Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer
Posted on 01/17/2003 4:06:23 PM PST by vannrox
Biologist Gerry Kuzyk was hiking with his wife in the remote reaches of the Yukon when he caught the putrid scent of caribou dung wafting through the chill air.
Then he saw it -- the biggest pile of animal droppings he had ever seen, 8 feet high and stretching over a half-mile of mountainside.
Kuzyk, a researcher with the Yukon Department of Renewable Resources, knew there weren't enough caribou in the entire territory to create such an epic mound. Odder yet, there hadn't been caribou in the area for nearly a century.
"It was like being in the `Twilight Zone,' " said Rick Farnell, a colleague who helped investigate the find. "You could see them from a distance -- big, black bands of feces. I'm talking tons of it."
The mystery was solved by lab analysis: The dung, the product of innumerable migrating caribou herds, had been frozen for thousands of years and only recently exposed by melting ice.
Along with the dung, the scientists soon discovered an arsenal of Stone Age darts, arrows and spears.
For most scientists, from ecologists to climate experts, the warming of the planet is a disturbing trend that could radically alter the environment. But for archaeologists, it has prompted a breathtaking treasure hunt.
Without doing any digging, the scientists are scooping up artifacts, mummies and fossils long hidden in the depths of monstrous glaciers.
"We walk right up and pull arrows and animals out of the ice," Farnell said.
Many of the items are simply the random debris of 10,000 years of passing human and animal traffic. But the glaciers also have coughed up some stunning finds.
In 1991, Swiss hikers in the Alps found "Otzi," a 5,300-year-old ice man felled by a flint arrowhead. A second ice man with a perfectly preserved woven hat and gopher-skin cloak melted out of the ice in British Columbia in 1999.
"It's incredible what's in the ice," said James Dixon, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.
Piece by piece, the artifacts rising from the ancient ice are beginning to recast archaeologists' understanding of the thousands of years after the last great ice age, an epoch when animals began probing the northern fringes of the planet and bands of humans began to populate North America in large numbers.
"There's a whole new scientific window opening," said Dixon, an expert on the human colonization of North America.
Unlike buried dinosaur fossils or crumbling Mayan monuments, the glacier artifacts are relatively unchanged from the day they were first encased in their icy tombs.
Arctic lupine seeds frozen for 10,000 years, for example, grew into healthy plants once they were removed from ice age lemming burrows.
The ice holds a zoo of perfectly mummified animals: fish, wapiti, sheep, mountain goats, moose, voles and birds.
"They're so beautifully preserved, they look like they're asleep," Farnell said. "You can't tell whether they died last week or died 4,000 years ago."
For archaeologists used to piecing together the past from chips of flint, finding soft organic material is rare bounty. They have flesh filled with DNA, feathers and dustings of ancient pollen. There are stomachs filled with the remnants of a last meal and patchworks of human tattoos.
The part of glaciers now melting captured a very particular slice of history -- a roughly 10,000-year period from the end of the last great ice age to the present.
The period began when the forbidding sheets of ice that had covered much of the Northern Hemisphere were beginning to retreat, opening a new realm of the planet to animals, birds and waves of human wanderers that eventually found their way to the Americas.
Over the ensuing years, the glaciers ebbed and flowed, driven by vast, cyclical changes in weather that could send tongues of ice rushing downward, only to retreat to alpine refuges a few hundred years later.
The last one, known as the Little Ice Age, began around 1450 and completed its cycle around 1900.
The planet is now in the midst of a natural warming cycle that has been compounded by a modern infusion of greenhouse gases -- carbon dioxide and other gases that are byproducts of industrialization. ....
(Excerpt) Read more at charlotte.com ...
Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer
The original site of Washington DC?
This reporter needs to be sent back to J-school. He (or she - I don't know many Ushas) made the mistake of printing the truth.
No mention of anyone's sister, though.
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But one big pile (8 feet high???) suggests fuel storage and there may have been a village a block away. The Afghans and others use dung for fuel so I would consider this.
In all honesty though, I think it's a hoax and these folks are looking for publicity....and they got it!!!....and we're contributing to their pile of SH**!!
Yes, and some of the bacterial/viral biomass may be lethal. You approach an exhumation of a victim of the spanish flu very gingerly if at all, for example.
I remember someone defining tomstones as being "ten feet down" in some places. The truth of the matter is that they were "10 feet down on the surface of a slope" where they had been pushed by a bulldozer.
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