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Research reveals first evidence of hunting by prehistoric Ohioans Ohio

Submitted by coldrum on Monday, 26 March 2012  Page Views: 4371

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Country: United States State: Ohio
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Jefferson's Ground Sloth
Jefferson's Ground Sloth submitted by bat400_photo : Jefferson's Ground Sloth (Megalonyx jeffersoni). More than seven feet tall when upright; a specimen found in Florida was seventeen feet tall. Image credited to the Illinois State Geological Survey, http://www.isgs.uiuc.edu/education/ice-age-res/sloth.shtml. Art to illustrate news story. (Vote or comment on this photo)
Cut marks found on Ice Age bones indicate that humans in Ohio hunted or scavenged animal meat earlier than previously known. Ten animal bones in the collections of the Firelands Historical Society Museum in Norwalk, Ohio, from a Jefferson's Ground Sloth show evidence of butchering. This large plant-eating animal became extinct at the end of the Ice Age around 10,000 years ago.

Dr. Brian Redmond, curator of archaeology at The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, was lead author on research published in the Feb. 22, 2012 online issue of the journal World Archaeology. Redmond and researchers analyzed the bones found in 1998 in the collections of the museum by society member and co-author Matthew Burr.

"This research provides the first scientific evidence for hunting or scavenging of Ice Age sloth in North America," said Redmond. "The significant age of the remains makes them the oldest evidence of prehistoric human activity in Ohio, occurring in the Late Pleistocene period."

A series of 41 incisions appear on the animal's left femur. Radiocarbon dating of the femur bone estimates its age to be between 13,435 to 13,738 years old. Microscopic analyses of the cut marks revealed that stone tools made the marks. The pattern and location of the distinct incisions indicate the filleting of leg muscles. No traces of the use of modern, metal cutting tools were found, so the marks are not the result of damage incurred during their unearthing. Instead, the morphology of the marks reveals that they were made by sharp-edged stone flakes or blades.

The "Firelands Ground Sloth," as the specimen is named, is one of only three specimens of Megalonyx jeffersonii known from Ohio. Based on measurements of the femur, tibia and other bones, it is one of the largest individuals of this species on record. It had an estimated body mass of 1,295 kilograms (2,855 pounds).

The sloth bones were first described in a 1915 scientific paper by geologist Oliver Hay. The bones were donated to the Firelands Museum before 1915. The only documentation with the remains indicates they were found in a swamp in Norwich Township. The exact locality where the bones were first discovered is uncertain.

For more, see www.physorg.com and with thanks to bat400 for additional information.

Note: 10000 years ago early Americans butchered 1.4-ton Sloth.
Contributor Bio for coldrum: Based in Milkyway, contributing since 2002. Favourite site: Avebury.

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"Research reveals first evidence of hunting by prehistoric Ohioans" | Login/Create an Account | 1 comment
  
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Butchered sloth bone lends more evidence to early North American settlement by bat400 on Sunday, 01 April 2012
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An excerpt of an article about the same subject, but focusing on the Canadian researcher involved:

A Canadian scientist's analysis of ancient animal remains found in Ohio — including the leg bone of an extinct giant sloth believed to have been butchered by an Ice Age hunter more than 13,000 years ago — has added weight to a once-controversial argument that humans arrived in North America thousands of years earlier than previously believed.

The butchered-sloth discovery — recently confirmed by University of Manitoba researcher Haskel Greenfield, co-author of a paper published in the latest issue of the journal World Archaeology — bolsters the growing consensus that prehistoric Asians crossed from eastern Russian to western Alaska as early as 16,000 years ago, possibly traveling down the coast of B.C. before spreading to the continental interior and the far reaches of South America.

U.S. experts led by an archeologist from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History recently re-examined the bone and other ancient remains, and contacted Greenfield — a specialist in early human tools and hunting — to help determine if the 44 incisions on the giant sloth's femur were, in fact, made by humans stripping meat from the downed beast.

"I went down to Cleveland full of skepticism," Greenfield told Postmedia News. "Partly, it was because other colleagues of mine had seen the specimen very briefly (and from a distance) and were sure that the marks were natural. It was only when I got up close to the specimen and began to look at it microscopically did I find a very different situation — one that I could not discount as caused by natural forces."

Greenfield said it was "the total pattern that overturned my skepticism — the location of the marks, their shape, their size, the direction that they were made from, etc., as well as the fact that the morphology of the marks was most similar to those made by stone tools."

The published paper — co-authored by Greenfield, CMNH archeologist Brian Redmond, U.S. National Park Service scientist Gregory McDonald and Firelands (Ohio) Historical Society researcher Matthew Burr — noted that, "until now, evidence of butchering and human utilization of ground sloths has been limited to South America."

But apart from the breakthrough discovery that early humans were hunting giant sloths as far north as the Great Lakes, the extreme age of the specimen — pegged at 13,435 to 13,738 years old through radiocarbon dating — offered a fresh clue in the mystery surrounding humanity's arrival in the Americas and dispersal throughout the hemisphere.

Said Greenfield. "Our study demonstrated that people were in northern Ohio and predated Clovis in the region by about 700 years." The Canadian scientist added that, "my feeling is that people came down the west coast of North America, not through a supposed ice-free corridor between the Rockies and the Laurentide glacier" as traditionally believed by North American archeologists.

"As they were coming down the coast, they encountered the massive glaciers that covered the Rockies and could not have crossed it easily into the interior of the continent," said Greenfield. "These early peoples would have been adapted to a coastal existence . . . Probably the origins of the inhabitants of the interior of North America were from a small band of these early hunter-gatherers who branched off from these coastal peoples."

Thanks to coldrum for the link. Read more: http://www.canada.com/technology.
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