The extinct beasts had lain suspended in their refrigerated graves for nine millenniums or more, like grapes in Jell-O. The flashiest archaeological finds in Yakutia, a republic in northeastern Siberia, have been the carcasses of woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, steppe bison and cave lions - big cats that once roamed widely across the northern hemisphere. Three-million-year-old insect fossils have been recovered in eastern Alaska (blind weevils of the genus Otibazo) and the western Yukon Territory (the species Notiophilus aeneus, better known as brassy big-eyed beetles). The marine reptiles lived between the Triassic and Cretaceous periods, which extended from 66 million to 250 million years ago. In southern Chile, dozens of nearly complete skeletons of ichthyosaurs were disgorged near the Tyndall Glacier. Laboratory analysis revealed that big-game hunting has been an essential part of pastoral subsistence and culture in the Eastern Steppes for more than 3,500 years.Ībout 10 percent of the planet’s land mass is covered with glacial ice, and as the world defrosts, ancient creatures great and small are being unburied as well. Taylor’s team discovered an icy killing ground of argali sheep, along with the spears and arrows used to slay them. Although people in the region have long been classified as herders, Dr. His ongoing survey of melting ice margins in the Altai Mountains of western Mongolia has produced artifacts that upended some of the most basic archaeological assumptions about the area’s history. Taylor’s own work focuses on the relationship between climate and social change in early nomadic societies. “In the Rockies, researchers have recovered everything from frozen trees that document important changes in climate and vegetation to the hunting implements of some of the first peoples of the continent.”ĭr. “In the Yukon, ice patch discoveries have given us new insights into the pre-European tradition of copper-working by Indigenous peoples,” said William Taylor, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History in Boulder. The primitive hunting weapon is the earliest organic artifact ever to be retrieved from an ice patch. Fourteen years ago, in the mountain ice outside Yellowstone National Park, he spotted the foreshaft of a throwing spear called an atlatl dart, carved from a birch sapling 10,300 years ago. Spectacular glacial finds invariably involve luck, as Craig Lee, an archaeologist at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, can attest. “It is also a rare and detailed archaeological example of Indigenous warfare.” Several of them had evidently been dragged out of the house, bound with grass rope and killed - some beheaded. In all, the researchers and native Yup’ik people who live in the area unearthed more than 100,000 well-preserved artifacts, as well as the singed carrion of two dogs and the scattered bones of at least 28 people, almost all women, children and elders. The ground was black and clayey and riddled with hundreds of slate arrow points, as if from a prehistoric drive-by shooting. Their most astonishing discovery was the charred remnants of a large communal sod house. “Little did we know that we were digging in something approaching the Yup’ik equivalent of Troy.” Knecht, an archaeologist at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. “When we began, the hope was to learn something about Yup’ik prehistory by digging in an average village,” said Dr. No one was spared.įor the last 12 years, Rick Knecht has led an excavation at a site called Nunalleq, about 400 miles west of Anchorage. The victors then attacked the undefended town, torching it and slaughtering its inhabitants. But the residents had been tipped off and set an ambush, wiping out the marauders. According to one account, the carnage started when one village sent a war party to raid another. įor the past few centuries, the Yup’ik peoples of Alaska have told gruesome tales of a massacre that occurred during the Bow and Arrow War Days, a series of long and often brutal battles across the Bering Sea coast and the Yukon. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
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