Researchers share surprising new findings on Ice Age excavation site
MND Staff
Bones of a woolly mammoth found in México state in the 1950s were recently re-examined by a Mexican research team using new technology. (Photo: INAH)
This story begins anywhere from 4,000 to 17,000 years ago, when woolly mammoths roamed the Earth. It picks up in Mexico in the mid-1950s, when the remains of a couple of those mammoths — and stone tools with traces of human use — were found in the central part of the country.
Now flash forward to the present day, when a recent study of those artifacts, using modern science and technology, is giving new glimpses into what researchers now believe was an Ice Age camp of humans in what is today México state.
“The study indicates that it was a seasonal hunter-gatherer camp,” archaeologist Patricia Pérez Martínez, author and coordinator of the project, said Tuesday during a presentation of the study’s findings.
The animal remains and artifacts, found nearly seven decades ago during a public works project in the small community of Santa Isabel Ixtapan, represent “the first material evidence of the existence of this type of site on the shores of Lake Texcoco, around 9,000 years ago,” Pérez said.
Head of the Hunter-Gatherer Technology Laboratory at Mexico's National School of Anthropology and History Patricia Perez Martinez
Lead researcher on the study Patricia Pérez Martínez heads the Hunter-Gatherer Technology Laboratory at the National School of Anthropology and History in Mexico City.
The findings are significant because small villages of humans in that time period usually existed in caves and rock shelters, often in mountainous regions, usually in the northern region of Mexico.
“Finding a seasonal hunter-gatherer camp in the open air is very [rare],” Pérez said.
More:
https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/new-findings-ice-age-site/
= new reply since forum marked as read
though a real surprise would be finding a harness or even a saddle for that wooly mammoth.
