A 12-Year-Old Boy Found an Ancient Woolly Mammoth Tooth During a Vacation in Ohio

A 12-year-old boy visiting Ohio’s Amish Country may be one of the youngest archaeologists in history.

Last month, Jackson Hepner was living with his family at The Inn at Honey Run in Millersburg, Ohio, when he came across a rare relic of the ice age, a woolly mammoth tooth, Fox 8 reported.

“Hepner wrote on the hotel’s blog, where a relative is the hotel manager, “I noticed the tooth about ten yards upstream from the bridge that we had our family photographs on. “On the left side of the creek, it was partly buried. It was on the creek bed, entirely out of the water.

The discovery was verified by experts Nick Kardulias from the Archaeology Department of Wooster College, Dale Gnidovec from the Orton Geological Museum of the Ohio State University, and Nigel Ashland from the Geology Department of Ashland University.

They noted the tooth, an upper third molar, had parallel ridges, which are indicative of mammoths, whose diet required specialized teeth to grind their food, such as grass and seeds.

Between 110,000 and 12,000 years ago, woolly mammoths inhabited the area now called Ohio (though they ultimately died out in Siberia about 4,000 years ago).

According to Gnidovec, mammoths came over from Asia two million years ago, but skeletons older than 13,000 years are difficult to find due to “glacial advances” over the state.

“During the Ice Age there were two kinds of ‘elephants’ living in Ohio — mammoths and mastodons,” Gnidovec told Newsweek.

“Mastodons are much more common … [and] mammoths much rarer. That is because Ice Age Ohio had much more forested areas, which the mastodons lived in, that it did open grasslands preferred by the mammoths.”

The Inn seems to be thrilled with their involvement in this discovery and Ohio’s ancient history.

“What is now lush greenery, flowing waters, and hundreds of beautiful species was once an enormous glacial sheet that would slowly (and literally) shape Ohio’s future,” they wrote on their blog.

“The unearthing of the Mammoth tooth shows that there are definite pieces of ancient history hidden around us, connecting us to an interesting past.”

Now that his discovery has been legitimized, Hepner is eager to get his hand on his buried treasure once again.

“I would like to have my tooth back in my hands as soon as possible,” he wrote. “I want to show my friends.”

A lost interview with a survivor of the last U.S. slave ship surfaced

A schooner named Clotilda arrived in Mobile Bay, Alabama, on the warm and unusually unsuspecting day of July 1860, on board by captain William Foster and eleventy African slaves. Clotilda was the U.S. slave ship last known to bring captives to the United States from Africa.

Among more than one hundred enslaved African people, there was also Cudjo (sometimes spelled as Cudjoe) Kazoola (or Kossula) Lewis – the last known survivor of the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the United States.

Cudjo Lewis, originally named Kossula (American listeners would later transcribe Cudjo’s given name as “Kazoola”), was born around 1840 into the Yoruba tribe, in the Banté region, which today belongs to the West African country of Benin. His father’s name was Oluwale (or Oluale) and his mother’s – Fondlolu. Kossula had five siblings and twelve half-siblings, who were the children of his father’s other two wives.

Mobile Bay and the wreckage of slave ship Clotilda are pictured above.
In the spring of 1860, when Cudjo was only 19 years old, he was taken as a prisoner by the army of the Kingdom of Dahomey.

After the Dahomian tribe captured him, Cudjo was taken to the coast. There, he and more than one hundred other men and women were sold into slavery and crammed onto the Clotilda – the last slave ship to reach the shores of the continental United States. The captives were brought to Mobile Bay, Alabama.

The international slave trade was not legal at that time already for more than 50 years. Along with many European nations, the U.S. had outlawed the practice in 1807, but Lewis’ journey proves how slave traders went around the law to continue bringing over human cargo.

However, to avoid detection of the authorities, the captors of the slaves snuck them into Alabama at dark hours and made them hide in the swamp for several days. To get rid of any hard evidence, they put the 86-foot Clotilda on fire on the banks of Mobile-Tensaw Delta. Ship’s remains are believed to be uncovered in the upcoming month.

If it wasn’t for Zora Neale Hurston – an anthropologist and a known figure of the Harlem Renaissance – we may have never heard Cudjo’s story from Cudjo himself. Some 60 years after the abolition of slavery, she made an amazing discovery and located the last surviving captive – Cudjo – of the last slave ship to bring African slaves to the United States.

Zora went on to conduct numerous interviews with Cudjo, but struggled to get them published. One of the main reasons for rejection, was that Zora refused to alter Cudjo’s words for them to fit into the frames of the standard American English. At that time, her anthropological interviews were often seen as controversial due to the use of vernacular dialogue.

Even some black American thinkers thought that the use of vernacular might enforce the caricaturist views of the black people inside the minds of the white people. Zora wasn’t the one to back down, and the book with interviews with Cudjo was only published in May 2018 and it was named Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”.

Zora’s book tells the story of Cudjo Lewis and his life. The heartbreaking narrative provides a first-hand look at the trauma enforced by slavery.

After Cudjo was abducted from his home, he was forced onto a ship with hundreds of strangers. They wound up spending several months together, only to be separated in Alabama to go to work in different plantations.

“We very sorry to be parted from one ’nother,” Lewis recalled. “We seventy days cross de water from de Africa soil, and now dey part us from one ’nother. Therefore we cry. Our grief so heavy look lak we cain stand it. I think maybe I die in my sleep when I dream about my mama.”

Cudjo also describes what it was like to arrive on a plantation where no one could speak his language and explain to where he was, what was going on, what was he ought to do. “We doan know why we be bring ’way from our country to work lak dis. Everybody lookee at us strange. We want to talk wid de udder colored folkses but dey doan know whut we say.”

Understandably, Mr Lewis expected to receive compensation for being captured and forced into slavery and was angry to find out that the long-awaited emancipation didn’t come with the promise of “forty acres and a mule,” or any other kind of reparations. Bitter and frustrated, Cudjo, together with a group of 31 other free people saved up enough money to buy land near the state capital Mobile, which they called Africatown.

Today, the monument of Cudjo Lewis proudly stands in Africatown, Mobile, Alabama, reminding of the struggles its people endured. It was sculpted back in 2016 by April Terra Livingston and is located in front of the Union Missionary Baptist Church.

200-year-old shipwreck discovered in Florida

Beach erosion has revealed a shipwreck in St. Johns county.

The ship is possibly 200 years old.

“My wife and I walk the beach almost every day,” Mark O’Donoghue said. Saturday he spotted “some timbers and metal spikes,” exposed in the sand.

Sunday, even more, had been exposed and he had a hunch that it was a shipwreck. Part of the ship was poking through the sand. 

He notified the Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program, and they told him he was right.

Archaeologists were out Sunday and Monday, documenting the site in Crescent Beach, just north of the Matanzas Inlet. They believe the ship is from the 19th century, based on its construction and the frequency of ships wrecking on the northeast Florida coast during the 1800s.

Archaeologist Chuck Meide stood near the middle of the exposed wooden beams in the sand and said, “If I were standing on this ship when it was a living ship, I would be in the cargo hold, standing on the very bottom. So this would be the floor of the cargo hold. 

“This is the centre line of the vessel,” he said, pointing with his foot, “so the bottom of the hull would be here and then over my head is going be the deck.”

Pat Lee lives in the condos, on the dune just above the shipwreck. He told First Coast News that no one knew there was a ship buried here until erosion started ripping away the beach.

“The wreckage there used to be under 10 feet of sand. In the last three years, we lost it. We lost it all,” Lee said. 

“It’s very cool to see the shipwreck. It is very disturbing to see the sand leave our beach,” he added.

Of course, beaches change over time. Just as this coastline is experiencing erosion now, at one point, sand accumulated along this beach.

Meide said, “The sand dune wasn’t here when the shipwrecked. We know topography and the landscape of a coast changes a lot.”

When the ship did get pushed far onto the beach, possibly by a storm, Meide speculated, sand formed around it — sealing in its secrets until now.

And for at least a year, O’donoghue was walking right by a shipwreck!

Another Possible Lost Cemetery Site Found in Florida

An investigation into the whereabouts of a segregation-era lost cemetery has found possible burial sites with ground-penetrating radar on MacDill Air Force Base property, according to a report in The Tampa Bay Times.

This would be the fifth lost cemetery found in the Tampa Bay area over the last 16 months. The Port Tampa Cemetery for Blacks was once near the corner of Interbay Boulevard and Manhattan Avenue. That land is now part of the base. The cemetery disappeared around the time the base opened in 1941.

There are no known records of the at least 38 bodies buried there being moved. Archaeologists began looking for the cemetery earlier this year and their report was sent to MacDill on Friday.

NAACP Hillsborough County Branch President Yvette Lewis also received a copy of the report. She shared it with the Tampa Bay Times. MacDill has not yet replied to a Times request for comment via email. Voicemail to a base spokesman did not pick up.

A report on Tampa cemeteries — written in the 1930s but issued in 1941 by the federal Works Progress Administration — said the Port Tampa Cemetery could be reached by starting at the corner of Interbay Boulevard and Manhattan Avenue, heading south 884 feet, turning east and going 1,327 feet.

Ground-penetrating radar in that area “identified anomalies as possible burials,” the archaeological report provided by the NAACP said. “While these anomalies were not clustered or arranged in patterns typically seen in historic cemeteries, their spacing is consistent with the use of an area as an expedient informal burial ground, where intermittent burials took place and where individual burials would not be in family groups or arranged in obvious rows.”

According to that report, there are four other areas where the cemetery could have been located:

• Immediately west of where the radar discovered grave-like anomalies. That spot is suspect because aerial maps from 1938 show it as a cleared square area.

• A 45-acre “wooded area in the northwestern area” of the base near where the radar possibly found graves. Because the archaeologists could not confirm the cemetery’s boundaries, the archaeologists recommend the “wooded tract be treated with caution in the event that human remains may be present.”

Archaeologists investigated each of those other areas with radar and dogs that can sniff human remains but found no evidence of burials. Still, those areas should be considered “sensitive,” the report read, and any work that could disturb possible graves should be avoided.

Overall, the report said, the archaeologists found obituaries and death certificates for 38 people buried in the cemetery. That included 12 stillborn infants.

The Works Progress Administration report stated it was a Black cemetery, but archaeologists did find one death record for a white burial.

The base suggests erecting a marker near Dale Mabry Gate that will honour the cemetery, according to an email from MacDill to the NAACP that Lewis also shared with the Times.

“Be it known that this plaque serves as a memorial to those dearly departed love ones who are believed to be buried on MacDill AFB at what was known as the Port Tampa Cemetery,” is suggested language for the marker.

It would also include this quote from Hillsborough County Judge Lisa D. Campbell, whose maternal grandparents buried a stillborn in the cemetery: “Through the curtain of time, we find you here, in infinite peace. We call your name and you answer in legacy and honour. Rest. Eternally.”

Port Tampa was established in the 1890s as a separate city. African Americans moved there for the jobs at the port, but they dried up once Port Tampa Bay opened to the east in the mid-1920s.

MacDill opened in 1941 and Port Tampa was annexed by the city of Tampa in 1961.

Graves from four other cemeteries have been discovered in the Tampa Bay area over the last 18 months — two in Tampa and two in Clearwater. Three of those were for Blacks. The fourth, Ridgewood Cemetery found on Tampa’s King High School campus, was for the indigent and unknown, but records indicate nearly all the burials Black.

The Pioneer cabin tree older than 1,000 years has fallen after a violent storm that hit California

After getting the news, it feels like the end of an age, the iconic Sequoia ‘ Tunnel Tree ‘ has gone down in history as a violent storm that struck California brought it to the Ground.

The Tunnel Tree was part of the Calaveras Big Trees State and was counted among the most famous trees across the United States. For over a century, it enchanted the hearts of the park’s visitors.

It is estimated that the gigantic tree was older than 1,000 years and measured 10 meters in diameter.

“The Pioneer Cabin Tree has fallen! This iconic and still living tree – the tunnel tree – enchanted many visitors.

The storm was just too much for it,” reads a status update at The Calaveras Big Trees Association’s page on Facebook. The Sequoia tree was grandeur, which allowed it to claim such an iconic status.

Reports suggest that in the past couple of years, the tree was barely alive, having only one branch alive at the top.

The storm which is considered to be the strongest one to hit the area in over a decade had apparently been too much for the tree. Flooding and the shallow root system of the gigantic tree are most likely to be the reasons for why the tree fell.

The Tunnel Tree had been among the most popular sites of the state park ever since the late 19th century.

Also known as the Pioneer Cabin Tree, it got its name for its distinctive hollow trunk, partially burnt after a forest fire. It had small compartments much like in a log cabin, burnt core as a chimney, and a small opening as a backdoor.

During the 1870s, its compartments were fused into a tunnel so that tourists could pass through it.

This particular tree was selected as it already had large forest fire scars. However, this enabled the tree to compete for attention with the Yosemite’s Wawona Tree and to attract more tourists to the park.

Since the 1880s, park visitors were encouraged to inscribe their names into the tree, but the practice was stopped during the 1930s in order to preserve it.

The trail through the tree was initially for pedestrians only. Later on, automobiles could also drive through as part of the “Big Trees Trail.”

It was one of the few “drive-through” trees within the area of California. The trail was kept open to hikers only afterwards.

A report by the United States Forest Service, as of 1900, suggests that the tree was 85 meters tall. Bearing in mind its glorious past, it really is like the end of an epoch.

Fossil of young long-necked dinosaur found—and nicknamed Andrew

In what is now Montana, some 150 million years ago, a young dinosaur roamed through a land before (modern) time. Not yet five years old, the long-necked creature somehow ended up buried in a violent, muddy flood, forever freezing it in adolescence.

Now, researchers have freed this potentially record-setting dinosaur from its stony slumber. After uncovering the remains, the scientists published a study in Scientific Reports, in which they argue that the skull is the smallest yet found from a group of long-necked dinosaurs called diplodocids.

The little fellow even has a nickname: Andrew, after the steel baron and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who funded palaeontology research and has a diplodocid species named after him

With its skull just 10 inches across, researchers’ best guess is that Andrew was a juvenile Diplodocus—an especially rare find. While more than a hundred Diplodocus specimens have been discovered, their skulls are much rarer. Fewer than a dozen have been dug up to date. If the researchers’ reconstruction is correct, Andrew’s skull could be the smallest and least mature Diplodocus skull ever found, potentially providing insights into the dinosaur’s development.

“The smallest Diplodocus skull could tell us a lot about how Diplodocus grew up,” says palaeontologist D. Cary Woodruff, a PhD student at the University of Toronto and the study’s lead author.

‘Free rein at the salad bar’

Andrew hails from Montana’s Mother’s Day Quarry, a bone bed that contains at least sixteen juvenile dinosaurs, their bones are strewn about like a game of pick-up-sticks.

The remains are buried in pebble-flecked mud, suggesting that a flood may have overwhelmed a herd of young diplodocids. Due to the angles at which the bones were stuck in the muck, researchers think that other dinosaurs later trampled the bodies.

Andrew emerged from these rocks in 2010 during an excavation led by study coauthor and Cincinnati Museum Center palaeontologist Glenn Storrs. Storrs then reached out to Woodruff to give the fossil a closer look.

To Woodruff, the skull seemed to belong to a Diplodocus, though its features differed greatly from those of mature individuals. For one, Andrew had 13 teeth in its lower jaw, some of which had spoon-like edges to slice through rough vegetation. In contrast, only 11 peg-like teeth, good for nabbing softer vegetation, occupied the lower jaws of Diplodocus adults. Second, Andrew’s snout was narrow like a deer’s, whereas Diplodocus adults had broader snouts, more like a cow’s.

Woodruff thinks these differences tell the story of a shifting diet as the dinosaurs matured, echoing a 2010 study of a different Diplodocus juvenile skull.

Adult Diplodocus were lawnmowers, gobbling ferns and other soft plants in bulk. But young Diplodocus may have been more selective eaters, using their dental variation to nibble on the choicest parts of many different kinds of plants.

“Because they’ve got these different tooth types, it’s kind of like of a Swiss army knife in their mouth, right? They can pick and eat every plant they want to,” says Woodruff. “[They had] free rein at the salad bar.”

A puzzle with missing pieces

Kristi Curry Rogers, a palaeontologist at Macalester College in Minnesota, welcomes the new paper, but she doesn’t fully agree with its findings because of the fossil’s poor preservation. Andrew’s skull is missing parts of the cheek, palate, and lower jaw, plus the fossils are slightly squished. These hiccups make it hard to reconstruct the skull, let alone infer the dinosaur’s behaviour from it.

“The authors don’t address the deformation of the skull or the missing components of the face in any great detail, the inclusion of which could easily, and dramatically, change the interpretations,” she said in an email.

The uncertainty also muddies Andrew’s status as a member of the Diplodocus genus. When researchers tried to calculate Andrew’s place on the diplodocid family tree, its position depended on which of the dinosaur’s traits the researchers looked at.

“This is actually the part of the paper that I found the most interesting and important,” said palaeontologist Kimberley Chapelle, a PhD student at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, in an email. The confusion may simply stem from growing pains; young and old Diplodocus could have looked very different, leading to challenges in categorization.

For now, Woodruff says that Diplodocus is his best guess for Andrew’s identity, but he says that it could also be an unknown species. To help settle the debate, Andrew’s skull is currently being 3-D scanned for future research.

“[At] the end of the day, that’s science: one object, two interpretations, multiple testable hypotheses,” said Woodruff in an email. “And if we’re later proven wrong about the identity, that’s fine. Andrew still contributes to our understanding … regardless of whatever the heck it is.”