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13,000-Year-Old Tools Unearthed At Colorado Home

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Bianca
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« on: February 27, 2009, 06:16:50 am »










This photo release by the University of Colorado on Feb. 26, 2009, shows Douglas Bamforth, Anthropology professor for the University of Colorado at Boulder, left, and Patrick Mahaffy, show a portion of more than 80 artfiacts unearthed about two feet below Mahaffy's Boulder's front yard during a landscaping project this past summer.

The artifacts, which may have been made during the Clovis period nearly 13,000 years ago, were neatly arranged in a cache near where this portrait was taken, suggesting that the users of these instruments may have intended to reuse them.


(AP Photo by Glenn J. Asakawa/
University of Colorado)
« Last Edit: February 27, 2009, 06:19:31 am by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

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Bianca
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« Reply #1 on: February 27, 2009, 06:18:27 am »









                                    13,000-year-old tools unearthed at Colorado home
   




     
Alysia Patterson,
Associated Press Writer
– Thu Feb 26, 2009
DENVER

– Landscapers were digging a hole for a fish pond in the front yard of a Boulder home last May when they heard a "chink" that didn't sound right. Just some lost tools. Some 13,000-year-old lost tools. They had stumbled onto a cache of more than 83 ancient tools buried by the Clovis people — ice age hunter-gatherers who remain a puzzle to anthropologists.

The home's owner, Patrick Mahaffy, thought they were only a century or two old before contacting researchers at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

"My jaw just dropped," said CU anthropologist Douglas Bamforth, who is leading a study of the find. "Boulder is a densely populated area. And in the midst of all that to find this cache."

The cache is one of only a handful of Clovis-age artifacts uncovered in North America, said Bamforth.

The tools reveal an unexpected level of sophistication, Bamforth said, describing the design as "unnecessarily complicated," artistic and utilitarian at the same time.

What researchers found on the tools also was significant. Biochemical analysis of blood and other protein residue revealed the tools were used to butcher camels, horses, sheep and bears. That proves that the Clovis people ate more than just woolly mammoth meat for dinner, something scientists were unable to confirm before.

"A window opens up into this incredibly remote way of life that we normally can't see much of," Bamforth said.

The cache was buried 18 inches deep and was packed into a hole the size of a large shoe box. The tools were most likely wrapped in a skin that deteriorated over time, Mahaffy said.

"The kind of stone that's present — the kind that flakes to a good sharp edge — isn't widely available in this part of Colorado. It looks like they were storing material because they knew they would need it later," said Bamforth.

Bamforth believes the tools had been untouched since the owners placed them there for storage.

Mahaffy's Clovis cache is one of only two that have been analyzed for protein residue from ice age animals, Bamforth said. Mahaffy paid for the analysis by California State University in Bakersfield.

A biotech entrepreneur, Mahaffy is familiar with the process. He is the former president and chief executive officer of Boulder-based Pharmion Corp., acquired by Celgene Corp. for nearly $3 billion in 2007.

Mahaffy wants to donate most of the tools to a museum but plans to rebury a few of them in his yard.

"These tools have been associated with these people and this land for 13,000 years," he said. "I would like some of these tools to stay where they belong."
« Last Edit: February 27, 2009, 06:19:56 am by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

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« Reply #2 on: February 27, 2009, 08:23:45 am »









                                            Ice Age Camels Butchered in Colorado







By LiveScience Staff
25 February 2009

Three stone artifacts from a 13,000-thousand-year-old Clovis-era cache unearthed recently in the city limits of Boulder, Colo. are shown by University of Colorado at Boulder anthropology Professor Douglas Bamforth and Boulder resident Patrick Mahaffy, who owns the property where the cache was found. Two of the more than 80 implements in the cache were shown to have protein residue from now-extinct North American camels and horses.

Stone tools found in Boulder, Colorado were used to butcher camels and horses 13,000 years ago, before the beasts became extinct in the region.

A new biochemical analysis of a rare Clovis-era stone tools was done at the University of Colorado at Boulder. It is the first study to identify protein residue from extinct camels on North American stone tools and only the second to identify horse protein residue on a Clovis-age tool, said CU-Boulder Anthropology Professor Douglas Bamforth, who led the work.

The Clovis culture is believed by many archaeologists to coincide with the time the first Americans arrived on the continent from Asia via the Bering Land Bridge, about 13,000 to 13,500 years ago, Bamforth said.

Other tools tested positive for sheep and bear protein residue.
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« Reply #3 on: February 27, 2009, 08:25:29 am »










Big American beasts



Dozens of species of North American mammals went extinct by the end of the Pleistocene, including American camels, American horses, woolly mammoth, saber-toothed cats, woolly rhinos and giant ground sloths. While some scientists speculate ice-age mammals disappeared as a result of overhunting, climate change or even catastrophic comet impact, the reasons are still unresolved, in Bamforth view.

The Mahaffy Cache, named for the owner of the property on which it was found, consists of 83 stone implements ranging from salad plate-sized, elegantly crafted bifacial knives and a unique tool resembling a double-bitted axe to small blades and flint scraps. Discovered in May 2008 by Brant Turney — head of a landscaping crew working on the Mahaffy property — the cache was unearthed with a shovel under about 18 inches of soil and was packed tightly into a hole about the size of a large shoebox. It appeared to have been untouched for thousands of years, Bamforth said.

The site appears to be on the edge of an ancient drainage that ran northeast from Boulder's foothills, said Bamforth. Climatic evidence indicates the Boulder area was cooler and wetter in the late Pleistocene and receding glaciers would have been prominent along the Front Range of Colorado, he said.

"The idea that these Clovis-age tools essentially fell out of someone's yard in Boulder is astonishing," he said. "But the evidence I've seen gives me no reason to believe the cache has been disturbed since the items were placed there for storage about 13,000 years ago."

All 83 artifacts were shipped to the anthropology Professor Robert Yohe of the Laboratory of Archaeological Science at California State, Bakersfield for protein residue tests that were funded by Mahaffy. The protein residue on the artifacts was tested against various animal anti-sera, a procedure similar to standard allergy tests and which can narrow positive reactions down to specific mammalian families, but not to genera or species.

"I was somewhat surprised to find mammal protein residues on these tools, in part because we initially suspected that the Mahaffy Cache might be ritualistic rather than a utilitarian," said anthropology Yohe said. "There are so few Clovis-age tool caches that have been discovered that we really don't know very much about them."
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« Reply #4 on: February 27, 2009, 08:27:12 am »









About the people

The artifacts were buried in a coarse, sandy sediment overlain by dark, clay-like soil and appear to have been cached on the edge of an ancient stream.

"It looks like someone gathered together some of their most spectacular tools and other ordinary scraps of potentially useful material and stuck them all into a small hole in the ground, fully expecting to come back at a later date and retrieve them," Bamforth said.

The type of people who buried the Mahaffy Cache "lived in small groups and forged relationships over large areas," Bamforth figures. "I'm skeptical that they wandered widely, and they may have been bound together by a larger human network." A single individual could have easily carried all of the Mahaffy Cache tools a significant distance, he said.

One of the tools, a stunning, oval-shaped bifacial knife that had been sharpened all the way around, is almost exactly the same shape, size and width of an obsidian knife found in a Clovis cache known as the Fenn Cache from south of Yellowstone National Park, said Bamforth. "Except for the raw material, they are almost identical," he said. "I wouldn't stake my reputation on it, but I could almost imagine the same person making both tools."

"There is a magic to these artifacts," said Mahaffy, the landowner. "One of the things you don't get from just looking at them is how incredible they feel in your hand --they are almost ergonomically perfect and you can feel how they were used. It is a wonderful connection to the people who shared this same land a long, long time ago."

Mahaffy said the artifacts will likely wind up in a museum except for a few of the smaller pieces, which will be reburied at the cache site.
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