Oilsands activity has uncovered vast wealth of a different kind - a 10,000-year-old quarry, rich with tools and weapons from some of the first Albertans, including a pristine spearpoint still smeared with the blood of a woolly mammoth.
"It's got this echo of the Ice Age world," said Jack Ives, Alberta's provincial archeologist, who described the find in a hearing before the province's energy regulator yesterday. "There's quite a rich concentration of artifacts."
The so-called Quarry of the Ancestors, which scientists suspect may be one of first places where humans lived in northern Alberta after the retreat of the glaciers, is found on an outcrop of hard, fine-grained sandstone adjacent to the Albian Sands oilsands lease about 75 kilometres north of Fort McMurray.
The $12.8-billion Albian Sands project is currently before the province's Energy and Utilities Board.
Source: London Free Press - link to story now broken.
Something is not right. This message is just to keep things from messing up down the road