ZUMPANGO, Mexico (Reuters) – Amid crews of structures vying to build an airport in Mexico, scientists are de-burying more and more mammoth skeletons in what temporarily has one of the largest concentrations in the world. now extinct father of fashionable elephants worldwide.
More than one hundred mammoth skeletons have been known from nearly two hundred excavation sites, as well as an aggregate of other Ice Age mammals, in the domain destined for the new advertising airport in the Mexican capital.
Lead archaeologist Rubén Manzanilla said Tuesday that some 24,000 years ago, herds of mammoths came to this position where vast meadows and lakes would have them to reside.
“This position is like paradise,” he told Reuters, noting that when the last glaciers melted, a wide variety of mammals, adding ancient species of camels, horses and buffaloes, survived. along what would have been an incredibly muddy coastline.
“Then, for many years, the same story repeated itself: the animals ventured too far, got trapped and couldn’t get their legs out of the mud,” Manzanilla said.
He speculates that the maximum number of mammoths died this way, adding that there is evidence that about 10,000 years ago, the first humans would possibly also have hunted 20-ton beasts with arrows and flint spears, or dug rudimentary wells into shallow water to catch them. .
But the amount of bone, adding up the long curved tusks, technically any of the animal’s front teeth, is a shock.
“We came here with the concept of locating mammoth remains, but so much,” he said.
Once the excavations were completed, Manzanilla said the site, about 50 km north of downtown Mexico City, could rival others in the United States and Siberia as the world’s largest mammoth skeleton depot.
He noted that a museum-style mammoth demonstration is being planned for the airport’s main terminal.
The series of interconnected lakes that once covered the Valley of Mexico were intentionally tired through 17th-century Spanish colonial masters in an effort to tame the annual floods.
Today, the predominantly dry landscape is governed by working-class neighborhoods and roads born from Mexico City.
(Report through Carlos Carillo; Additional drafting and reporting through David Alire García; Edited through Aurora Ellis)
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