Manny from Ice Age lived in Wyoming for years, or at least his relatives made a home here about 2 million years ago. Though people don’t see them anymore above ground, University of Wyoming Department of Anthropology Professor Todd Surovell has found them underground at archeological sites here in Wyoming.
Professor Surovell has been searching for a mammoth at multiple sites every summer for the past four years. The sites continue to yield more and more clues as to where this mammoth may have lived and where its bones could be found. However, it has been quite a hunt for Surovell to find the perfect dig site. Site locations have been in counties such as Douglas, Converse County and along LaPrele Creek.
One day, during a downpour at a dig site, Surovell and his team, which consisted of UW Professor Bob Kelly and doctoral Student Madeline Mackie, visited the Wyoming Pioneer Memorial Museum where they saw multiple mammoth bones on display. They consisted of the mandible, humerus, radioulna, and teeth of a mammoth which had been found nearby in Wyoming. The museum director, Arlene Ekland-Earnst, showed Surovell a letter during his visit from a man named Bishop. This individual owned property in Wyoming from which mammoth bones were excavated from.
One method that has been used to determine the date of the bones of these mammoths is radiocarbon-dating, which is a radioactive isotope of carbon which can determine the age of the bone. This was done on the humerus bone, and it was determined that it was between 12,694 to 12,863 years old. This was the same time period that humans started to evolve in the area not yet known as Wyoming and slaughtered mammoths for game and food.
“We’ve been doing archeology in North America for roughly 150 years,” Surovell says in a press release. “We have 15-16 sites where humans interacted with mammoths. It’s a really, really rare thing, which is why I’m willing to chase it down. From all of North America, we have about 30 sites that have any evidence of humans interacting with the various species living on the continent at that time. Every opportunity you have to dig one, you should take advantage of that. So here, even just the possibility of a mammoth kill by humans, I’d do anything I can to try to find it.”
Mel Glover, the current director of the Wyoming Pioneer Memorial Museum, recently found a brown paper bag that contained mammoth bone fragments which had been dug up from Bishop’s site on July 15th of 1958. There is little information on the individual Bishop and his comrades who were also a part of the dig. However, this helped Surovell narrow down his land search to a kill site and four names of residents who lived in the area around 1958; L.C. Bishop, William R. Eastman, Hildebrand and Vetter.
“I feel like we have done everything we can to try to narrow down the location to the most likely place, and we missed it on our first try. I don’t know if we missed it by one foot, 10 feet, 10 yards, 100 yards or 100 miles” Surovell says in a recent press release. “Given the clues, I feel like we are really close, but it’s the kind of thing where there could be someone in Douglas who could point exactly to the right spot. If one of these people is still alive or one of their kids who went out with them, they could potentially take us right to the mammoth. It’s a super fun little scavenger hunt.”
