World’s longest fossilized human trackway discovered at White Sands

Footprints are a common theme at White Sands. Every day, people from all over the world visit and leave traces of their comings and goings. The white dunes of the Tularosa Basin are just a recent blip on the geological timeline.

During the ice age tens of thousands of years ago, a giant body of water called Lake Otero existed. The climate was wetter, and the vegetation was abundant. One could have seen grasslands stretching for miles that would have looked more like the prairies of Nebraska than New Mexico’s deserts.

This paradise of lush green life naturally captured the attention of the larger animals of the ice age. Plant eaters of all kinds came to Lake Otero to feast on the grasses and trees of the Tularosa Basin.

Large plant-eaters attracted fearsome predators of the ice age, such as dire wolves and the American lion. Throughout the ice age, these animals left their footprints along the wetlands of Lake Otero.

Around 12,000 years ago, the earth’s climate began to show signs of change. Areas once green and lush started transforming into the desert landscape we see today. Rainfall in the Tularosa Basin became rare, and the great Lake Otero began to dry.

The once large body of freshwater became only pools of water scattered along the former lakebed. As the waters of Lake Otero dried, crystals began to form from the gypsum left behind by the evaporating lake water. The constant blowing of the wind broke down those large crystals into smaller crystals. This eventually formed the white sand dunes that gave this park its name.

Today we find fossil footprints of the animals that once lived here at White Sands more than 10,000 years ago. Scattered along the now dried lakebed are trackways and trample grounds of ancient camels and Columbian Mammoths. These fossilized footprints appear to gather around what may be ancient pools of water.

For 80 years, only a small collection of fossil footprints were known. However, a group of scientists noticed dark spots dotting the expanse of the lakebed that appeared to be footprints. Their curiosities lead them to dig up these odd dark spots.

This led to the discovery of both Harlan’s Ground Sloth and Paleo-Human footprints. During the 2010s, footprints of a dire wolf were discovered. These footprints were located next to ancient seeds. Scientists dated these seeds to more than 18,000 years ago.

The people, who once lived in the Tularosa Basin, left very little proof they lived here. Throughout the basin, pieces of stone flakes from toolmaking, arrowheads, and spear points have been found. However, these appear to be related to peoples who lived after the ice age.

This is in contrast to the surrounding areas that are filled with items left behind from ancient peoples. The lakebed of Lake Otero seems to be almost devoid of a single artifact that dates to before the Spanish exploration in the 1500s, let alone the ice age.

At White Sands, we find many remarkable tracks scattered across the lakebed. This includes a long track of human footprints that extends for long distances. While these footprints are ancient, scientists are still uncovering new evidence of past life.

In 2018, researchers discovered what they believe to be the footprints of a female. They tell a story that may seem familiar today her footprints show her walking for almost a mile, with a toddler’s footprints occasionally showing up beside hers.

The footprints broadened and slipped in the mud with additional weight. This suggests that she carried the child, shifting them from side to side and setting them down as they walked. Footprints across White Sands have been found coexisting and interacting with extinct ice age animals.

One set of footprints shows what appears to be humans stalking a giant sloth. This is shown by human footprints being found inside the footprints of the sloth as they were tracked. Currently, there is no evidence of a fruitful hunt, but this is not surprising. Most ice age hunts were not successful, with only one out of three hunts ending with a kill.

The ice age ended because of changes in the earth’s climate. Environments once rich in lush green life began to disappear. The reason for the disappearance of the great beasts of the ice age is still debated among scientists. More than likely, it was the combination of both the changes in climate and the overhunting by skilled people.

The fossilized footprints of White Sands are probably the most important resources in the Americas to the understanding of the interaction of humans and extinct animals from the ice age.

These fossilized footprints, among other natural and cultural features found in the dunefield, further propelled the movement to re-designate White Sands National Monument into White Sands National Park. As a massive landscape filled with history that stretches beyond points on our planet’s geologic timeline, White Sands continually proves itself to be more than just a sandbox.

An Underground City Full Of Giant Skeletons Discovered In The Grand Canyon

In the early 20th century, chance led us to the gate of the underground town of the most prominent giants of that period. This was an unprecedented find in the Grand Canyon, which soon repeated in the press.

The Grand Canyon was the birthplace of a culture in which, according to an article published in the Gazeta de Arizona on April 5, 1909, people of cyclopean proportions existed. A civilization that only left us some structures as a testimony of its existence.

The article mentions the discovery of a huge subterranean citadel by an explorer named GE Kinkaid, who accidentally found it while rafting on the Colorado River. It is worth mentioning that Kinkaid was a recognized archaeologist and had the financial support of the Smithsonian Institution.

According to their descriptions, the entrance to this mysterious city was at the end of a tunnel that extended for something more than 1,600 meters underground.

Kinkaid was impressed that the cavern was almost inaccessible. The entrance was about 450 meters under the wall of the steep canyon. The place was in a zone protected by the government and the access was penalized under fine.

“Above a shelf that could not be seen from the river was the entrance to the cave. When I saw the chisel marks on the wall inside the entrance, I got interested, I got my gun and I went in. “Kinkaid said.

The architecture found suggested that the builders of that subterranean city possessed advanced engineering skills.

The central axis of the underground city made it a gigantic camera from which radiated passages similar to the radii of a wheel. The walls of the main chamber were adorned with copper weapons and tablets covered with symbols and hieroglyphic characters very similar to those we know in Egypt.

Another interesting finding was the discovery of mummified bodies inside the citadel. None of the mummies found were less than 2.74 meters and all were wrapped in dark linen. Kinkaid said he had taken photographs of one of them with a flashlight, however, none of those photos were found.

Further explorations revealed interesting data on the beliefs of these alleged giants of the city.

More than 30 meters from the entrance is a room with a cross-shaped plant several tens of meters long and where an idol was found that could have been the main god of his religious system.

He was sitting cross-legged and with a lotus or lily flower in each hand. His face had oriental features as well as the carving of the cave. This idol had a certain resemblance to Buddha, although the scientists of the time did not finish assuring that it represented that religious cult.

The article also talks about the discovery of ceramics and other artifacts with trademarks having been manufactured in other parts of the world. Perhaps a rare mixture of cultures that scarcely occurs in archaeological finds, so this discovery would be of unprecedented importance.

The last camera they found on the exploration was what Kinkaid and his partner, Professor SA Jordan, a ceremonial crypt, believed to be at the end of the great hall where they found the mummies.

Unfortunately, the article does not give many more details about this discovery. Nor are there any official versions or references to this enigmatic subterranean city. The Smithsonian Institute denies having knowledge of the existence of this underground city.

Researchers Discover 14,800 Years Old Petroglyphs, the Oldest one in U.S.A

A recent high-tech study performed by a bouldering researcher of the University of Colorado showed the oldest recorded petroglyphs in North America, which were carved into a series of boulders in West Nevada at least 10,500 years ago and perhaps even as far back as 14,800 years ago.

Petroglyphs found on the petroglyphic site of the lake at Winnemucca 35 kilometers northeast from Reno consist of large, deeply sculpted grooves and dots that form intricate patterns on several large limestone boulders that have been known about for decades, said CU-Boulder researcher Larry Benson, who led the new effort.

Although there are no people, animals, or handprint symbols depicted, the petroglyph designs include a series of vertical, chain-like symbols and a number of smaller pits deeply incised with a type of hard rock scraper.

Benson and his colleagues used several methods to date the petroglyphs, including determining when the water level the Winnemucca Lake subbasin — which back then was a single body of water connecting the now-dry Winnemucca Lake and the existing Pyramid Lake — reached the specific elevation of 3,960 feet.

The elevation was key to the study because it marked the maximum height the ancient lake system could have reached before it began spilling excess water over Emerson Pass to the north.

When the lake level was at this height, the petroglyph-peppered boulders were submerged and therefore not accessible for carving, said Benson, an adjunct curator of anthropology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.

A paper on the subject was published this month in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Co-authors on the study included Eugene Hattori of the Nevada State Museum in Carson City, Nev., John Southon of the University of California, Irvine, and Benjamin Aleck of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe Museum and Visitor’s Center in Nixon, Nev. The National Research Program of the U.S. Geological Survey funded the study.

According to Benson, a white layer of carbonate made of limestone precipitated from the ancient, overflowing Winnemucca Lake had coated some of the petroglyph carvings near the base of the boulders. Previous work by Benson showed the carbonate coating elsewhere in the basin at that elevation had a radiocarbon date of roughly 11,000 years ago.

Benson sampled the carbonate into which the petroglyphs were incised and the carbonate that coated the petroglyphs at the base of the limestone boulder. The radiocarbon dates on the samples indicated the carbonate layer underlying the petroglyphs dated to roughly 14,800 ago.

Those dates, as well as additional geochemical data on a sediment core from the adjacent Pyramid Lake subbasin, indicated the limestone boulders containing the petroglyphs were exposed to air between 14,800 and 13,200 years ago and again between about 11,300 and 10,500 years ago.

“Prior to our study, archaeologists had suggested these petroglyphs were extremely old,” said Benson, also an emeritus USGS scientist. “Whether they turn out to be as old as 14,800 years ago or as recent as 10,500 years ago, they are still the oldest petroglyphs that have been dated in North America.”

While Native American artifacts found in the Lahontan Basin — which encompasses the Winnemucca Lake subbasin — date to the time period of 11,300 to 10,500 years ago, it does not rule out the possibility that the petroglyphs were carved as early as 14,800 years ago, Benson said.

The oldest dates calculated for the Winnemucca Lake petroglyph site correspond with the time frame linked to several pieces of fossilized human excrement found in a cave in Oregon said Benson, who also is affiliated with CU’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.

The caves, known as the Paisley Caves in south-central Oregon, held not only fossilized human coprolites that dated to roughly 14,400 years ago but also bones of horses and camels that went extinct in North America prior to 13,000 years ago.

The younger time interval calculated for the Winnemucca petroglyphs corresponds to dates obtained from a second significant archaeological finding in the region — Spirit Cave Man, who was discovered more than 70 years ago some 60 miles east of Reno and whose hair, bones, and clothing were dated to about 10,600 years ago. The remains of the man, who was found partially mummified in a shallow grave in Spirit Cave, Nev., were discovered with a fur robe, a woven marsh plant shroud, and moccasins.

Petroglyphs near Long Lake in central Oregon — which were previously thought to be the oldest examples of rock art in North America — share similar features with some of the rock art the Winnemucca site, said Benson. At least one of the petroglyph panels from Long Lake was buried by ash from an eruption of the nearby Mount Mazama volcano roughly 6,700 years ago, proof that it was carved sometime before the eruption.

“We have no idea what they mean,” Benson said of the Winnemucca Lake petroglyphs. “But I think they are absolutely beautiful symbols. Some look like multiple connected sets of diamonds, and some look like trees or veins in a leaf. There are few petroglyphs in the American Southwest that are as deeply carved as these, and few that have the same sense of size.”

Benson obtained permission to non-invasively examine the petroglyphs from the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, which owns the land. Study co-author John Southton, a faculty member at the University of California, Irvine, radiocarbon dated the material for the study.

Giant “Skeletons of Enormous Size” Discovered In New Mexico – New York Times Article From 1902

Researcher Graham Hancock coined the phrase, ‘we’re like a species with amnesia,’ and it’s true. Despite the fact that it seems the story of human history is well uncovered, every single year there are new discoveries made that challenge what we once held to be true. In some cases, there are discoveries which are concealed from the general public for various reasons, a great example of that would be the black budget world.

There also seem to be amazing discoveries that are completely ignored by mainstream media and most of these discoveries would shake the foundations of human history. Another great example is the bodies recently discovered in Nazca, Peru – three-fingered/towed humanoid beings whose physical anatomy is far different from that of a human. Another example would be the stories regarding intelligent ancient civilizations, like Atlantis, for example, which many scholars now believe to have actually existed.

Out of all the information that’s out there regarding intelligent ancient civilizations, and more, even if just one of these stories is true, it would completely change what we thought we knew about human history and the history of our planet. I believe the story of our past might be different from what seems to be the only two available options, creationism and evolution. There may be a myriad of other factors involved.

These discoveries would also shake the foundations of many people’s belief systems. The human race has been kept from so much information, and forced into a specific worldview that’s designed to benefit the ‘1%.’

In today’s day and age, it’s always best to keep an open mind, especially when new information is constantly emerging (for those who are curious enough to actually look) which challenges the old.

Giants?

Did giants once roam the Earth? It’s been in the literature and lore of multiple cultures throughout human history, from the Maya, the global indigenous populations, the Bible, and more since what we perceive as the beginning of time. For example, the Bible tells us that when the Gods were on Earth, they were giants. “This, when you bring up in conversation, normally brings up, you know, laughter and people giggling and thinking you’re joking, and yet, the Bible is full of references of giants in our history.” – Michael Tellinger

Tellinger is referring to the Nephilim, as referenced in Numbers 13:33 of the Bible: “We saw the Nephilim there (the defendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.”

Again, it’s not just the bible, it’s lore from cultures that pre-dated religion as well as the indigenous.

Tellinger is a renowned author/politician who has made several groundbreaking discoveries regarding lost ancient civilizations that once roamed the Earth. Here’s an article about him, with a picture of him standing next to a giant footprint, almost the size of a full human being.

There are several examples of physical evidence which exists to support the idea that giants once roamed the Earth. For example, stored in the vaults of the medical school at WITS University, Johannesburg, there is part of an upper leg bone with a hip-joint that would have stood approximately 12 feet tall. It’s been there since the early 1960s and was found by miners in Northern Namibia. It is one of the most precious and rare specimens available today that clearly indicates the existence of giants in Southern Africa more than 40,000 years ago.

Apparently, in 1883 the Smithsonian, a United States government/military led organization at the time sent a team of archaeologists to South Charleston Mound. According to the official report, the team discovered a number of giant skeletons ranging from 7 to 9 feet tall. Some of them had a “compressed or flat-head type” which would resemble similar skeletal characteristics to those found in Egypt and South America.

Whether or not this is ‘fake news’ is highly debatable, as there is a lot of evidence to suggest it’s not. The list goes on and on, and what’s interesting is an article published in the New York Times in 1902 that also deals with the subject.

The article goes on to describe two stones with “curious inscriptions” and underneath were the bones of a body that “could not have been less than 12 feet in length.” According to the NY Times article, “the men who opened the grave say that the forearm was 4 feet long and that in a well-preserved jaw the lower teeth ranged from the size of a hickory nut to that of the largest walnut in size .”

Apparently, the chest of the body had a circumference of 7 feet.

The bodies were first discovered by Luciana Quintana, it was on his ranch these specific bodies were found, according to the article, “Quintana, who has uncovered many other burial places, expresses the opinion that perhaps thousands of skeletons of a race of giants long extinct will be found. This supposition is based on the traditions handed down from the early Spanish invasion that have detailed knowledge of the existence of a race of giants that inhabited the plains of what now is Eastern New Mexico. Indian legends and carvings also in the same section indicate the existence of such a race.” 

Here’s another New York Times article about skeletons that were discovered in 1885. Going back further still, in 1774 settlers found what they called “The Giant Town,” which housed several gigantic skeletons, one being an eight-foot-tall male.

“In addition to the human skeletons found in NY State, there is also the famous case of ‘The Cardiff Giant,’ a white alabaster-like statue of an 11-foot man who showed an exposed penis and hieroglyphic inscriptions. This statue caused a worldwide sensation and was exhibited in New York City to thousands of paying customers before it was declared a fake by the NY newspapers, despite the fact that scholars from Harvard and elsewhere insisted that the statue was genuine.” – Richard Dewhurst

Dewhurst is an Emmy Award-winning writer. He’s a  graduate of NYU with degrees in journalism, film, and television, he has written and edited for the History Channel, the Arts & Entertainment Channel, PBS, Fox Television and Fox Films, ABC News, TNT, Paramount Pictures, and the Miami Herald. He himself is well research and you can read his article on the topic here: “The Ancient Giants Who Ruled America“

The Story of Human History

As mentioned earlier, we don’t really know the full story of human history, and when new evidence and information pops up, either from the past or today, which challenges the current accepted framework, it seems like people lose their minds. What we have today, in large part, is dogma, instead of actual fact.

With all of the discoveries being made and all the discoveries that have been made which mainstream media completely ignores, we are clearly not being told something about the true origins of humanity. The idea that a powerful group of people protecting their interests by suppressing information in multiple fields is unsettling. For a plant and its people to thrive, it must live in complete transparency.

Ship Found 20 Feet Below World Trade Center Site

Builders stopped the backhoe during massive reconstruction efforts at the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan when they uncovered something surprising just south of where the Twin Towers once stood.

At a depth of 22 metres (6.7 metres) below the current level on the street, in a pit that would become an underground security and parking complex, excavators found the mangled skeleton of a long-forgotten wooden ship.

A recent study found that the ship was actually constructed in 1773 or shortly after, on a small shipyard near Philadelphia, in the tree rings in those waterlogged shores. Moreover, the ship is made of the same type of white oaks used to construct parts of Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution were signed, according to the study published in the journal Tree-Ring Research.

Archaeologists had been on-site throughout the excavation of the World Trade Center’s Vehicular Security Center. They had found animal bones, ceramic dishes, bottles and dozens of shoes, but the excitement really kicked up when the 32-foot-long (9.75 m) partial hull of the ship emerged from the dirt.

The vessel was quickly excavated, to prevent damage from exposure to the air. Piece by piece, the delicate oak fragments were documented and taken out of the rotten-smelling mud.

The timbers were sent to the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory, where they would be soaked in water to keep the wood from cracking and warping.

A few timbers were sent back to New York, just 20 miles (32 kilometers) north of the World Trade Center, to the Tree Ring Laboratory at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York. Researchers at the lab dried the fragments slowly in a cold room and cut thick slices of the wood to get a clear look at the tree rings.

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The team established that the trees used to build the ship — some of which had lived to be more than 100 years old — were mostly cut down around 1773. Then, to determine where the wood came from, the researchers had to find a match between the ring pattern in the timbers and a ring pattern in live trees and archaeological samples from a specific region.

“What makes the tree-ring patterns in a certain region look very similar, in general, is climate,” said the leader of the new study, Dario Martin-Benito, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich.

Regional ring patterns arise from local rain levels and temperatures, with wetter periods producing thicker rings and drier periods producing smaller rings, he said.

Martin-Benito and his colleagues at Columbia’s Tree Ring Lab narrowed their search to trees in the eastern United States, thanks to the keel of the ship, which contained hickory, a tree found only in eastern North America and eastern Asia. Otherwise, the researchers would have had much more difficulty in limiting their search, as oak is found all over the world. 

The ship’s signature pattern most closely matched with the rings found in old living trees and historic wood samples from the Philadelphia area, including a sample taken during an earlier study from Independence Hall, which was built between 1732 and 1756.

“We could see that at that time in Philadelphia, there were still a lot of old-growth forests, and [they were] being logged for shipbuilding and building Independence Hall,” Martin-Benito told Live Science.

“Philadelphia was one of the most — if not the most — important shipbuilding cities in the U.S. at the time. And they had plenty of wood so it made lots of sense that the wood could come from there.”

Historians still aren’t certain whether the ship sank accidently or if it was purposely submerged to become part of a landfill used to bulk up Lower Manhattan’s coastline. Oysters found fixed to the ship’s hull suggest it at least languished in the water for some time before being buried by layers of trash and dirt.

Previous investigations found that the vessel’s timbers had been damaged by burrowing holes of Lyrodus pedicellatus, a type of “shipworm” typically found in high-salinity, warm waters — a sign that the ship, at some point in its life, made a trip to the Caribbean, perhaps on a trading voyage. Martin-Benito speculated that the infestation might have been one of the reasons the ship met its demise just 20 or 30 years after it was built.

“I don’t know much about the life expectancy for boats, but that doesn’t seem like too long for something that would take so long to build,” Martin-Benito said.

Possible War of 1812 Cemetery Found in Vermont

Vermont Public Radio reports that the possible remains of soldiers who died during the War of 1812 were found buried in rows at a construction site in northwestern Vermont.

They’re human remains, bones that researchers say that have been around for a while. In fact, they say they’re the remains of a soldier from the War of 1812 and there could be others buried nearby. The project is ongoing and is being overseen by the University of Vermont’s Consulting Anthropology Program, with support from the State Division for Historic Preservation.

University of Vermont Anthropology Asst. Professor John Crock spoke with VPR’s Mitch Wertlieb about the find and what it means. crock is the director of UVM’s Consulting Anthropology Program. Their interview is below. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mitch Wertlieb: So what exactly has been found here and when was this discovery made?

John Crock: The discovery was made last week. Initially, an excavator – and I’d like to give him credit: Mike Weston, at Don Western Excavating – noticed human bone in one of the first or second backhoe pulls from a proposed house addition in Burlington and did the right thing: he called the police.

The police came and looked at it and recognized it as likely human remains. They called the medical examiner, who then came in to basically clarify that it wasn’t a recent human. Then, they called the state archeologist who then called us at UVM to further investigate.

How do you know what era the remains are from?

The War of 1812 had a battery in Burlington, basically a big army base that we now know mainly from Battery Park, which kind of memorializes that. There was a large hospital barracks. Although Burlington was only fired upon once in 1813, it was a major base, with as many as 4,000 people that were serving other battles, including one in Plattsburgh.

But the main function was actually that there was a military hospital here and a lot of people were treated there for injuries that were incurred during warfare. There were references to people being buried in a cemetery on private property not too far from that hospital. But the exact boundaries of that [are unknown] – there were no records. Essentially, the military did not keep records of cemeteries or burials until the Civil War. So this is essentially an unmarked burial ground.

I don’t know what the scientific method is for checking this – maybe it’s carbon dating – but had the bones been checked for that to say, “OK, they are this many hundreds of years old”?

Carbon dating is a little bit… It’s harder… with this archeologically recent timeframe of only a couple hundred years.

Previously we found some remains related to the same period of time on a project on North Street and these had preserved with them, military buttons. In one case, an individual was buried with musket balls and a pocketknife that further led us to conclude that these were indeed military burials.

In this case, we’ve identified a number of them in a cluster, in cemetery rows, within just a small area of the landowner’s addition, which leads us to believe that this indeed is part of the larger cemetery that was referenced in historical documents.

According to the state archeologist, there could be around 700 soldiers buried around the city at this time. Why so many?

That’s possible. [There were] a lot of diseases. You know, there was an epidemic in the winter of 1812-1813 of pneumonia or influenza. Soldiers were also battling typhus.

The majority of those who died were really deaths that resulted from this kind of close-quarters living with epidemic disease raging through these camps. [These are] things that we’re more familiar with now in the era of COVID, [where we’re] reflecting on how these things get transmitted so quickly in crowds.

How confident are you that these are definitely the remains of an American soldier? And is there any way of determining, if so, who that soldier might have been?

We’re very confident, I’d say, at this point, that these are remains of soldiers and there are ways.

We have the enlistment records that our program historian has really [curated]. She combed through microfilm back in the microfilm era to get the list of enlistment records. So we know the stature of individuals, their surname and we know their occupation prior to becoming soldiers. That gives some indication of what their human remains might look like.

And then there are other things that we can do with bone chemistry to try to figure out what area person was from. If, for example, these weren’t Vermonters, we could easily identify those that enlisted, for example, from North Carolina or farther south because their bone signature through isotope studies has a different pattern than those who would have grown up here in New England.

What do you ultimately hope to learn, to find?

You know: the whole package. Where did these people come from? What communities did they represent? Many of them were farmers. How did that affect the farming communities of New England, to send all of their able-bodied men, including what we would consider adolescents now? Some as young as 12 were enlisting. We hope to learn more about that.

Also: the burial practices. Was there ceremony involved? We found an individual in the previous case on North Street that was buried, for example, with a gun sling under their head as a pillow. So it was clear that people were presiding over the funeral or burial. That’s telling us things that just aren’t in the written records and things that only archeology can tell us as we learn more.

The coffins, for example, weren’t mass-produced. They were built to-size; they were built for individuals. And interestingly – we’re just coming up with this information this week – in some of the grave shafts that we’re investigating, that we’ve exposed, we’re finding that the individual had already been exhumed. This is likely from UVM medical students in the 1820s and 1830s who were using this burial ground to access anatomical specimens. So some of these soldiers effectively donated themselves to science without knowing it.

And how long do you think this overall project will take, now that these bones have been discovered?

We’re hoping to get done with it within the week. That’s the best we can do, as fast as we can go, being careful and also honoring what is really the country’s first veterans.

Archaeologists explore a rural field in Kansas, and a lost city emerges

In the Great Plains of Kansas, archaeologists have made an innovative and unlikely discovery: a vast town lost centuries ago. Donald Blakeslee discovered a few years ago the lost city of Etzanoa in Arkansas City, Kan, a Wichita State University anthropologist, and an archaeology professor. 

In that small city in south-central Kansas, local residents found the arrowhead and the gold mine underneath their town, pottery, and other ancient artifacts, for decades, in the fields and rivers of the region.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Blakeslee used newly translated documents written by the Spanish conquistadors who came across the land over 400 years ago to determine that these artifacts were once part of the Native American lost city of Etzanoa.

“‘I thought, ‘Wow, their eyewitness descriptions are so clear it’s like you were there,’” Blakeslee told the Times about reading the conquistador’s accounts. “I wanted to see if the archaeology fit their descriptions. Every single detail matched this place.”

The city of Etzanoa is believed to have been around from 1450 to 1700 and was home to approximately 20,000 people. Blakeslee said that the city was the second-largest settlement in the present-day United States at the time and spanned across at least five miles of the space between the Walnut and Arkansas rivers.

The 20,000 inhabitants of Etzanoa were said to have lived in “thatched, beehive-shaped houses.”

In 1541, conquistador Francisco Vazquez de Coronado came to the town hoping to discover its fabled gold but instead found Native Americans in a collection of settlements that he called Quivira.

Sixty years later in 1601, Juan de Oñate led a team of 70 conquistadors from New Mexico to Quivira, also hoping to find its gold but they ran into a tribe called the Escanxaques, who told them of the nearby city of Etzanoa.

Oñate and his team arrived at the city and were greeted peacefully by the inhabitants of Etzanoa. However, things quickly went south when the conquistadors started taking hostages, which then caused the city’s residents to flee in fear.

The group of conquistadors explored the vast area of more than 2,000 houses but feared an attack from the peoples they dislodged and decided to return home.

On their return trip, they were attacked by some 1,000 members of the Escanxaque tribe and a huge battle took place. The conquistadors lost and returned home to New Mexico, never to come back to the area again.

French explorers came nearly a century later to that part of south-central Kansas but did not find any evidence of Etzanoa or its people. It is believed that disease caused the untimely demise of the population.

However, traces of the people and their city would not stay hidden forever. Blakeslee and a team of excavators found the site of the ancient battle in a neighborhood in Arkansas City and found remanents from the battle.

Locals in the area had been uncovering artifacts from the lost city for decades but didn’t understand why until evidence of the city itself was discovered by Blakeslee.

“Lots of artifacts have been taken from here,” Warren “Hap” McLeod, a resident of Arkansas City who lives on the spot where the battle took place, told the Times. “Now we know why. There were 20,000 people living here for over 200 years.” One local resident said that the sheer amount of artifacts that people in the area have is mindblowing.

“My boss had an entire basement full of pottery and all kinds of artifacts,” Russell Bishop told the Times. “We’d be out there working and he would recognize a black spot on the ground as an ancient campfire site … I don’t think anyone knew how big this all was. I’m glad they’re finally getting to the bottom of it.”

The Great Plains were long-regarded as huge, empty spaces in ancient times that were populated mainly by nomadic tribes. But Blakeslee’s discovery of Etzanoa could prove that some of the tribes in the area weren’t nomadic and were actually more urban than previously believed.

Blakeslee has also discovered evidence that similar, large-scale lost cities could be located in nearby counties which might have been around during the time of Etzanoa.

These latest groundbreaking archaeological finds are helping researchers fill in huge blanks in early American history.