Many hunt the mammoth, but not that many find one buried in a soybean field.
That’s what happened, the Washington Post reports, when one Michigan farmer went
digging in a soybean field Monday when he and his friend pulled up what they first thought was a bent, muddy old fence post.
But it was actually the rib bone of an ancient woolly mammoth.
Two days later University of Michigan paleontologist Daniel Fisher and his students were digging up what remained of the beast, which turned out to be quite a lot, actually. As the Washington Post notes,
There are a few things that make this particular mammoth exciting: It’s a very complete skeleton (although it is missing its hind limbs, feet and some other assorted parts), compared with most of the mammoths found in Michigan and surrounding areas. And because it has been carefully extracted by paleontologists, the bone has the potential to be studied much more thoroughly than those that are haphazardly pulled out of the ground.
Fisher, an expert on all things mammothy, told the WashPo that it looks as though the mammoth had been butchered by humans, though not necessarily killed by them.
Yep, that’s right. They may not have hunted the mammoth. But they apparently ate it anyway, and put the leftovers in a pond to store them for later.
I guess that would be considered the cave-person equivalent of getting takeout?
*Existed. Obviously they don’t exist now, what with the whole extinction thing. =P
I just got an email informing me that someone “liked” one of my comments. Is that even a thing? Can you “like” a comment? Because I don’t see a button for that.
@Orion: I get those on occasion too. I didn’t think it was possible on the site. : P
Don´t you know feminism killed the mammoths?
Got a weird mental image of a Roosh-faced mammoth being hunted and killed by prehistoric women.
SFHC (is it okay if I call you that?) — that’s fucking cool. I have learned a thing, and that’s always fun 🙂
Kupo — thanks for the tip, I’m on iOS and turned predictive text on, which seems to have solved it (in the most annoying way possible, but maybe I’ll adjust?)
@Argenti
Of course, and thankyou! ^^;
(Good to see you around, BTW! I think you stopped posting before I started, but I remember you from my lurker days.)
@M:
Thanks for the science nerding! I learned something and have now been sent on a spiral of wikipedia and academic paper reading.