The 13,900-Year-Old Mastodon Rib Found With A Bone Point Still Inside — And The CT Scan That Put Hunters Before Clovis
The ancient people who attacked the mastodon did not intend to leave an archaeological record.
They were hunting, not archiving.
The fact that they did leave a record — one of the most precise and direct records of ancient human hunting behavior in North America — is an accident of physics and geology and fourteen millennia of fortuitous preservation.
This accident is worth keeping in mind as a reminder of the extraordinary contingency that underlies all archaeological evidence.
Every ancient object that survives to be discovered and studied survived by accident — the accident of being preserved when everything around it was destroyed.
You Might Also Like
Stay for the Announcement
Daily Gossips
I Came to the Hospital With Gifts and Overheard My Husband Tell My Sister, “Your Son Will Have My Name, and Your Sister Will Pay for Everything”
Daily Gossips
The Command That Never Ends
Daily Gossips
My Husband Cooked Dinner, and Minutes After My Son and I Ate, We Both Collapsed. I Played Dead on the Floor and Heard Him on the Phone: “Soon They’ll Both Be Gone”
Daily Gossips