Latest finds include two huge skulls, ribs and sparse limbs
ZUMPANGO, Mexico:
Along with construction crews running to build the new airport in the Mexican capital, skulls and curved tusks of gigantic mammoths peep into the ground as archaeologists unearth more and more bones belonging to the mammal most famous of the Ice Age.
Latest finds include two huge skulls, as well as ribs and scattered limbs, found just inside the perimeter where a new civilian airport is under construction, about 30 miles (50 km) north of downtown Mexico City. .
To date, some 70 individual mammoths have been found since the end of last year. Dating back over 10,000 years, this part of Mexico once teemed with herds of mammoths, drawn to the lush meadows and lakes that dotted the landscape.
The huge bones have left legends of giants who dazzled indigenous civilizations and the Spanish conqueror Hernan Cortes.
Standing next to a partial skeleton, senior archaeologist Ruben Manzanilla, explains that this place would likely have been part of a thick, winding muddy shore at the edge of a lake formed at the end of the last ice age.
“When an animal of this size fell here, it got stuck and couldn’t escape,” he said, as a convoy of construction trucks hit a dusty road.
The Colombian mammoth of Manzanilla, which unlike its cousin the woolly mammoth had little fur, was certainly up to its imposing name.
He estimates that it weighed about 20 tonnes, double that of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and reached a height of more than 4 meters (13 feet), about twice as tall as the basketball legend Shaquille O ‘ Neal.
Manzanilla thinks countless mammoths have probably died of mud, but he also points to evidence from nearby sites that early human hunters also used flint spears to shoot them and set rudimentary traps in the water .
The urban footprint of the Mexico City metropolis, home to 22 million people, has since replaced almost all of the interconnected lakes that filled the region in Aztec times.
In 1519, two kings of Tlaxcalan showed Cortes what was probably a gigantic femur and told him that they were descended from terrible but very tall men, according to a report by the soldier who became a contemporary chronicler Bernal Diaz del Castillo.
“We were sure there were giants on this earth,” wrote Diaz del Castillo.
The incident is summarized in an article on the history of mammoths in Mexico in the current issue of Arqueologia Mexicana by Leonardo Lopez Lujan.
Even though more and more mammoths are arriving, the excavations have not slowed progress on the new airport, a top priority for President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Since the construction site is located in an existing Air Force base, the military also retrieves the tab for a team of 30 archaeologists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) , as well as nearly 200 workers working on the project.
(This story has not been edited by GalacticGaming staff and is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
