About This Project

Paleontologists can read the remains of a mastodon like a book - each bone, tooth and tusk a different chapter in the story.

This short film is most concerned with the "how," specifically how paleontologists can read an animal's remains to develop and support the theory that it was brought down by early Native American hunters.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Last year, a team from the University of Michigan excavated the remarkably complete skeleton of a mastodon – a huge, elephant- like creature that lived at the end of the Ice Age. Using everything from a backhoe to their bare hands, the team freed the animal’s remains, including it’s nearly complete skull, from the mud and muck of a riverbed where they had been buried for 12,000 years.

But this group of researchers wasn't just looking to recover the mastodon's remains - they were also searching for preliminary evidence that this animal was butchered, and possibly directly hunted, by the first people to inhabit North America.

This short film will tell the story of how one scientist collects the evidence from one individual mastodon to build the case that it was hunted.

What is the significance of this project?

Most projects like this focus on the more dramatic and strange aspects of a discovery like this. I am focusing on the science.

That approach makes this project significant because it allows a paleontologist to discuss, in detail and in their own words, how the scientific process is applied to excavating the remains of an extinct animal, and why it is important for us today to understand how the first humans to inhabit North America interacted with their environment.

What are the goals of the project?

The goal of this project is to produce a four-minute film that communicates the research methods of paleontologists, engages a viewer with the idea of human/animal interactions at the end of the last Ice Age, and show how we can draw lessons on how we are affecting our own environment by studying the past.