Mastodon Found in Ohio Soybean Field

 Illustration from "Ohio's Prehistoric Peoples" depicting Paleo-Indians attacking a mastadon.  Makes me wonder why they didn't use atlatls or throwing sticks to kill from afar.  See my earlier  blog on atlatls.

At my local archaeology club annual potluck and auction on August 21, I picked up a flyer looking for volunteers for excavating a buried mastodon near the Richland/Morrow County line in Ohio, starting Saturday, August 23. 

The flyer explained that a backhoe digging a drainage ditch last year uncovered a mastodon tooth, bits of bone, and tusk fragments.  It may also have hit the mastodon’s skull.  The ditch drains water from a soybean field to a pond.    The man who farms that field discovered the tooth and bone fragments after the ditch was dug.

If the rest of the mastodon is found, the archaeologists will be digging every Saturday through at least September.

The group doing the dig last uncovered a mastodon 21 years ago.

In a book I bought at the auction, “Ohio’s Prehistoric Peoples”, the author, Martha Potter, says that mastodons, mammoths, giant elks, giant beavers, musk oxen, horses, and tapirs moved into what is now Ohio after the Wisconsin glacier began retreating, about 12,000 B.C.  “Practically all of these animals, however, had become extinct by about 3,000 B.C.,” she wrote in the book published by The Ohio Historical Society in 1968.

Potter, who was at the auction and signed my copy of the book, also mentions a mastodon skeleton found in Madison County and the remains of a giant beaver found in Franklin County, near Columbus, Ohio.  She says that, “Radiocarbon dates indicated that the giant beaver was here almost 10,000 years ago and the mastodon about 8,000 years ago.  Although none of these Ohio Pleistocene mammals have been found together with human skeletons or with man-made tools, it is highly possible that man was actually living here 11,000 years ago.  Ohio’s first human inhabitants, the Palaeo-Indians [also spelled "Paleo-Indians"], followed the movements of the animals and the retreating ice.”

The flyer says that one possibility is that the Paleo-Indians may have driven the mastodon into a nearby bog “to trap, kill, and butcher it, so we will also be looking for flint tools or evidence of cut-marks on the bones.”

More information on this find can be found on this website page of the Ohio History Connection Archaeology Blog. 

I hope to get on the waiting list for volunteers on this dig, so stay tuned!