Tag: artifacts

Commentary: Humans Lived in Europe Earlier Than Thought, in Neanderthal Territories

RealClearWire
a wax figure of a Neanderthal

Perched about 325 feet (100 meters) up the slopes of the Prealps in southern France, a humble rock shelter looks out over the Rhône River Valley. It’s a strategic point on the landscape, as here the Rhône flows through a narrows between two mountain ranges. For millennia, inhabitants of the rock shelter would have had commanding views of herds of animals migrating between the Mediterranean region and the plains of northern Europe, today replaced by TGV trains and up to 180,000 vehicles per day on one of the busiest highways on the continent.

The site, recognized in the 1960s and named Grotte Mandrin after French folk hero Louis Mandrin, has been a valued location for over 100,000 years. The stone artifacts and animal bones left behind by ancient hunter-gatherers from the Paleolithic period were quickly covered by the glacial dust that blew from the north on the famous mistral winds, keeping the remains well preserved.

Since 1990, our research team has been carefully investigating the uppermost 10 feet (3 meters) of sediment on the cave floor. Based on artifacts and tooth fossils, we believe that Mandrin rewrites the consensus story about when modern humans first made their way to Europe.

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Four Incredible Dinosaur ‘Graveyards’

RealClearWire
T Rex fossil exhibit

Over their 165 million-year reign on Earth, hundreds of billions of dinosaurs lived and died. Occasionally, they did the latter en masse, making it much easier for us to find their fossilized remains and examine them. Concentrated areas of dinosaur death have become colloquially known as “dinosaur graveyards”. The following are some of the most remarkable.

1. The Hilda Mega-Bonebed. Around 75 million years ago, a herd of Centrosaurus that may have numbered in the thousands was swept up in a torrential flood that inundated the lowlands of what is now Alberta. The hapless, top-heavy dinosaurs were dragged into river channels that flowed into the shallow inland sea which cut North America in two, where they drowned and accumulated in a macabre mass. Scavengers feasted upon their fleshy remains.

Today, these centrosaurs’ resting place is a jumble of bones roughly the size of 280 football fields in southern Alberta’s Dinosaur Provincial Park, a goldmine of ancient history. It is so large that completely excavating it would be impractical.

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