Ancient World Review

Pyrenean Mastodon Skull Unveiled In France

Video from 2014. Canadian Museum of Nature.

"A French farmer kept quiet for years after stumbling across the skull of an extinct ancestor of the elephant near the Pyrenees mountains, the Natural History Museum of Toulouse has told AFP." Source: Archaeology News Network.

"The farmer discovered the first-ever skull of a Pyrenean mastodon in 2014 while doing work on his land near the village of L'Isle-en-Dodon, about 70 kilometres (44 miles) southwest of Toulouse."

Note: According to Live Science (2016), "Mastodons went extinct around 10,000 years ago. There are many theories as to why. Most of these theories boil down to climate change and/or human hunting, according to Simon Fraser University. Some scientists think that the Earth warmed up from the Ice Age too quickly for the mastodon to adapt or that humans hunted them to extinction." It's also possible that they were wiped out by disease.

Climate change and disease sound like the most probable causes. The idea that small bands of prehistoric hunter-gatherers could have hunted the mastodon to extinction doesn't seem very likely at all.

Related: 10 Important Facts About Mastodons

Mammoth Kill Site Discovered In Austria

Documentary from 2010. Part Two here.

"Archaeologists have discovered a Stone Age kill site full of mammoth remains where ancient people used to herd the large mammals so they could be killed and butchered. The discovery was made during road works on a new bypass near Drasenhofen, a town in the Austrian state of Lower Austria." Source: Archaeology News Network.

Note: This is apparently the first mammoth kill site to be discovered in Austria.

Related: The Mission to Resurrect the Woolly Mammoth.

Woolly Mammoth Bones Discovered In Michigan (2015 - 2017)

Report from 2015.

"Last Monday, farmer James Bristle and his neighbor were digging a trench to install a drainage pipe in his wheat field on the outskirts of Chelsea, Michigan, when their backhoe suddenly struck something hard about eight feet underground. At first, the pair thought they had hit a buried piece of wood, perhaps a fence post, but they soon realized they had uncovered something neither had ever seen before—an enormous three-foot-long bone." Source: History (2015).

According to PBS (2016), "[r]enowned mammoth expert Daniel Fisher of the University of Michigan has recently presented fresh evidence that Ice Age hunters were involved in the mammoth kill. Together with a preliminary radiocarbon date, that may put the find among the earliest convincing signs of humans in the Americas." (Emphasis added)

Video from 2016.

Last year, a second excavation at the Bristle farm turned up more bones.

Report from 2017.

"Two years ago, James Bristle, a Michigan soybean farmer, found the bones of a woolly-Columbian mammoth hybrid while installing a drainage system on one of his fields. Now, according to a press release from the University of Michigan, they’ve found more. Researchers have unearthed around 40 additional bones, including the skull, tusks and teeth of an ice age creature." Source: The Smithsonian (2017).

Butchered Mammoth Suggests Humans Lived In Siberia 45,000 Years Ago

Video from 2017.

"The slashed and punctured bones of a woolly mammoth suggest that humans lived in the far northern reaches of Siberia earlier than scientists had previously thought, a new study finds." Source: Live Science (2016).

Entelodon - The Hell Pig

Notes: "Entelodon, meaning 'Perfect-Toothed," was a large ancestor of hoofed animals (mainly pigs). It could grow up to two meters tall, about the size of a rhino, and weighed up to one tonne. Entelodon has been described as the 'pig from hell'. They were aggressive, and could easily fight off many predators." Source: Dinopedia.

Comment: The Entelodon (or Entelodont depending on the source) has to be the scariest mammalian carnivore I've ever read about. After all, we're talking about a killer pig almost as big as a human and weighing up to a ton, and this monster would apparently eat just about anything. Luckily for early humans, predators like this died out long before our ancestors came along. They would have had to deal with wild boars, however. They're unpredictable and vicious and fossils of boars dating back to the Last Ice Age have been found all over Europe.

Image from Prehistoric Wildlife.

The Wooly Rhinoceros

A clip from the BBC series Walking With Beasts. "The Woolly Rhino first appeared some 350,000 years ago and may have survived until as recently as 10,000 years ago (1). Their fossils are fairly common and have been discovered throughout Europe and Asia. Well-preserved remains have been discovered frozen in ice and buried in oil-saturated soils. In Ukraine, a complete carcass of a female Woolly Rhino was discovered buried in the mud. The combination of oil and salt prevented the remains from decomposing, allowing the soft tissues to remain intact." Source: International Rhino Foundation.

(1) Early humans almost certainly encountered these strange beasts. According to Wikipedia, "Modern human remains dating to 43-45,000 years ago have been discovered in Italy and Britain, with the remains found of those that reached the European Russian Arctic 40,000 years ago."

Ancient "Monster" Elephant Was 50 Percent Bigger Than Modern Cousins

"Half a million years ago, the Arabian Peninsula wasn't a sandy desert but rather a lush, wet landscape. There, a gigantic elephant — 50 percent larger than today's biggest elephants — tromped around an ancient lake before dying, a new fossil skeleton reveals." Source: Live Science.

"The behemoth, known as Elephas recki, is an ancient elephant species that existed from about 3.5 million years ago to about 300,000 years ago and lived in parts of Africa and the Middle East, said study lead researcher, Iyad Zalmout, a paleontologist with the Saudi Geological Survey in Jeddah."

Peru's Prehistoric Crocodile Hotspot

"... the Iquitos bonebeds ... have yielded seven different species of prehistoric crocodylians. The crocs range from stout-snouted monsters to long-jawed fish snatchers and blunt-toothed caimans, and five of the species drawn from the bonebeds have never been seen before. The question facing the paleontologists is why so many different species were present in the same place at the same time." Source: National Geographic.

Note: This "croc hotspot" dates to around 13 million years ago.

Australia The First Four Billion Years - Strange Creatures

Pleistocene Mammoth Skeleton Found In Mexico May Have Been Killed Or Butchered By Humans

"Paleontologists have managed to recover much of the skeleton of a mammoth discovered last December in the central Mexican municipality of Tultepec..," according to the Archaeology News Network. The Pleistocene-era mammoth appears to have been butchered by early humans.

"Paleontologist Luis Cordoba Barradas, who is heading up the recovery effort, said the position of the bones at the site, located in the central state of Mexico, indicates 'the specimen may have been partially cut up by a human group...'

"The arrangement of ribs and other large bones - including the humerus, fibula and femur - and around a dozen vertebra indicates the animal may have become trapped in mud due to its heavy weight and been cut up or ripped apart by humans and other predators, the expert said."