As it turns out, some of the earliest Americans were artists. A bone fragment some 13,000 years old, with images carved on it of a mammoth or mastodon was discovered down in Florida.
Similar prehistoric art depicting animals with trunks has been unearthed in Europe, however, this is the first in the Western Hemisphere. The bone fragment contains an incised image roughly 3 inches long from head to tail and about 1 3/4 inches from head to foot.
The only other ancient bone found in North America carved with the image of a mastodon was found in Mexico in 1959.
The newly found North American image is similar somewhat to a few found in Europe.
Stout suggested the similarities between this and ancient European art could imply certain cultural contact or movement of people across the Atlantic is quite controversial. This idea has erstwhile been proposed by Stanford and others, though, has attracted a lot of skepticism and criticism from other archaeologists.
The animal was a long-necked, plant-eating sauropod, one of the largest creatures ever to have walked the earth. The fossil was found alongside fish and shark teeth in what would have been a sea bed 90 million years ago, leading its discoverers to believe the dinosaur might have been washed into the sea and torn apart by ancient sharks. The dinosaur was dubbed Angolatitan adamastor – Angolatitan means “Angolan giant” and the adamastor is a sea giant in Portuguese sailing myths.
“It’s very exciting to come to this conclusion,” said archaeologist Avi Gopher. The findings were scanned by X-ray and CAT scans, though further research will be required to concretize the hypotheses. If the hypothesis is concretized, he said, “Tthis changes the whole picture of evolution.”
When I came across this piece of news, my mind immediately fell to the