Latest stories from the News Desk

Scientists Study Ice Age Animal Remains at Wyoming’s Natural Trap Cave

Natural Trap Cave begins as a 15-foot-wide black maw in tan limestone at the base of the Bighorn Mountains. The hole opens like a funnel into a spacious cavern more than eight breathtaking stories below and is only accessible to researchers by rappelling. For thousands of years, animals plunged to their deaths into the abyss — from stilt-legged horses to Beringian wolves to 900-pound American lions three times the size of those now living in Africa. The bones of those now-extinct animals have been preserved in the refrigerator-like climate of the cave just waiting for someone to come along and tease out their story.
On the Banks of the Jordan River, Neanderthals Ate Turtles 60,000 years ago

On a lush lakeshore in northern Israel 60,000 years ago, prehistoric hunter-gatherers were augmenting their diet of giant aurochs, deer, and weeds with smelly freshwater turtles, archaeologists have discovered.
Younger Dryas Black Mat in Geoarchaeological Site in Zacatecas, Mexico

New explorations in the desert of northeastern Zacatecas, Mexico, revealed dozens of archaeological and geoarchaeological sites. One of them, Ojo de Agua, contains the remains of a Pleistocene springfed hydrographic system located at the southeastern end of a large elongated endorheic basin. The locality yielded a particularly dark, highly organic stratigraphic layer commonly known in the Americas as Black Mat, exposed on the natural proﬁles of a creek. Several radiocarbon assessments conﬁrmed the formation of the Ojo de Agua Black Mat during the Younger Dryas chronozone with ten calibrated results clustering between 12,700 and 12,100 cal BP. Article contains link for full publication download.