Early Modern Humans Versus Mammoths - Maybe Dogs Were The Game-Changer
Thursday, May 29, 2014 - 16:50
in Paleontology & Archaeology
In the never-ending battle between cat and dog owners, one factoid can't be denied: cats are terrible at helping take down big game. But mammoth kill sites in Europe that containing lots of mammoth bones - up to 86 of the beasts - used for dwellings has led Penn State Professor Emerita Pat Shipman to formulate a new hypothesis of how these sites were formed. Shipman suggests that their abrupt appearance may have been due to early modern humans working with the earliest domestic dogs to kill the now-extinct mammoth. Shipman even believes there is a way to test the predictions of her new hypothesis. read more