Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Prehistoric man, giant animal coexisted
The secret is out: Man and gomphotheres once coexisted in Sonora. Tools and spear tips found with fossil bones at a remote Sonoran site suggest that Clovis-era hunters butchered two juvenile specimens of the elephantlike megafauna about 13,000 years ago. It's the first discovery of such recent evidence of gomphotheres in North America, said Vance Holliday, a University of Arizona anthropologist. It's also the first time gomphothere fossils were found together with implements made by Clovis people, the oldest known inhabitants of North America, Holliday said. The discovery, on a remote ranch in the Rio Sonora watershed, was actually made in 2007 but was kept quiet to avoid alerting fossil hunters to it. Archaeologists from Mexico and the United States named the site "El Fin del Mundo," or "The End of the World." They continue to work the site in the Mexican state that borders Arizona but presented some preliminary findings last month at a Geological Society of America meeting in Portland, Ore. Holliday said Guadalupe Sanchez of Mexico's national institute of anthropology was originally taken to the site by a rancher who had discovered large bones in an arroyo. Holliday said he was unsure if Clovis people were hunting gomphotheres or scavenging them. In either case, Holliday said, "this would be the first documentation that there was some sort of human interaction with gomphotheres in North America."...read more
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