dhill757
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Member # 1890
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posted 10-04-2004 09:45 PM
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Great point about ancient cremation, Rockessence!
Here is an article I promised Essan a long time ago. It has to do with the bones of ancient mastadons and mammoths washing up along the coasts of the Atlantic. These bones come from the ocean floor along the coastline of the Carolinas. Follow the link and the article has some pictures. These same bones have also been seen in the Azores, but I'm still looking for those specific pictures.
This article comes from the Regional Review in1939, incidentally:
quote:
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Volume III - No. 3
September, 1939
In the ordinary course of events, the ocean is the great receiver ---- the world's greatest collector. It collects the sediments that are eroded from the land by streams, winds, waves and glaciers. As the earth's most populous burial ground, it receives the shells and bodies of countless organisms that swim in it or drift upon its surface. It also, upon occasion, receives the bodies of animals that lived upon the land. During times of Widespread upheaval many or these things are restored to the land, but only rarely does the ocean itself become an active agent in a process of giving back to the land the bones of animals that once roamed upon it. It is our purpose here to describe such a case. At Edisto Beach State Park in South Carolina the bones and teeth of long-extinct animals --- animals that lived upon the land in the Ice Age --- are being excavated from the ocean floor and washed ashore by storm waves of the modern Atlantic.
There is, of course, no actual migration as in the fanciful sketch which appears on this page, but the event nevertheless has some of the elements of an anachronism. Ancient animals are being washed ashore by the sea which, contrary to its custom, is acting as the giver rather than the receiver. If this situation is not anachronistic it certainly is paradoxical --- a reversal of a normal process of nature. The cavalcade of animals that comes piecemeal to the shores of Edisto includes beasts that seem strangely un-American. It includes elephants --- Woolly Mammoths and Mastodons --- Ground Sloths, Giant Beavers, Tapirs, Giant Armadillos, Royal Bison. It includes horses that lived and died here long before the Spaniards brought the first of our present stock in the early 16th century. But these venerable inhabitants of South Carolina are not un-American. It is we who are the newcomers! Associated with the forms mentioned above are others that are more familiar, such as the teeth of bears, antlers of elk and deer, and plates of large land turtles together with the bones of still other animals that lived in the sea. In this last group are the globular ear bones of whales, curved ribs of sea cows that were the ancestors of the rare individuals still living along the coast of southern Florida, plates of alligator and marine turtles, along with teeth of sharks and spines of rays that lived in periods before the Ice Age. During the summer of 1937 Student Technician Hugh M. Rutledge, with the help of volunteers from the CCC camp, collected more than 1,500 vertebrate fossils of which he identified more than 200. The following summer Student Technician Rudolph A. Jaworski added nearly a thousand specimens to the collection. We may well pause and wonder. How did such a motley crew of early Americans find their way into a common graveyard?
Before we can arrive at a satisfactory answer to this question we shall have to learn a little more about the existing situation at Edisto Beach. In picturing the ocean at Edisto as a giver we were being overly generous with that relentless foe of the land. Edisto lies in a broad reentrant in the coast line --- an arc, concave landward, that extends 180 miles from Charleston to the Florida boundary. In this arc today at Edisto, the waves are eating into the land at the measured rate of 15 feet a year, and there is clear evidence to indicate that the process has been going on for a long time.
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http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/regional_review/vol3-3b.htm 