Were Mastodons Butchered at the 100,000 Year-Old Cerrutti Site Near San Diego, CA?
From The Observatory
Source: Dig Labs Project
Were cobbles used intentionally to break mastodon bones at Cerutti Mastodon? If so, were hominins inhabiting the New World much earlier than previously thought?
Note to reader:
We hope you find this article useful—it’s an ongoing Observatory research project that will be updated.
If you have expertise or insight on the topic that you think could be useful, please send us a note.
We hope you find this article useful—it’s an ongoing Observatory research project that will be updated.
If you have expertise or insight on the topic that you think could be useful, please send us a note.
Note to reader:
We hope you find this article useful—it’s an ongoing Observatory research project that will be updated.
If you have expertise or insight on the topic that you think could be useful, please send us a note.
We hope you find this article useful—it’s an ongoing Observatory research project that will be updated.
If you have expertise or insight on the topic that you think could be useful, please send us a note.
“Were Mastodons Butchered at the 100,000 Year-Old Cerrutti Site Near San Diego, CA?” by Dig Labs Contributors is licensed by the Observatory under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
For permissions requests beyond the scope of this license, please see Observatory.wiki’s Reuse and Reprint Rights guidance.
Introduction
Broken mastodon bones were found in 2017 near San Diego, California, at the paleontological and possibly archaeological site now known as the Cerutti Mastodon site. There were no known Pleistocene carnivores capable of breaking fresh proboscidean femora at mid-shaft, but these bones showed marks of wear-and-tear, and lay next to cobbles supposedly used as hammerstones and anvils.
Were these cobbles used intentionally by hominins to break the mastodon bones? If true, does this mean hominins were inhabiting the New World much earlier than previously thought?
