Nathaniel Kitchel was only hoping to find something that his Dartmouth College students would be interested in when he visited the Hood Museum of Art storage warehouse that winter day. “Really just to see what was there and if there was something that I found particularly interesting,” he recalls.
What Kitchel found could change what we know about our early New England ancestors and the beasts that shared the landscape.
Kitchel, a postdoctoral fellow in the Dartmouth Department of Anthropology, is an archaeologist who studies the first humans who settled in northeastern North America. He and his colleague from Dartmouth, Jeremy DeSilva, just published a scientific article that reveals that the woolly mammoth might once have shared these lands with the first humans to arrive here.
The story begins in December 2019, when Kitchel visited the Hood Museum offsite storage facility to examine his collection of New England artifacts, which had been donated to Dartmouth many years ago.
Kitchel spotted a large bone – big enough to get his attention. There was a tag attached. When he turned it over, he read these words: Mount Holly, VT, and “fossil elephant”.
Nathaniel Kitchel, a postdoctoral fellow in archeology at Dartmouth College, found the mammoth rib bone in the archived collection of the college’s Hood Museum of Art.
He didn’t jump up and down or yell to call for the Tory, Kitchel said. “But the internal monologue was: Wow. OKAY. Wow, ”he said.
A few weeks earlier, Kitchel had given a talk at the Mount Holly Community Historical Museum in his native Vermont. Mount Holly is where workers building a railroad in 1848 discovered the partial fossilized remains of a mammoth preserved in a bog.
The find – a molar, two tusks, and a few bones – became known as the Mount Holly mammoth, and was later adopted by Vermont as its state fossil. (Incidentally, New Hampshire is one of the seven fossil-free states, according to fossilera.com.)
At the Mount Holly Museum, Kitchel had shared his opinion that the first humans to arrive in New England were unlikely to ever encounter mammoths or behemoths. “You might want to think humans might have been around when this creature was alive, but the best evidence we have right now indicates it’s pretty unlikely,” he told the audience.
Now Kitchel was staring at a fossilized rib of the mammoth he was talking about. It was also the evidence that could prove to him that he was right or wrong. “Famous last words,” he said.
Working with colleagues at Dartmouth and Curators at Hood, he collected a tiny fragment of rib bone and sent it to a lab at the University of Georgia lab specializing in radiocarbon dating, which determines how long an organism has died based on a radioactive isotope. which degrades over time.
Eight weeks later, the answer came via email: the Mount Holly mammoth was 12,800 years old. It is the “youngest” mammoth ever discovered in New England – recent enough to have possibly encountered humans, Kitchel said.
Most of the mammoth and mastodon fossils found in the area are 14,000 to 15,000 years old, he said.
Are humans hooked?
What makes the discovery so important, Kitchel said, is what it contributes to a long discussion about whether humans ever hunted these ancient elephants, known as proboscidians. In other parts of North America, there is strong evidence that they have done so.
This led to scholarly arguments, he said, about “the role humans played in the ultimate extinction of these animals.”
The arrival of the first humans coincides with the demise of the mammoths, but there were other significant factors, namely the end of the Ice Age and the dramatic climate change that accompanied it.
The lack of evidence that humans and mammoths have ever been in this region at the same time has been part of the debate, Kitchel said. “If they don’t overlap, you can’t blame the humans.”
Now that his research has shown that they probably overlap, humans are back on the hook, he said, “with the major caveat that it’s not because humans may have shared the landscape with these animals that they necessarily chased them away “.
Driving them away would not have been an easy task. From what scientists have learned from their skeletons, mammoths were again a third the size of Asian elephants and could have weighed up to 20,000 pounds, Kitchel said.
Kitchel did not weigh in on the debate. As an archaeologist who studies early peoples, he said, “It’s important to understand the creatures they shared the landscape with, whether or not they tried to eat them. Because it gives a more complete picture of what life could have been like back then. “
Mammoths in motion
The fossilized remains of the Mount Holly mammoth have a “rich history,” Kitchel said. “They took trips.”
“By 1848 paleontology in North America was in its infancy and people were starting to try to understand what elephants were doing in various places in North America,” he said.
When the Mount Holly mammoth was discovered, researchers from Harvard University traveled to Vermont to inspect the remains, then brought them back to Harvard for study. One of the creature’s tusks was later returned to the University of Vermont and is now on permanent loan to the Mount Holly Museum, Kitchel said.
The rest were part of a collection which was then sold to JP Morgan, the financier of the late 1800s, who sent them to the Museum of Natural History in New York. It was there that they stayed for more than 70 years before being sent back to Harvard, Kitchel said.
How the rib bone was stored in the Hood Museum warehouse is still a mystery. The attached tag had a name: William A. Bacon. Kitchel has since learned that Bacon was a lawyer and newspaper editor who lived in Ludlow, Vermont, in the early 1850s.
At the time, it was common “for people to try to acquire things like this for a cabinet of curiosities,” he said. In fact, this is how many museums were created.
Radiocarbon dating was only the first step in studying the newly discovered fossil. They want to confirm the results by sending a sample to another lab.
Kitchel and his colleagues at Dartmouth are also using ground-penetrating radar to explore the area where the mammoth was found. They are unlikely to find more remains, he said, but he is eager to learn more about the environment that has preserved the fossils for thousands of years.
Kitchel said he hopes the new research will generate excitement in others for the creatures that once roamed these lands.
Growing up in northern Vermont, he says, he was familiar with the Ice Age. “But the animals of the Ice Age, this megafauna, have always been something that I considered to be from somewhere else,” he said.
“I had no recognition, really, that these same almost mythical creatures – a mammoth, a behemoth – perhaps roamed this same landscape that I did as a child. “
