NEWS

Morrow County mastodon might have coexisted with humans

Courtney Day
Reporter

ASHLAND – Morrow County farmer Clint Walker marveled at the large assortment of mastodon bones displayed in an Ashland University lecture hall Monday.

Nigel Brush, professor of geology, talks about a find during the presentation of the mastodon dig at Ashland University’s Kettering Science Building.

“I had no idea they had this much stuff,” said Walker, who first stumbled on the site researchers and volunteers ended up excavating last summer and fall.

The discovery came when Walker was adding a drainage ditch in his field near the Richland County line in northeastern Morrow County and he spotted a tooth he figured was too large to belong to any creature living today.

He was right. The bones were from a distant relative of the elephant that became extinct about 10,000 to 11,000 years ago.

A team led by Ashland University geology professor Nigel Brush spent several days digging up hundreds of bones and fragments from the site and then several months piecing together fragments, identifying bones, cleaning and preserving the artifacts and collaborating with experts throughout the country and in Canada to research the findings.

The mastodon bones were badly weathered and too fragmented to form a complete skeleton, but markings found on them, particularly on one vertebral bone, have led researchers to believe the animal might have been hunted by humans, Brush said.

Brian Redmond, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History curator and John Otis Hower chair of archaeology, said that finding evidence of interaction between humans and mastodons is rare.

Nigel Brush, professor of geology, talks about a find with Clint Walker, owner of the land where they discovered mastodon bones, and Jeff Dilyard, a retired teacher who helped out with the dig, during a presentation at Ashland University’s Kettering Science Building.

“There’s not that many sites in North America that have evidence of stone-tool cut marks,” Redmond said, adding that the markings on the vertebral bone are some of the clearest he has ever seen.

There is only a small window of time about 10,000 to 11,000 years ago when mastodons and humans would have both been alive in the area, Brush said.

Though many of the bones found have deteriorated too much to have enough collagen remaining for carbon dating, the team is hoping some of the bones can be dated to help confirm the theory that the animal was hunted by humans.

Small pieces of flint found near the bones might carry blood evidence that also could support the theory, Brush said. The team is waiting on those results to come back as well.

Bones of a mastodon lie tagged and organized during Monday’s presentation at Ashland University’s Kettering Science Building.

It appears the animal was butchered by paleoindians, Brush said, and then its bones were gnawed by large predators, making the pieces more difficult to fit together like a puzzle.

The bones were then weathered by the elements before being buried. Much later, just a couple of thousand years ago, a mud flow churned up the bones and bone fragments even more.

“What we have now is a residue, basically,” Brush said. “This is really what most mastodon sites look like.”

Unless a skeleton is well-preserved in clay, Brush said, its bones are unlikely to survive intact.

Still, the crew was able to find and excavate bones from throughout the animal’s body, from its skull to its toes.

Brush will co-author a paper about the findings with Redmond, Scott Donaldson, Jeff Dilyard and any other researchers who make major discoveries about the findings.

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Twitter: @courtneydaynj