Hunting Ground
Of 1,000,000 B .C.
By FRANK DuFRESNE
Condensed from Colliers
June 2, 1945, issue.
It was midsummer in the Arctic.
The Eskimo Napauk and I had
come a long way to visit this re
mote spot on the bleak shore line
of Kotzebue Sound, in northwest
ern Alaska.
Just above the swirl of the surf,
we had been exploring for teeth
and bone fragments of Pleistocene
creatures. The spreading horns of
an extinct bovine had already
been balanced across the Eskimo’s
kayak and paddled out to the
schooner.
A fossilized molar the size and
weight of a cobblestone had been
dug out of the sand, and I was
prying at a thighbone big as a
small tree trunk, when Napauk’s
gaze suddenly riveted on a spot
above the thudding water.
“No use diggum any more,” he
said. “Here comes a whole one.”
It looked just like that at first.
It looked like a curiously deflated
elephant in the very act of break
ing through the walls of its icy
prison. Two enormous tusks of
stovepipe diameter, curled back
against themselves like giant fish
hooks, hung suspended in the air.
Part of a huge skull was in
sight. A poised foreleg gave the
impression that this long-dead
beast was probing cautiously for a
foothold before taking another
step.
You caught your breath in the
wonder of it! Here was a wooly
mammoth—something out of a
legend. It just didn’t exist any
more. It belonged to another age.
Yet here it was, moving out into
the sunlight of today.
There wasn’t much to be done
about it. For one thing, we had no
way of scaling the slippery white
wall, and there was little we could
accomplish if we succeeded in
reaching the animal.
We could only keep our rare
discovery under observation dur
ing the short summer; see it pro
ject farther out like a mounted
specimen on the mantelpiece as
the ice melted away from it; watch
it collapse gradually for lack of
support, and see pieces of it come
toppling into the sea. We gathered
handfuls of long dark hair; picked
up chunks with flesh and hide still
attached to the bone.
On the Alaska side of Bering
Sea, the news of the discovery of
Ice Age creatures filtered into
Nome largely in the form of com-,
plaints from the gold miners.
To begin with, it was trouble
enough to cut down through a
hundred feet of frozen muck in
order to reach the gold-bearing
gravels on bedrock. Streams of
snow water gathered in ditches
dug around the mountain slopes
were led down into the valley
through flexible canvas hose, and
shot through tapering nozzles to
thaw and wash away the overly
ing debris. But when the sluice
boxes were in place and the long
awaited “clean-up” at hand, more
troubles appeared.
In a few instances long strands
of black hair and rust-colored
wool clogged the riffles of the
Sluice boxes. Strange-looking
skulls bigger than the camp cook
stove, too bulky to be carted off
in wheel-barrows, had to be push
ed and rolled out of the way.
Ivory tusks longer than any
sported by modern elephants re
quired the strength of two men to
carry them from the pits. And
over the whole area was the pene
trating odor of decaying flesh
thawed and shredded by the giant
hydraulic nozzles.
But it was in the Fairbanks re
gion that paleontologists really hit
the packpot. Here in central Alas
ka, gold mining was conducted on
a grand scale and by newly dis
covered wrinkles that permitted
extensive areas to be stripped of
endless tons of muck and ice.
It was here, far below the pres
ent earth’s surface, that one of the
greatest game fields of all time
was laid bare. The miners found
a setting that obviously had
swarmed with wild life. They
found abundant remains not only
of mammoths and bison, but also
of horses and camels and giant
cats.
Contemporaneous with a long
list of vanished species were prac
tically all of our existing forms.
Both in numbers and variety, the
Pleistocene life excelled anything
left on the continent today.
Only in the heart of darkest Af
rica may living man hope to see
its equal. Actually, what we have
in America today is only a rem
nant of that which occurred before
the glaciers moved down from the
polar regions to blanket the top
half of the New World.
Not once, but probably four
times, the ice advanced upon
America. Originating in Canada,
it reached roughly down to a line
drawn from New York through
Cincinnati to St. Louis, then it
swung sharply northward to near
the Canadian border and west to
Seattle.
Mountain valleys as far down
as mid-California were covered.
Greenland got such a heavy dose
of glaciers that it hasn’t recovered
from the shock yet; geologically,;
it is sitll in the Ice Age.
When did it all happen? Prob
ably a million years ago, and it
lasted to within twenty-five to
eighty thousand years of the pres
ent time.
There are two reasons why
Alaska is such a good hunting
ground for long-dead animals, and
why it may hold the key to many
questions, including that puzzling
one about when man first made
his appearance in this country.
In the first place, Alaska forms
one end of a land bridge that once
connected America with Asia
across Bering Strait.
Another good reason why Ice
Age fauna is so easy to find in
Alaska is that excellent cold stor
age is provided in many, but not
all, parts of the Territory.
All you have to do on wide
stretches of the tundra to find
solid ice is scrape away the matted
roots of dwarf vegetation with
your hands. There is your ice,
more than a hundred feet thick,
covering thousands of square miles
of the old earth’s surface. An an
imal pinned down by this cold
weight is quite likely to be right
where hard luck overtook him,
and just about as well preserved, i
What apparently happened was!
that the animals became buried in
mud, muck and silt, the water ini
which then froze.
That was why collectors got on
the job soon after the hydraulic
nozzles at Fairbanks blasted the
first mammoth out of its icy
crypt, incidentally scattering the
previous pieces far and wide over
the landscape. This was soon rem
edied by an arrangement whereby
the miner swung his nozzle in an
other direction whenever he spot
ted a new creature showing up in
the ice.
Following this bit of co-opera
tion, no scientist ever had better
equipment at his command for re
moval of overburden—such equip
ment as thawing devices, scrapers
and giant electric dredges with
chains of buckets reaching a hun
dred feet down into the earth.
It took the incentive of gold to
warrant such extensive equipment
—scientists are notoriously poor—
but at any rate the mounds of re
covered bones grew to astonishing
proportions. They were hauled
away by the truckloads.
Not only bones, but bits and
patches of hide, hair and tendons
were recovered. Mammoths and
regal bison were among the com
moner types found, although it
wasn’t long before the antlers and
skulls of giant elk-moose, caribou,
musk oxen, horses and bears came
to light.
Then came a mastodon, which is
like a mammoth but with differ
ent type molars, a saber-toothed
tiger big as a grizzly bear with
six-inch fangs used in stabbing its
prey to death, and an enormous
cat that could chase any African
lion off the veld. One of the queer
est finds was the great dire wolf.
Smaller animals were harder to
pick up because they got lost in
the silt, but enough parts were re
covered to show that this million
years-old game field had its full
quota of foxes, lynxes, squirrels
and other rodents.
Life in the Alaska Pleistocene
period was a strange blending of
animal forms, some of them soon
to succumb to the grim decree that
only the fittest may survive. Gone
are the mammoths, mastodons and
the giant elk moose, and with them
they took the fierce smilodon, or
saber-tooth tiger, and the carrion
eating dire wolf.
Did man live here when all this
, was going on?
I Well, they though they had the
answer to that one when the skull
of a mammoth calf was brought
HUNTING—3 .
i .|
out of the ice at Fairbanks with
an object like a jadeite axhead
lodged in the lower jawbone. It
was finally concluded that no hu
! man hand had delivered the lethal
blow, that the young mammoth
had instead fallen onto a ledge.
But this was negative evidence;
it didn’t prove anything. Th3
search still goes on, based on in
teresting, if conflicting, theories.
I
One eminent anthropologist de
nies the existence of the Ice Age
man in America, holding frimly to
the tenet that the forefathers of
i all our native tribes came across
to us from Asia by way of the
Aleutians at a much later date
using the islands as stepping stones
from one hemisphere to the other.
This top-ranking authority has an
imposing collection of Aleut mum
mies and low-browed skulls to
back up his contentions. He’s a
hard man to argue with. But it
cannot be denied that there have
been persistent reports of Ameri
can Indian culture fully as early
as the Aleutian migration.
They’re still searching for the
mysterious Folsom man whose dis
tinctive weapons and other arti
facts were found in New Mexico.
These have given rise to another
theory: namely, that immigration
to Alaska from Siberia might have
taken place anywhere from eight
to twelve thousand years ago.
The Peking man, found in Pleis
tocene caves of China, and from
whom this pioneer stock may have
sprung, almost certainly existed a
quarter of a million years ago.
This ties in with the prevailing
supnosition that the first Ameri
can was a Mongoloid invader.
Even this has been disputed,
though not too successfully, be
cause the published theory that
America originated its own hu
man life seems to have died with
the author of it. This student took
us down to the other end of the
Americas for his proof, contending
that human life sprang from hte
pampas of Patagonia. While this
idea appears to have supporters at
the present time, nevertheless
there is a belief that some of the
humans found in the lower Argen
tine might date back to the Pleis
tocene.
It’s all very confusing to the
layman and may not be so clear
even to the experts, but in so far
as the records show, no human
skeletal remains have been found
in American Pleistocene deposits.
We can go a step further: no
anthropoid ape fossil has been
found here. That is why Alaska’s
vast deposits of frozen muck are
important. Not only may now un
known species of animals come to
light, but there is always the pos
sibility that the red letter day will
arrive when America's number
one citizen may be found resting
in his icy shroud.
The seasonmg vegetables—on
ion. celery and parsley — carry
their flavors more evenly through
stuffing if they are chopped and
cooked in fat a few minutes be
fore being mixed with the bread
crumbs.
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