Did a Human Eat the La Sena Mammoth?

Archaeologists uncover the La Sena mammoth. Two ribs have been exposed in the grid square in the foreground. Unusual fracture patterns in the 18,000-year-old mammoth bones suggest they may have been broken by humans. Source - Nebraska Game and Parks Commission.

In 1987, archaeologists discovered a mammoth skeleton along the banks of Medicine Creek Reservoir in Frontier County. The site is known as the La Sena site. Radiocarbon dating techniques and the depth of the skeleton tell us the animal died 18,000 years ago. As they studied the skeleton, some scientists came to believe that early humans broke apart the mammoth to eat it and may have even killed it -- some 6,000 years earlier than the Clovis and Folsom points are dated.

The fossil evidence they are looking at are bone flakes and the ways in which some bones were fractured. A new brand of scientific enquiry called taphonomy is providing the clues. Taphonomy is the multidisciplinary study of cultural and natural processes that may be responsible for the arrangement of objects found at an archaeological site. The La Sena skeleton had several bone flakes associated with it. These bone flakes were identical to the long, thin slivers of flint that have been documented as byproducts that flake off as humans chip stones to make sharp tools. So these early humans may have used stone tools to butcher the mammoth. In addition, some of the thick mammoth bones were split apart in ways that could only have happened with a heavy blow. They believe that the humans used large cobblestones to retrieve the nutritious bone marrow in the middle. Experiments with modern elephant bones splintered by rocks produced the same kinds of fractures, while studies of bones trampled by other elephants did not.

But not everyone accepts the evidence presented at the La Sena site. Skeptics say that the bone breaking evidence is not conclusive. And they are ask, why haven't archaeologists found other evidence of human life at the La Sena site, like fire hearths, stone tools or stone debris?

If the La Sena scientists are right, human beings were living and hunting here much earlier than we previously thought. From 12,000 years ago to 18,000 years ago is a significant difference. However, in the geologic time scale, humans are still a very recent introduction to the land that would become Nebraska.