just like humans did much later and mastodons and gompa thiers have been in the Americas for much longer about 10 million years when we look at the distribution of prova Citians today so proba Citians simply meaning animals with the proboscis the the extension of the upper lip and nose that we know is the trunk today they live in two discontinuous ranges in sub-saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia although this map is highly highly generalized Verte assume in on it you would see that these ranges are really really fragmentary so for example this is shows the distribution of Asian elephants in Southeast Asia and India and you can see that their ranges are really really fragmented and the same thing is true in sub-saharan Africa what's interesting is that if we're to look at the distribution of these animals in the fossil record say 1.8 million years ago this is where they lived and maybe the better question is where didn't they live they lived everywhere they could get to without a significant swim they never made it to Australia or Madagascar Greenland but they're pretty much everywhere else and there are a huge diversity of these animals multiple species of mammoths in North America mastodons gompa theer's and africa multiple extinct species of proba Citians in the same is true in Europe and Asia across the Arctic woolly mammoths in southern climates of Europe you had a species called the straight tusk elephant they were everywhere the point of telling you this is that there's really nothing unusual about finding fossil elephant bones in Wyoming you can pretty much find them everywhere where can elephants live well they can live many places we find them today in tropical forests in Southeast Asia that's where elephants are perfectly happy in dense tropical forests the same thing is true in Africa today where you have African forest elephants living in a Congo Basin you of course have African elephants living in the savanna the image on the top right shows African elephants savanna elephants in the Namib Desert of Namibia very arid climates the lower right is a young asian elephant playing in the snow they don't naturally live in the snow but obviously mammoths are perfectly happy in the snow because we find them in the permafrost of Siberia and Alaska all the time elephants can live anywhere really large body size to some extent allows adapt adaptive flexibility they're generalists in terms of what they eat in hot climates the body size keeps them cool and cold climates body size keeps them warm and dry climates body size allows them to retain water they can live really a lot of places they get into trouble when you have droughts and when there are food shortages but it's hard to find an environment that can't support elephants and Wyoming was certainly one that could when you look at their global distribution this should come as no surprise so in this context how did these bones get here well there's a simple answer to that question sometime within the last two million years a mammoth died somewhere near Douglas Wyoming I presume because that's where the bones ended up in the museum somebody found them and donated them where were they found well the first clues to the answer this question came from the display case this sign says that the mammoth was excavated from bed tick Creek south of Douglas it was discovered by a dr. bird of the American Museum and it was a gift of WR Eastman wares vet tech Creek well it's a tributary of the North Platte River it's about six kilometers south of Douglas and it flows for about fourteen murders or let's say eight miles from west to east towards the North Platte it's a fairly big area and not a very specific clue because of this though he went out to the bed tech area and walked that drainage and looked for mammoth bone sticking out of Bank so no luck the next clues came from a letter than this letter was given to us by the curator of the Pioneer Museum in Douglas it was written by this guy Elsie Bishop Lauren this is Lauren and his wife Sadie who was born in 1885 he was a Converse county surveyor and later in the state engineer and this is the letter that was given to us in 2015 the letter was written on June 21st 1958 to the state geologist at the time guy named Horace Thomas and the letter describes the circumstances of the discovery of these bones and I'm not going to read you the whole letter but I'm gonna give you a few excerpts Elsie Bishop says some 20 years ago a friend and I dug out the head bones and huge teeth and two front leg bones from the base of a bank on land then owned by me so this is 1958 he's writing this so he's talking about approximately 1938 when he finds the bones and the bones he describes are those in that case he says the bones are found 9 feet below the surface and a soil that's rather heavy and well compacted it gives a description here the geology he says it's where the Dakota sandstone a geologic formation is joined and he gives a very specific location in the northwest quarter of section one town ship 31 north of 70 will range 71 west by the White River Formation are just plain gumbo soil this guy was a surveyor right he knows where he is this is really useful information now a quarter section that's a half a mile by half mile it's still not it was right there but it's like getting us closer right he says after about a July 8th I'll be free to go to Douglass and assist in the supervision and if you're mr. McGrew will be available to get us going about that time what he's at doing is he's writing to the state geologist he's saying hey there's this mammoth out there we want to excavate the rest of it we could use some professional assistance mr. McGrew was Paul McGrew who's a paleontologist at the University of Wyoming well this is cool right there's a lot of good information except that the Pioneer Museum says dr. bird found it Bishop says he found it the quarter section identified by Bishop is six kilometers away from bed tick Creek does not contain the geology that he describes and he never owned it so he says he found it over here here's bed 2 Creek thoughts of contradictions right last year in July we spent a week in the field in this area looking for it now why would I spend all this time looking for the location where these bones came from there are a lot of mammoth bones in the world well let me tell you why I'm an archaeologist I'm interested in people I mean mammoths are cool these are 20,000 pound animals that roamed the plains of Wyoming and big matriarchal herds the idea is if he the idea of humans interacting with these animals is pretty cool right and that's what interests me as an archaeologist I'm interested in ecological economic and social aspects of the interactions between mammoths in humans and mammoths are one of these animals that we actually have drawings of we actually have physical depictions of from past humans like this drawing from growth - sorry I can't do French roof and neck I'm Tara Lloyd French I speak Mongolian okay I'm not finished I saw this drawing last summer it's pretty cool to see the painted caves in France so here's a painting of a wooly mammoth painted sometime between 40,000 and 20,000 years ago deep in a cave and Friends we've been interacting with these animals for a long long time a very long history of interaction with these species and not just in North America not just in France globally this record goes way back this is one of the earliest sites showing human interaction with proba Citians and I shouldn't say human because humans didn't exist 1.7 million years ago this is a hominid ancestor of ours it's not clear which hominin produced this site almost certainly it was this one Homo ergaster used to be known as Homo erectus a hominin that was not not close to modern it was modern in stature it was bipedal had a big increase in brain size from the hominids before it the big technological changes as well and right around this the time this hominid shows up in the fossil record we start seeing interactions with these animals this is a species called elephants wreck I from the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania surrounded by chip stone tools whether it was killed or scavenged remains a question that we argue about but very early on in the archaeological record we see humans interacting with proba city and so this is Tanzania in East Africa 1.7 million years ago this is a site from Germany called Grove Bern this is the remains of a straight tusk elephant elephant elephant it was tightly associated with artifacts at the time 120,000 years ago is the last interglacial relatively warm period in Europe Europe was inhabited by Neanderthals Homo sapiens Neanderthal insists the same species as us different subspecies almost fully modern humans but again we see this interaction with Neanderthals and Probus idioms moving forward in time into what we call the Upper Paleolithic I showed you the drawing the cave painting from France this is a mammoth rib site in Cracow pull 125 thousand years ago and embedded within that rib you can see the stone tool probably a spear point right there again interaction between mammoths and humans in this case homo sapiens sapiens people like you and me people anatomically like us people behaviorally like us if you met these people you'd recognize them as no that's a person 25,000 years ago and of course this trend a proba City and exploitation continues to the new world and what we call the paleo-indian period of the earliest period of new world archaeology this shows a mammoth ribcage from a site called the laner site in southeastern Arizona about 13,000 years ago rib here rib here and a spear point embedded between them interestingly this shows I showed you this before it shows proba Citians 1.8 million years ago versus today now let's look at the genus Homo our genus were Homo sapiens 1.8 million years ago the genus Homo was limited to the southerly latitudes of Africa and Eurasia this is a very generalized distribution but what's interesting is it's very similar to the distribution of proba Citians today the distribution of homo today of course is everywhere we've basically swapped places if we look at this issue globally humans interacting with these taxa and we look at it through space and time so this shows sort of the time-space series here red are the oldest sites green in the next oldest blue or the next oldest in yellow or the youngest you see there's sort of a wave looking at this over a million years this wave through space and time of exploitation of these animals that comes out of Africa into Europe through Asia and into the Americas and what's really interesting I think and some people would say that the pattern is not as strong as I'm claiming and I think they have a reasonable argument but I think it's pretty clear that if we look at this pattern globally what we see is people colonize new regions as we expand our range across the world and as they do they hunt proba Citians and proba City and suffer extinction we see this pattern where the hunting of elephants and archaeological record is very much concentrated on what I would call the human frontier the edge of human expansion so when we see it in Wyoming or in Arizona we see it very briefly and in one specific time and it's right when people first arrived but that statement can be generalized virtually anywhere in the world with the exception of where elephants persist today so of course in the new world for a long time we've known this pattern we've known that the arrival of first arrival of humans in the new world correlates with the last of the Pleistocene megafauna human arrival humans show up and very quickly animals go extinct and mammoths are just one of those animals so this is a classic photograph from Steven Saenz jr. and archaeologist geo archaeologists in Arizona's daughters here today actually your dad took this photo and sent it to me he was very proud of it this is a mammoth tooth here this is a iconic stratigraphic unit in our kin paleo-indian archaeology it's called the black mat it dates the end of last ice age ice age ends at the top of this this upper contact of the black if we look at mammoths in the fossil record they end right here you never find a man with above that at least nobody has yet and that contact dates to about twelve thousand seven hundred years ago okay so before that we have Pleistocene megafauna meaning Ice Age big animals mammoths mastodons gone fifty years ground sloths horses no evidence of humans again that's debatable but that's my story after that lots of artifacts an abundant archaeological record no place to see megafauna and right here we find both there's very brief really interesting time we find both together in the same deposits so let's talk about the human story the humans followed mammoths they did it 1.8 million years later and they crossed into the new world across the land bridge during the last ice age when all this ice was tied up in continental glaciers a mile thick that covered much of North America all of the water to build those ice sheets came out of the ocean and the sea level dropped which generated this big broad bridge of land that connected Northeast Asia to Northwest Alaska and Yukon by around fourteen and a half thousand years ago we know from the archaeological record of Alaska or what we call eastern Beringia humans are there because we find their evidence in the archaeological record interestingly at the time of their arrival we're pretty sure they were trapped there because big glaciers coming out of the Canadian Rockies and the coastal ranges connected with big glaciers coming off of the Hudson Bay area and the way south was blocked by continental ice eventually as a climate warmed in those glaciers melted and they retreated humans made it south and by around 13,000 200 years ago people make it into the continental United States and eventually into South America the first people in the new world we argue about who they are but we all agree that people were here by what we call the Clovis period in the Clovis period is named after Clovis projectile points or spear points which looked like this these runs are from Mexico but if you found him in Wyoming it would look pretty much the same they're the first widespread evidence of people in the new world and Clovis points are regularly found an association with proba Citians mammoths mastodons and gompa theories most of these sites here a mammoth kill sites there couple this one here is a mastodon kill site called the Kem's weak site in Missouri this one here in Sonora Mexico is called fin del mundo it's Clovis Association of gompa fear all and all of these sites we find these spear points in association with extinct Ellis Wyoming was long known about sight like this this is the Colby site this book by George frizzen and Larry Todd is a classic in paleo-indian archaeology in fact Larry's here today it's one of the excavators of this site at this site they found six or seven Colombian mammoths associated with four Clovis spirit points and about 30 or 40 other artifacts it's really strange interesting anatomical alignment of bone here George frizzen whose knees you see sticking out here famous guys the former state archaeologists for Wyoming and former department head at the University of Wyoming and remember the National Academy of Sciences he suggested that this was the frozen meat cache people killed this animal and then cached the meat killed in the cold season cache the meat and came back to later exploit it I don't know that they ever did so mammoths were one of a whole series of animals that go extinct around twelve thousand eight hundred to twelve thousand seven hundred years ago North America suffers a massive extinction event 33 generative animals go extinct the word general is the plural of genus many of these generally have multiple species so we're talking about 40 some species of megafauna megafauna meaning big animal or animals bigger than a hundred pounds go extinct it's a massive event if you were here 14,000 years ago the big animals around here would remind you more of Africa than of Wyoming and Wyoming is famous for big animals today right but back then we had mammoths the Bison were 25% larger we had camels horses the carnivores were ridiculous we had saber-tooth cats American Lions American cheetahs dire wolves we had giant ground sloths giant Bevers Bevers the size of black bears wasn't that long ago I mean we're talking seven hundred six to seven hundred human generations ago all of these things lived in Wyoming twelve thousand seven hundred years ago boom they're all gone now we argue about to what extent it was a simultaneous extinction event that all of these animals go extinct in a very short period of time what was it a long staggered event but it's pretty clear that when people showed up in this state and on this continent most of these things if not all of them we're still running around so why do I care about these bones well it's possible that humans killed this animal you know we only have about 15 sites 15 16 sites in North America that show interaction of human and extinct proba Citians if humans killed this animal it's an archaeological site and it's a really rare thing if this animal died naturally it's much less interesting to me I mean mammoths are still cool but I'm gonna leave that one to the paleontologists if it's a paleontological interest it's less interesting to me if it's archeological it's much more interesting so the distinction is pretty simple on the left the Kobe mammoth is an archaeological site because we have evidence of human interaction with that animal on the right the Marquette mammoth found in fall of 2018 and Buffalo Bill reservoir not far from here it's almost certainly paleontological there's no archaeology found with that try to get radiocarbon dates but it's not dateable at the moment because it doesn't have any organic matter preserved but I'm guessing that this animal died prior to the arrival of humans on the continent which then raises the question of the mammoths in the case what I call the Bishop mammoth how old is that so the first way I could tell if it was of any interest to me is to get a radiocarbon date on those bones in that case and the director of the museum was kind enough to let me do that so I put on my safety glasses and sampled some bone for a radiocarbon date keeping in mind mammoths have been in this state for two million years right I'm only interested in the last ones the ones who live between about thirteen thousand one hundred and twelve thousand seven hundred years so we cut out a piece of bone we send it to the lab and we wait for a date and we got the date back this is the day we got this mammoth died between twelve thousand seven hundred twelve thousand eight hundred and fifty years ago this is exactly the right age people were around when this mammoth died assuming this is a good date sometimes radiocarbon dates are an error but if this is an error it's a really darn good one this is exactly what we were hoping for it's made this mammoth worth looking for where did this thing come from it's one of the last mammoths in Wyoming in May of 2018 we took another visit up to Douglas and in one of the curation of facilities downstairs we found this bag with these bones in it more clues this bag says dated July 16 1958 bone fragments taken from the location of the mammoth of the elephant family of which we have the leg jaw and two vertebrae now in the museum dugout July 15 1958 by Bishop Hildebrand and Vetter remember bishops letter was written a month earlier saying I want to go out there in July and supervised the excavation of this mammoth and here's evidence that he did know sadly there were three bone fragments in that bag but the bag was on a crate and beneath the bag in the crate was this which looks like a heck of a lot of fragmented mammoth bone but there's no documentation associated with it other than that brown paper bag sitting on top of it is this the mammoth that Bishop had just dug up I was hoping most of the mammoth was still left there I didn't know given all the clues we had last July over five days we went to this draw in Converse County we're basically looking for a place that Bishop owned in the bed Tech Creek area with the right geology we went through land records we used all the clues and we found in this spot you can see this nice sandstone here you mentioned that Dakota sandstone his letter over five days we worked all along this jaw and what we're trying to do is identify places where we had sediments that were 13,000 years old that could potentially preserve a mammoth to do that we did something called augering I'm going to show you what that looks like that's an auger on the Left see if I can get this to work so you're drilling down into the ground collecting about 4 inches of dirt at a time and laying it out and you're looking at the stratigraphy to see what the sediments look like subsurface and to collect samples for dating and it's a really quick way of getting a look at what's beneath the surface and identifying where you have sediments of different age along a jaw like this after four days in drilling about 19 holes we thought we'd identified the best the most likely location where that mammoth could have been found and I made my crew dig this trench the 90-degree day they called it Todd's torture trench we decided to go for it let's see if we can find a mammoth and it was hot and you can see there's no shade and there's no clouds we found some artifacts there and got pretty excited have no idea how old they are yeah break for lunch come back dig some more collect samples ja stratigraphic profile the dog is supervising and then fill it in and there was no mutiny I think I got them beers that evening no mammoths but we did find a buried archaeological site five artifacts in a buried archaeological site are they Clovis I don't know but we did collect samples of charcoal and soil organic matter that we can use to get radiocarbon dates so we submitted our samples for radiocarbon dates hoping to learn we had found thirteen thousand-year-old sediment as we waited for those dates sadly radiocarbon dating is not instantaneous and there's no lab at the University of Wyoming any if you even if there was it would still take at least a month it's a long involved process but we just learned that Bishop had been there in 1958 and I was thinking let's see that's 60 years ago maybe somebody's alive who was there at the time 50 years ago if somebody was still alive who was out there and when Bishop and Hildebrand invetory digging up those bones it probably would have been a kid let's reach out to the press to see if anybody has any information so a Wyoming public media put together this story douglas budget the local paper put out this story and we waited what fascinates me about this time period is this question this is the this is the kind of opportunity that few people in the history of our species have ever had what would you do if you were the first person to step foot in Wyoming what I mean by that is imagine being in a small group of hunters and gatherers who come into this state nobody's ever been here it's full of big animals you don't know where you are how are you gonna make a living your options are endless basically your options are limited by the ecology of the state and the geography the state but you can imagine in many ways you could make a living in terms of you're gonna hunt more you're gonna gather you can hunt big animals are gonna have small animals are gonna be organized social you're gonna live in big groups or small groups maybe egalitarian or you're gonna have Chiefs we're gonna have big social networks you're gonna have small ones they're gonna move huge distances or slowly move through the state how would you behave we as archaeologists are one of the few kinds of sciences scientists who have the opportunity to study humans living in these kinds of contexts so it's a really really fascinating time period to study in human history and of course these kinds of questions these kinds of events were repeated over and over again all over the world but it's really great to be a Wyoming archaeologist who works in Wyoming and studies the first people so what do we know about Clovis the Clovis people are the first widespread evidence of humans in the new world we know their populations were really low because Clovis sites are damn hard to find I'm looking for one for a long long time I've been digging one to the last four years and it's been amazing but they're really really rare they made these distinctive spear points that we call fluted points look like this fluted because they have these flakes removed from the base that give them this grooved appearance and we find points like this across the continent Clovis people it appears focus their subsistence efforts on the hunting of large game interestingly the animals that are rarest on the landscape and those are the big ones mammoths bison horse camel these are the ones that are the most common in Clovis faunal assemblages and these people were extremely nomadic we know this because we find stone and Clovis sites that has moved hundreds of kilometers regularly the Clovis site I've been working on is called the lapel mammoth site so this is my main focus of my work the Bishop man the site is looking for the next thing when I'm done with this one and this is a really cool site this is what it looks like this is lapel Creek in Converse County that's a tributary the Platte the site occurs about a mile from its confluence with the Platte and those are excavations in 2017 the site was found in 1986 by a doctor in Douglas named William Heinrichs and his buddy Mike Ernst they're out showing Mike's dad some tepee rings and a nearby bluff when they found mammoth bones sticking out of this Bank here right in here although the mammoth at the time was right in this part of the site where you see the radish vegetation this cell a lot of Clovis sites are found it's a lot how a lot of paling Indian sites are found people locals live and working on the land find amazing things and then share that information with us paleo-indian archaeologists people like me who do this for a living I think we're really smart about finding these sites have a damn hard time doing it but it's usually people are out on the land ranching hunting hiking walking to find these sites so we're really grateful for the help of the public in 1986 they found this site eventually the word got to George Frison in 1987 George came out and tested this site with a small crew excavations then ceased for 27 years because of a dispute with the landowner this is on private land we can't work on private land the permission a landowner we weren't able to go back until 2014 and what we have here is a Clovis mammoth kill and camp site this is from George's excavation in 1987 and here you see the bones of a mammoth these are the ribs here pretty much still in anatomical position the spine is running this way the head would have been here to the south and the tail to the north the limbs probably sticking out towards the bank it would probably eroded before we learned about the site and went down the creek George found a few small flakes and this flake tool in these bones he thought he had a mammoth kill site he was pretty excited to go back and pretty bummed out when he couldn't but was very happy when we were able to go back in 2014 and he's thrilled about the work we're doing there now George is 94 by the way I'm still going strong still doing field work what our recent work has shown is that this site is much larger than expected this site contains a camp area it's not just to kill so here you have the mammoth bone bed where George dug just the midsection of that animal and you see there's all this other stuff area and areas more distant from that animal so these circles here are proportionate to how many artifacts we found so bigger circles more artifacts so this site has a kill area a camp area and several unexpected features for a mammoth kill site focusing on this area that we call Block B here these are excavations from 2015 I believe or 2016 we have a big stain of red ochre I'm gonna tell you what that is in a minute but this stain is six feet long and four feet wide a hearth feature a fire pit in there hundreds of artifacts several tools butchered bison bone bone needles some of the oldest bone needles from the new world the only bone needles ever found in a Clovis site a bone bead all this really interesting domestic stuff associated with a mammoth kill so ochre what is okra okra is a natural mineral called hematite and it's kind of a blood-red color we don't know exactly what it's used for it's very commonly found in human burials you paint somebody read before he put them in the ground in this case that's not the case so you can see this pink hue in in the sediments here this is pigments that people brought in if you enhance this digitally you can really bring it out this is a huge area these nails are three feet apart where they brought in so much of this stuff the ground became stained red with it what were they doing with that why was it at a mammoth kill the simple answer is I have no idea in this same area beautiful chip stone tools these are what we call flake tools you make a big flake and then you modify the edge to give it a certain shape this materials from that's from the heart ville uplift most of it's from sort of the Guernsey Hartville area this is what we call an N scrape or a hide working tool that's been burned this is the tool George found you can see it's a different material this we call a spokeshave because the notch we don't know exactly what it was used for here are the needles they're all broken it's a really difficult hard sediments difficult site to dig all these are found in the water screen most of the breaks are probably because we broke them but it's the kind of thing where you have to break them to find them this is an eye here it's broken across the eye the tip there sort of flat on the eye and they come down to a round very fine tip and these things are tiny okay that's it scales 15 millimetres just to give you a better idea of scale tiny tiny but these are typical for paleo-indian bone needles bone bead this is probably the oldest ornament from the new world it's from right here in Wyoming you can see some ochre staining on it again this is a tiny little bead really interesting stuff that we did not expect to find it in Mammoth Gill in fact nobody's ever found stuff like this at a mammoth kill another thing I'm gonna highlight we thought there might be stuff to the south because we'd see we're seeing artifacts trailing away in that direction I thought the center of attention would be up here in the mammoths when I saw high densities of artifacts moving south I thought well it's putting some test units down here down in this test unit over here which is only half of a test unit it's three it's one meter by half a meter because we couldn't fit a full test you know one artifact which is a pretty fun one a beautiful Clovis point absolutely typical Clovis point you can see the flute here the very bottom is broken it's missing but a 60 feet from the mammoth there's no question about what it is the way we see this sight we see it as analogous to sites that have been studied for recent foraging peoples like the in booty and then Democratic Republic of the Congo who who traditionally hunted elephants and when they do they move their camp to the elephant you simply can't cut up an elephant and bring it back to your camp so what you do is you pick up your camp and move it to the elephant so after they kill an elephant they set up a camp and they'll be there for a week and everybody will cooperate in the butchery and dry the meat and distribute it and then move on and we think that's exactly what's happening you're the problem these sites are fascinating right I mean they they tell us all kinds of things about the first people in the new world the first people in Wyoming in Wyoming we're lucky to have two of them and perhaps three of them I mentioned Colby in the prow there's a third one down in Carbon County called the the U P mammoth this is a geologist former geologist the University of Wyoming named Brainerd Mears with the skull of that animal was found in the early 1960s and spring deposits and their artifacts in there but it's not clear if they were truly associated because that site was used by people through time and the deposits are really mixed so this is why I care this is why I spent all that time looking for that mammoth so we got our samples for radiocarbon dating and we submitted them and we finally got the dates back did we find where these bones had been found here are the dates we received hoping for thirteen thousand the oldest sediments we found were three thousand three hundred years old this is incredibly discouraging after looking for four years what I knew now is that we're in the wrong place and I really had no clue where to go next I'm not gonna end on that depressing note because two days later after receiving these radiocarbon dates I got this email from a guy named Pat Neal subject mammoth greetings tod i read with interest the article in the douglas budget well that caught my attention here's an excerpt from Pat's emails it brought back memories at the time when I was about 12 years old our family was friends with the Hildebrand's my mom was an amateur geologist / rock hound and we spent time exploring as I remember Lyle Hildebrand invited her family to accompany him and friends on a dig we spent two long weekends on some property where he had found some remains of a mammoth and from what was found a partial bone of a three-toed horse I know that much of the mammoths are digging up was left covered up because it was too delicate to remove but the bones we collected we took home and cleaned up on our backyard and gave them to the Historical Museum at the fairgrounds in Douglas there may be the ones referred to an article since I don't know the specific location you're looking at this may not be of interest to you I do know that the discovery was in the bank of a creek bed I'm certain I have many pictures of us digging at the location and of our backyard with the bones being cleaned if you're interested let me know and I'll dig into my old photo albums scan the pictures and send them to you why yes Pat what's your phone number I call up Pat and like Pat what do you remember tell me where'd you go I don't know I was 12 was in the back of my mom's car I have no idea this is Pat this is a mammoth this is also pat pat is an IT professional at a company in Oregon he's 72 years old grew up in Douglas he happens to check the Douglas budget website now and then so he goes home starts scanning photos sending him to me most of these photos are very much focused on the excavation and they're not real helpful in terms of determining where they are but in these photos some 38 of them there were two that provided some interesting clues one of them had been printed backwards it took me a little bit to figure that out but I believe this is Bishop and this is Hildebrand I may have that reversed this I presumed was bed Tech Creek and later determined it was see this hill back behind it there's this very distinctive white conical Hill sticking up I got on Google Earth and went bananas looking for that hill in the satellite imagery and trying to figure out exactly where this thing came from right and eventually we went out there and we found it because of those two photos this is a really foggy day that white Hills here it's very gray these guys are standing about right here if you look at these like this the draw and how it bends down the hill the slope is this slope this slope is this slope it's changed very little in 60 years it's remarkable here's what I know now those bones are found around 1938 and in July of August July and August of 1958 most of the animal was excavated by some Douglas locals over two weekends some of the mammoths we think is still in place from the photos that's what Pat says and some of the photos show like the tusks still in place we think they're still there Pat recalls that no artifacts were found I believe him he would know and this animal likely dates to Clovis times what we don't know is what bones are recovered I have not had an opportunity to inventory those bones in the Pioneer Museum now I'm very confident that those bones in that crate are the ones that came from this excavation I don't know what bones are still there I don't know if there was any human interaction with this animal or how much of the deposit remains but these are fun questions to try to answer right this is why in my job you go to work every day because what I do is really so we found it and we'll see where this leads to summarize herds of mammoths roamed Wyoming for almost two million years and around 13,000 years ago humans entered this ecosystem and for a few centuries people interacted with these animals hunting them and I very much believe that it was human hunting that drove mammoths to extinction not just here but driven elephant extinction around the world this event in Wyoming was what a small part of a global story spanning tens of thousands of years the story repeated over and over and over again as humans colonized the world leaving Probus odeon populations decimated and today elephants only survived and isolated parts of the world where the process continues today thank you [Applause]

Channel: Draper Natural History Museum

Views: 22,348

Rating: 4.5675673 out of 5

Keywords: Todd A. Surovell, Draper Natural Histoy Museum, DMNH, Draper After Dark, Nancy-Caroll Draper Foundation, Sage Creek Ranch, Anthropology, University of Wyoming, First Peoples, Mammoths, Wyoming

Id: 9ZBn0BbgWNw

Length: 46min 2sec (2762 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 05 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/alllie]

Humans suck so bad.