⛏️ New Yorker Digs Up Mastodon Teeth & We Give You A Piece of Mastodon!
New revelations about early Americans and their love of sloth jewelry + Get free access to PrivacySafe Social.
🦷 Is There A Mastodon Tooth In Your Backyard? Maybe If You’re A New Yorker.
When most people think of treasure in their backyard, they imagine hoards of hidden coins — not the bones of a prehistoric mammal. Two lucky homeowners near Scotchtown, New York unearthed exactly that: a gigantic jaw from an animal that went extinct roughly 11,000 years ago.
The fossil specimen belonged to an adult mastodon, a distant relative of modern-day elephants and the ancient woolly mammoths popularized in cartoons and roadside attractions. Last September, an anonymous couple in New York noticed enormous teeth sticking out of the mud in their yard and called in the experts from New York State Museum and SUNY Orange. The team of paleontologists recovered a jaw, a toe bone fragment, and part of a rib and they suspect there are more bones nearby.
Details about the exact location of the find are being kept under wraps, probably to avoid a rush of TikTokers and Redditors looking for a prehistoric souvenir. The find further solidified Orange County’s reputation as a hotspot for mastodon fossils, which started way back during the U.S. Revolutionary War with the discovery of a trove of bones. George Washington is reported to have owned a fossil tooth himself and rushed to view mastodon bones in New York during the winter of 1780. Over 150 mastodon specimens have been found across New York State to date, and there’s every reason to expect there will be more as time goes on.
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Membership on PrivacySafe Social is a perk for Bits On Tape subscribers, and you can request an account today. Our community connects you with 1,000+ servers & millions of users in the decentralized Mastodon network. We operate under guidelines that promote safe and respectful discussion and intend to be a bright light in the “fediverse” — a global network that is growing by the millions as people run toward the exits from Big Tech. Check out our modifications to Mastodon at our source code repo.
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💍 Sloth Bone Jewelry Was Traded in Ancient American Social Networks
Long before hashtags and followers, ancient humans in North and South America were creating their own social networks — with collections of sloth bone jewelry as their version of shopping hauls. Researchers have uncovered polished sloth osteoderms, bony plates from the backs of the animals, in Brazil’s Santa Elina caves. These sloth bones were crafted into pendants an astonishing 27,000 years ago and predate the famed Clovis culture by over 10,000 years.
In today’s hyper-connected world, we signal our identities and affiliations across social media profiles with hashtags, posts, and selfies. For ancient humans, artifacts such as bone pendants likely served a similar role and marked group membership, status, and shared experiences. These early adornments suggest that communities weren’t just focused on survival. Ancient humans were building social ties and shared traditions, laying the groundwork for cultural networks that spanned vast regions.
New evidence suggests this was happening in the Western Hemisphere much earlier than scientists thought. The widely-accepted “Clovis-first” theory had posited that humans arrived in the Americas around 13,000 years ago, but evidence from Monte Verde in Chile, White Sands in New Mexico, and now Santa Elina in Brazil paints a more complex and much older picture. Advanced fossil dating shows sloth bones were shaped into pendants shortly after the deaths of the animals and marks of fire on the specimens hint at human activity long before the Clovis era, upturning our traditional understanding of human settlement of the Americas.
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Bits On Tape™ is a twice-weekly replay of science & technology stories by cyber experts. These bits are put to screen by Sean O’Brien, leading voice behind privacy and cybersecurity at Yale Law School and founder of Yale Privacy Lab, and edited by Cherise Labonte, science researcher and licensed Registered Nurse.
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