I have a bachelors degree in anthro...I find it fascinating that there was substantial skeletal material at all of remains that old in the Lake Jackson area. The Gulf Coast is not known for its preservation qualities, and to find any evidence of the former Karankawa occupation is a treasure indeed. How neat that older remains were found!!
If you have an anthro/archaeo ping list, please put me on it.
Here's another interesting article, but it's too late and I'm too tired to post it on its own thread just now:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/82038_mastodon09.shtml
Still unresolved: The puzzle of the mastodon's bones
Site of Sequim find and its pointed stone is donated to conservancy
Friday, August 9, 2002
By TOM PAULSON
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
At the end of the last ice age, a mastodon died near modern-day Sequim only to have its bones recovered some 14,000 years later. The discovery spawned a scientific feud still simmering today.
Yesterday, 25 years to the day in 1977 since Emanuel Manis accidentally dug up the mastodon's tusks, his widow donated the two-acre site to the non-profit Archaeological Conservancy, based in Albuquerque, N.M.
Manis, who died in April 2000, unearthed the bones while digging with a backhoe, intending to create a duck pond in the yard. Instead, he created a new listing for the National Register of Historic Places.
"We wanted to make sure it was protected," said Clare Manis Hatler, now 71 and remarried. "It's not every day you find tusks in your front yard."
And it's not every day such a discovery poses a major challenge to established theory.
"It was the first direct evidence of humans associated with mastodons anywhere in the world," contended Dr. Carl Gustafson, a retired Washington State University archaeology professor and one of the first scientists to study the bones recovered from the grassy pasture now known as the Manis Mastodon site.
Not everyone agrees with him, Gustafson acknowledged, because the evidence is still not universally accepted. Before the Sequim find, he said, the conventional wisdom within the scientific community had been that humans didn't hunt, eat or even cross paths with the prehistoric mastodons.
But the Manis mastodon was found to have died with some type of projectile point embedded in one of its ribs.
"They (the examining scientists) were perplexed by the projectile point because nobody had even thought it possible that humans might have been hunting these creatures some 14,000 years ago," said Gene Hurych, Western regional director for the conservancy's office in Sacramento.
The argument over the significance of the Manis mastodon is perhaps also complicated by a competing set of remains found at a site in Jefferson County, Mo. Though the Missouri mastodon remains were first noticed as far back as 1839, it wasn't until 1979 -- two years after the Manis find -- that scientists in Missouri reported finding a lone Clovis spear point among the bones.
The Missouri scientists say their discovery is "the first time archaeologists had found evidence of human weapons interspersed with the bones of these giant prehistoric beasts." It wasn't embedded in the bones, but it was a Clovis spear point -- a universally accepted style of stone weapon.
The problem with the Manis mastodon's stone point, Hurych said, was its crude nature. Some attacked it as not a human-fashioned weapon at all.
"I guess they think the mastodon must have fallen on it or something," he said.
Hurych said he's not going to take a position on the debate, except to say that his organization regards the Manis mastodon site as one of the most important sites among the 250 archaeological sites they own and manage.
Prehistoric human association with mammoths, the elephant-like creatures that evolved much later than the mastodons, has been less controversial among scientists.
As the evidence out of the Manis site continues to analyzed, Gustafson said, it's becoming increasingly difficult to deny human association. It's pretty clear, he said, that this was a place where ancient Americans butchered these beasts and worked the bones.
"More and more people are beginning to believe this," he said. Though retired, Gustafson is still working on the bones and the data collected at the site.
The Manises had lived in Sequim for two years when they stumbled upon the tusks. Emanuel Manis had been a precision machinist for Lockheed and also for the Stanford Linear Accelerator, one of the world's leading high-energy physics research institutions.
"We had a strong interest in science," said Manis Hatler. They moved to Sequim in 1975 and bought a bowling alley, intending to semi-retire. But after discovering the mastodon, they spent a decade or so managing an active archaeological dig.
"The Manises literally devoted their lives to this archaeological site," Gustafson said. "I think it's one of the most significant finds of the last century."
"They've hung with this all these years," said Hurych. There's much more yet to be found, he said, and the site may someday be re-opened to more study.