Ice Age Mammals

Ice Age art find is earliest in Americas

WASHINGTON, June 23 (UPI) -- A 13,000-year-old bone with a carved image of a mammoth or mastodon may be the first example of Ice Age art found in the Americas, U.S. researchers say.

The bone fragment is the oldest and only known example of Ice Age art in the Western Hemisphere, experts said.

Fossil hunter James Kennedy uncovered the bone in Vero Beach, Fla., and noticed the engraving of a proboscidean -- the order of animals with trunks -- while cleaning it, redorbit.com reported Thursday.

"This is an incredibly exciting discovery," Dennis Stanford, anthropologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, said. "There are hundreds of depictions of proboscideans on cave walls and carved into bones in Europe, but none from America -- until now."

The engraving is at least 13,000 years old, the researchers said, because this is the age of the last appearances of mammoths and mastodons in eastern North America.

The research has been published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

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Ice Age art from Florida | Past Horizons

Esearchers from the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Florida have announced the discovery of a bone fragment, approximately 13,000 years old, in Florida with an incised image of a mammoth or mastodon. This engraving is the oldest and only known example of Ice Age art to depict a proboscidean (the order of animals with trunks) in the Americas. The team’s research is published online in the Journal of Archaeological Science .

The bone was discovered in Vero Beach, Florida. by James Kennedy, an avocational fossil hunter, who collected the bone and later while cleaning the bone, discovered the engraving. Recognizing its potential importance, Kennedy contacted scientists at the University of Florida and the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute and National Museum of Natural History.

“This is an incredibly exciting discovery,”

The engraving is 3 inches long from the top of the head to the tip of the tail, and 1.75 inches tall from the top of the head to the bottom of the right foreleg. The fossil bone is a fragment from a long bone of a large mammal—most likely either a mammoth or mastodon, or less likely a giant sloth. A precise identification was not possible because of the bone’s fragmented condition and lack of diagnostic features.

“The results of this investigation are an excellent example of the value of interdisciplinary research and cooperation among scientists,” said Barbara Purdy, professor emerita of anthropology at the University of Florida and lead author of the team’s research. “There was considerable skepticism expressed about the authenticity of the incising on the bone until it was examined exhaustively by archaeologists, palaeontologists, forensic anthropologists, materials science engineers and artists.”

One of the main goals for the research team was to investigate the timing of the engraving—was it ancient or was it recently engraved to mimic an example of prehistoric art? It was originally found near a location, known as the Old Vero Site, where human bones were found side-by-side with the bones of extinct Ice Age animals in an excavation from 1913 to 1916. The team examined the elemental composition of the engraved bone and others from the Old Vero Site. They also used optical and electron microscopy, which showed no discontinuity in colouration between the carved grooves and the surrounding material. This indicated that both surfaces aged simultaneously and that the edges of the carving were worn and showed no signs of being carved recently or that the grooves were made with metal tools.