The number of large-scale skeletons found at an airport construction site north of Mexico City has risen to at least 200, with a large number of excavations still pending, experts said Thursday.
Archaeologists hope the site has become “enormously central” – on the shores of an ancient lake that attracts and traps mammoths in its moist soil – to help solve their puzzle of extinction.
Experts say the site is still being searched, with indications that humans may have made tools from the bones of wood-burning animals that died somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago.
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Paleontologists work to preserve a gigantic skeleton found at the construction site of Mexico City’s new airport on Thursday, September 3, 2020, at the Santa Lucia military base in Mexico. (AP Photo / Marco Ugarte)
There are so many mammoths at the site of the new Santa Lucia airport that inspectors have to go with each bulldozer to make sure the work stops when large-sized bones are removed.
“We have about 200 mm moths, about 25 camels, five horses,” said Ruben Manjinila López, an archaeologist at the National Institute of Anthropology and History. The site is about 12 miles (20 kilometers) from the artificial pit, essentially shallow mammoth traps, dug by early inhabitants to trap and kill dozens of mammoths.
Manzinila Lapez said evidence is beginning to emerge that suggests that even if Mammoth had died a natural death after being stuck in the mud of an ancient lake bed at the airport, his remains would have been carved by humans, somewhat like those found on a large rock near Tultepec. , In the village of San Antonio Zuvento -trap site.
While tests are still being carried out on gigantic bones to detect potential butchered marks, archaeologists have unearthed dozens of gigantic bone tools – usually tools such as toolpack tools or shafts used to hold cutting tools.
“Here we have evidence that we have similar types of equipment, but unless we can do laboratory studies to see traces of these equipment or potential equipment, we cannot say that we have evidence that is well established,” Manzinila said. Lopez said.
Paleontologist Joaquin Arroyo Cabreles said the airport site would be a “very important site to test hypotheses” about the extinction of a mass of mammoths.
“The reason for the extinction of these animals, there is debate everywhere, was the reversal of the weather or the presence of humans,” said Arroyo Kab Brales. “I think in the end the decision will be that there will be a synergy effect between the weather reversal and the human presence.”
Ashley Ledger, a paleontologist at Cogston Resource Management Company in California, who was not involved in the excavations, noted that such natural death groups are “rare. A very specific set of conditions that allow fossils to be stored in an area but must be met.” They are also preserved that way. They need to have a tool to bury them quickly and experience low oxygen levels. “
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The site near Mexico City now appears to have overtaken the Hot Springs mammoth site in South Dakota – with about 61 sets left – to find the largest bones in the world. Large concentrations have also been observed in La Brea tar pits in Siberia and Los Angeles.
For now, the enormous locations are ubiquitous and work on the new airport may slow down, but not stop.
Captain of the Mexican Army. Jesus Cantoral, who oversees rescue efforts to stay on the Army-led Constrio site, said “a large number of excavation sites” still remain to be studied in detail, and observers have to stay with backhouses and bulldozers whenever the ground breaks. To a new place.
The project is so vast that, as noted by archaeologists, machines can only work elsewhere when studying a field.
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The airport project is scheduled for completion in 2022, at which point the dig will be completed.
