Jonny Mahaffey Says:

Maybe, Just Maybe

Last night I watched another great episode of Niva, "The Discovery of Ice Age-era Fossils in the Rockies."

I had a hypothesis of my own about the main question the show seemed to pose: whether or not humans could have created what is known now as "Clay Mammoth," or rather, the stones that surrounded it in what appears to be a meat cache (something ancient humans did to preserve meat - putting the animal remains in a lake to take advantage of the natural preserving properties and using rocks to hold it in place, out of the reach of scavengers).

If Clay Mammoth is indeed a human meat cache, then it would place humans in North America about 25,000 years or so earlier than previously thought - about 10-13,000 years ago. Humans being present here during the Ice Age, isn't really that far-fetched. It's perfectly plausible.

My hypothesis however, is this:
dit to
What if the "meat cache" is not human made, but, animal made. Animals are smarter than most give credit to! I've had a dog named Daisy (basset hound) that used to take extra food she couldn't eat just then, and made a little food cache of her own, out of the immediate reach of other animals - even though there wasn't anything around, she still instinctually did this. So why couldn't something like one of the giant Grizzly-sized Ice-Age sloths have done it. Sloths are smart enough; and they're not the only suspect of Clay Mammoth murder investigation, many other thing,, capable things, were around at the time. Why automatically credit the behaviour to humans, when humans must have learned it from something else that had been doing it for a long long time. Maybe, just maybe, we don't think of absolutely everything all on our own. In fact, we don't, even today, we still learn from Nature.