Replica of a woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. The exhibit is from 1979 and the fur is musk hair. Credit: Image by Flying Puffin (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Researchers are following the age of a rib fragment of the Mount Holly mammoth.
Woolly mammoths may have walked the landscape at the same time as the earliest humans in what is now New England, according to a Dartmouth study published in Boreas. Through the radiocarbon dating of a rib fragment from the Mount Holly mammoth from Mount Holly, Vt., The researchers learned that this mammoth existed about 12,800 years ago. This date may overlap with the arrival of the first people in the Northeast, who presumably arrived around the same time.
‘It has long been thought that megafauna and humans in New England did not overlap in time and space and that it was probably ultimately environmental change that led to the extinction of these animals in the region, but our research yields some of the first evidence that they may have actually coexisted, ”explains co-author Nathaniel R. Kitchel, the Robert A. 1925 and Catherine L. McKennan Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology in Dartmouth.
Photo showing the featured labels and 3D model of the Mount Holly Mammoth Tribal Fragment housed in the Hood Museum of Art in Dartmouth. The rib was 3D surface scanned using a Creaform Go! SCAN50 with a resolution of 1.00 mm and is digitally archived in .stl format at Morphosource.org. Credit: Image by Nathaniel R. Kitchel and Jeremy DeSilva
The Mount Holly Mammoth, Vermont’s state fossil, was discovered in the Green Mountains in the summer of 1848 during the construction of the Burlington and Rutland railroads. One molar, two fangs and an unknown number of bones were excavated from a hill goat near Mount Holly. Over time, the specimens spread across different repositories as they were transferred from one collection to the next. A rib fragment of the Mount Holly mammoth has become part of the Hood Museum of Art collection and some of the other skeletal material is now housed in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University and the Mount Holly Historical Museum.
Kitchel stumbled into Mount Hood’s mammoth tributary in the Hood Museum’s storage facility last December because curators invited him to look at some artifacts from New Hampshire and Vermont. He came across a large leg (about 30 cm long) that had been colored brown from age. He had a feeling it was the remains of a mammoth and when he looked down at the label, it said: ‘Rib of fossil elephant. Mt. Holly RR sny. Presented by Wm. A. Bacon Esq. Ludlow VT. It was quite respectful for Kitchel, as he recently delivered a speech at Mount Holly’s Historical Museum for which he read the Mount Holly mammoth.
To appreciate the importance of the Mount Holly mammoth remains, including the rib fragment, it is helpful to understand the paleontology of the Northeast. During the last glacier maximum of about 18,000 – 19,000 years ago when the glaciers reached their maximum, the ice began to retreat and gradually exposed to present-day New England. During the period, it is likely that the glaciers probably tore up the fossil-conserving soil sufficiently, reducing the likelihood that fossils would remain intact. These changes together with the natural acid soil in the Northeast created inhospitable conditions for the conservation of fossils. While Kitchel has discussed the complex paleontology of the Northeast in the past with colleague and co-author Jeremy DeSilva, an associate professor of anthropology at Dartmouth, he never thought he would have a great chance of working on it.
After seeing this gigantic material in the Hood collection, he and DeSilva decided to get a radiocarbon date from the fragmentary rib. They did a 3D scan of the material before taking a small sample (1 gram) from the broken tip of the rib. The sample was then sent to the Center for Applied Isotope Studies at the University of Georgia for radiocarbon dating and a stable isotopic analysis.
Radiocarbon dating allows researchers to determine how long an organism has been dead based on the concentration of carbon-14, a radioactive isotope that decays over time. However, stable isotopes are isotopes that do not decay over time, giving a snapshot of what was absorbed into the animal’s body when it lived. Nitrogen isotopes can be used to analyze the protein composition of the animal’s diet. The nitrogen isotopes of the Mount Holly mammoth have low values compared to those of other recorded mammoths worldwide, while also reflecting the lowest value in the Northeast for a mammoth. The low nitrogen values could be due to the fact that these mega-herbivorous elms or lichens (nitrogen-fixing species) had to be consumed during the last ice age when the landscape was denser due to global warming.
“The Mount Holly mammoth was one of the last known mammoths in the Northeast,” says DeSilva. “Although our findings show that there was a temporary overlap between mammoths and humans, this does not necessarily mean that people saw these animals or had anything to do with their deaths, but it does raise the possibility that they may have done so now. has.”
The date of radiocarbon for the Mount Holly mammoth of 12,800 years overlaps with the accepted age when humans may have initially settled in the region, presumably during the onset of the Younger Dryas, a last pulse of freezing cold before temperatures dramatically warmed, indicating the end of the Pleistocene (Ice Age).
While other research on mammoths in the Midwest suggests that humans hunted and buried these animals in lakes and swamps to preserve the meat, there is little evidence that early humans in New England hunted or baited these animals.
The researchers are interested in the Mount Holly mammoth. The rest of his ribs and other bones can wait to be discovered. Or by the time they could have broken apart, dissolved in the acidic soil, or a scavenger could walk away with its legs. There are still many unknowns; yet the team has already begun further exploration using modern and more sophisticated archaeological techniques to investigate what may be underground at Mount Holly.
Reference: March 4, 2021, Boreas.