Vero Beach Ice Age Engraving - Mammoth Hoax Or The Real Deal?

Vero Beach...

In what is being hailed as one of the most sensational archaeological finds in recent years, comes news of the discovery of an engraved piece of fossil bone depicting a mammoth, the first known such artefact ever to have been described in the Americas.

Here are some details from the only online source I could find anywhere, (*see end of post for update) and whilst I'm sure any journalist would tell you that a single source story always needs further verification for true credibility, sometimes the one source will have to suffice, which in this case is Vero Beach 32963. Thus we begin...

In what a top Florida anthropologist is calling “the oldest, most spectacular and rare work of art in the Americas,” an amateur Vero Beach fossil hunter has found an ancient bone etched with a clear image of a walking mammoth or mastodon.

According to leading experts from the University of Florida, the remarkable find demonstrates with new and startling certainty that humans coexisted with prehistoric animals more than 12,000 years ago in this fossil-rich region of the state.

No similar carved figure has ever been authenticated in the United States, or anywhere in this hemisphere.

The brown, mineral-hardened bone bearing the unique carving is a foot-long fragment from a larger bone that belonged to an extinct “mammoth, mastodon or ground sloth” according to Dr. Richard C. Hulbert, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History museum. These animals have been extinct in Florida for at least 10,000 years.

Etched into the bone by a highly sharpened stone tool or the tooth of the animal is the clear image of a walking adult mammoth or mastodon. Extensive tests over the past two months have shown that the image was created when the bone was fresh, presumably right after the animal it belonged to was killed or died.

...far away in time.

However, I find myself as yet unconvinced of the authenticity of this discovery, especially as the archaeological context of the find, four years ago, has not been described in any detail, whilst the apparent fact that it's the only such artefact ever to have been found in the Western Hemisphere makes the find seem all the more unlikely. Although it could be argued that until a few years ago, archaeologists wondered why there was no Palaeolithic art in Britain - the discovery at Creswell Crags of engravings in a cave dating to the Late Upper Palaeolithic demonstrated that the Magdalenian tradition had extended much further north than thought, and it may well be the case that Vero Beach extends the tradition west - or east via Asia - by thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean.

There seems to be little dispute that this is a genuinely ancient carving, at least judging by the number of qualified opinions and conclusions that have issued forth from academia, but there is nothing published thus far that specifically establishes a conclusive link between the mammoth engraving and the New World - it so closely resembles what we'd expect to see from a Magdalenian site in north-western Europe, that it's hard to imagine why only a single instance of such a widespread and long-lived European cultural practice should suddenly turn up in North America, 12,00-14,000 years ago.

How for example, do we know that this wasn't originally found in modern-day Europe and quietly salted into a convenient location at Vero Beach where someone was sure to find it? Here's some related detail...

Experts who have examined the bone, found at a location which has not been publicly disclosed on the northern side of Vero Beach, concluded the carving and surface are of the same age – 12,000 to 14,000 years old — with no evidence of recent tampering (see accompanying story on tests that have been performed to date)...

...One test, a rare earth element analysis, is expected to be concluded this week to determine where in Florida’s geological strata or layers the bone was originally located. This powerful new method utilizes the process of fossilization itself.

When bones become fossilized, calcium is slowly replaced by minerals including rare earth elements like scandium and cerium. Bone takes up these rare earth elements, or REEs, in direct proportion to the amount present in the particular strata of earth where the bone was originally located.

This gives the bone a unique REE signature that confirms the earth layer where a bone originally lay and gives an idea of its age. Scientists can then compare the results to those of others fossil bones found in similar settings in Vero Beach.

We learn from the article that the find was made by James Kennedy, described as an amateur fossil hunter, and that the artefact was recovered some four years ago, although it wasn't until February 2009 that he removed it from it's temporary storage, wiped away the mud, and beheld the figure of a mammoth in motion engraved faintly into the fossil bone.

So although this is potentially a very fortuitous find, the fact that its original context has been lost would lead sceptic minds to question the validity of the claims that the engraved bone was indeed a local product, and not shipped in from elsewhere, either in the past or present era. However, it would appear that the impending REE analysis referred to above should at least confirm whether or not this remarkable find was made in Ice Age Florida, and there will doubtless be much crossing of fingers by those of us hoping that this really is a genuine discovery.

Right away, scientists wondered at so rare a find: Could the image have been carved more recently into the rock-hard surface of the bone that is at least 10,000 years old? Could an indigenous Floridian from even the last millennium have chiseled an image of a creature that disappeared with the Ice Age?

The image looked old and worn and seemed similar to European cave paintings and to artifacts found far from the Americas, but was it authentic?

The bone, currently housed in a vault locally, first went to Barbara Purdy in early April. Even specialists can be fooled, but to her eyes, it looked quite real. “The thing that struck me at the beginning was, unlike forgeries generally, the image is not deep,” Purdy says. “It could easily be missed. It looked naturally worn, the way a coin does that has been handled a great deal, the image beginning to fade.”

Dr. Michael Warren, forensic anthropologist and director of the C.A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory at the University of Florida, has studied the incisions that form the image and the surface of the bone, and has found both to be “ancient.”

In May, Dr. Kevin Jones, the chairperson of the Material Science and Engineering Department at the University of Florida, as well as two other scientists working with him there, also examined the carving.

Using a method called energy dispersive X-Ray spectroscopy and a scanning electron microscope, they were able to study the object in tremendous detail. All three scientists concluded that both the carving and the bone’s surface were the same age, with no evidence of recent tampering.

Around the country and abroad, Purdy sought out experts in Upper Paleolithic art, Late Pleistocene geology, paleontology and Paleoamerican archeology. She asked them to examine photographs and an electron microscope picture of the bone and carved image. None so far has voiced a reason to doubt the object’s authenticity, although tests and examinations continue.

I'm still not convinced, because I'm not aware of anything remotely similar from this era of Ice Age America, whereas we might expect other bones to have been modified in the same way, whether depicting either figurative or abstract designs - bone was a plentiful medium, and although of course such organic remains preserve very badly, and numerous other examples of this type of engraving from America may simply not have survived and are lost, the sheer volume of unmodified Pleistocene fossil bone recovered to date, appears to indicate that almost nobody other than the putative engraver engaged in such activities at that time.

On the other hand, it would be just as odd if no humans in Pleistocene America ever drew, painted or engraved anything, especially if we bear in mind that anatomically modern humans had by this time been creating figurative art in some quantity since the Aurignacian years of Upper Palaeolithic Europe, which was a good 20,000 years before the immediate predecessors of the Clovis culture were living in an America that was then populated by a faunal suite of such variety and quantity that the few humans there must have imagined they'd landed in a paradisical wonderland.

The fact that (almost) no-one of this era and later ever thought to depict a single element of the huge variety of creatures they would have encountered is puzzling, and furthermore would seem to argue against the idea that Eurasian creators of art were doing so primarily because they were depicting animals of prey. Early American hunters would, broadly speaking, have experienced the same hunting lifestyle, tactics and strategies, so presumably the same putative motives for creating so-called hunting magic would have been present in them too.

The dates of 12kya-14kya correspond roughly with the end of the Magdalenian era in Europe, after which this type of artistic activity vanished for ever, for reasons that remain as obscure as those which had prompted such behaviours in the first place.

Before this latest news hit the wires, Vero Beach was already a site of renown amongst archaeologists and palaeontologists alike, not least because two human skeletons, believed to have dated from a similar era to the mammoth engraving, were recovered. Indeed, this area has come under intense archaeological scrutiny at various points over the past century or more, and who knows how much unsupervised digging and other activities have taken place there during that time.

Despite my own misgivings, I'm tempted to quote the veritable army of academics supporting the validity of the proposed artefact, and I'm assuming they have good or better access to the details and more or less exact location of the original find by Kennedy - something along the lines of a previously undisturbed stratigraphic sequence for example. No details of the exact location are being given, primarily because nobody wants to encourage looters, nighthawkers and their ilk to pay unwelcome visits to the site, but for the outside world to be convinced, more finds in precisely described contexts will need to be made before all the doubters are swayed.

On this note, we hear from Barbara Purdy, whom it would appear, has been instrumental in getting this artefact examined and analysed by suitably qualified scientists - she is convinced that further work needs to be done at Vero Beach, as we see from this...

Barbara Purdy has spent years studying and analyzing the earliest Floridians and the evidence they left behind. Her most recent book, “Florida’s People during the last Ice Age,” released last year, offers an overview of the last 100 years of research into Florida’s earliest people.Fossil sites and finds in Vero Beach and Melbourne are among the many she describes in detail.

Purdy would like to see a new, more complete excavation of the old Vero site that has continued to yield fossil animal bones and human artifacts like spear points. She calls for a new “well-designed project incorporating the expertise of individuals from various disciplines using 21st century techniques.” She estimates a thorough scientifically executed excavation would cost around $150,000.

“What we need down there requires going down eight feet or more into the deposits,” she says. “All material needs to be screened with fine mesh. It all needs to be carefully done, not contract archeology, but a painstaking University-type project.”

The question of pre-historic man living here during the late Pleistocene now may be resolved, but scientists wonder what other finds might be discovered. The famous site of Vero Man, where human fossils were first found, will likely be disrupted this year due to expansion of the Vero Beach water plant.

Other scientists interested in the age of bones and the surrounding sediments found there plan to begin work in June. Any excavation will be the last opportunity to properly examine the site before the water plant project.

As it's still only June, there's plenty of the summer left for more work to be done at the site, and an estimated price-tag of $150,000 seems a small price to pay for further, and urgently needed work at what might turn out to be one of the most important sites of its type from that era anywhere in the world, especially when there is the tantalising possibility that not only will the integrity of the original find be proven genuine, but that future finds of a similar nature would radically illuminate our perceptions of a poorly understood era of prehistoric America.

As I haven't been able to find a great deal of detailed text either on how Vero Man/Woman was found and lost, or of the great significance of the Pleistocene remains found in the locale over the past decades, I'll delay writing more for the time being, unless of course any more finds come to light during the current season's dig, or there is welcome news that the mammoth engraving really is what it's claimed to be.

The very small image at top is all I could glean from the material published online, but hopefully better representations will appear in due course.

via Afarensis

Update 17/09/09 - TCPalm.com Vero Beach Man Who Found 13,000-year-old Engraving On Bone Wants to Sell It For More Than $1 million




Update 07/06/09 - TCPalm.com has this: Bone Appears To Date Human Presence In Treasure Coast Back 13,000 Years

...and this from before the current digging season began...

Archaeological Dig To Start In Early June At Site Where Vero Man Was Found

see/hear also :: Mammoths Roasted in Prehistoric Kitchen Pit - Jennifer Viegas at Discovery News

Ricky Gervais audiobook 'Natural History' - around 29 minutes in, there's a brief discussion with Karl Pilkington and Stephen Merchant regarding whether or not we should bring back the mammoth. The entire presentation is an exploration of the mind and logic of Pilkington, as the three of them discuss evolution, creationism and the role of science, and if we should give up trying to make new discoveries of as yet unknown species of life, or even make new scientific discoveries at all - (via John Hawks)

(just under £2 on iTunes uk, for just under 50 minutes chit-chat)

images:: Vero Beach mammoth carving - both from the linked article at TCPalm.com, who thus far, have posted the best images I've been able to find.