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Follow-Up on a "Holocene Mastodon" from Devil's Den, Florida

2/6/2016

6 Comments

 
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I'm still catching up on a backlog of blog-related emails and comments that accumulated during those heady weeks of #Swordgate. I've never been great at promptly returning emails, and going to the mattresses for Swordgate made the problem worse. I apologize if I haven't gotten back to you yet. I hope to answer everything eventually.

Almost a year ago, I wrote this post about some purportedly late radiocarbon dates for mastodons and mammoths that are being used as "evidence" for the accuracy of the Book of Mormon (BOM). The BOM (Ether:16-19) describes elephants in the New World at what would have been about 2500 BC.  The current scientific consensus, however, is that mastodons and mammoths did not survive in the Eastern Woodlands past about 9500 BC. While Mormon scholars continue to cling to a small suite of Holocene radiocarbon dates to argue for much later survivals, it's pretty clear that those anomalously young dates are probably attributable to either contamination, context/association problems, or both. I provided a table of five radiocarbon dates that seem to be embraced by Mormons not because they are good science, but because they remain the "best fit" to the Jaredite time period.  No-one else takes those dates seriously.  They're probably mistakes. 

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Radiocarbon dates put forward as evidence of late survival of mammoths and mastodons in eastern North America.
When I wrote the original post, I was unable to track down the primary sources for the Devil's Den mastodon. Dr. Eric Butler, a biologist at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, kindly found a copy of Martin and Webb's (1974) report and took a look at it. He provided a synopsis in a recent email.  I'll summarize two main points:

Mastodon Remains.  In a long list of fauna from Devil's Den, there is a single entry for Proboscideans: "2 vertebrae, a last cervical vertebrae and an anterior thoracic" from juvenile mastodons.

​Dating and Associations. The age estimate of 7000-8000 BP pertains to an entire fossil assemblage, not just the mastodon remains. While it is not exactly clear how this age estimate was produced (this description sources an unpublished research paper by H. K. Brooks that purportedly references radiocarbon dates, but no specifics are provided), it seems that the young age is not generally accepted by paleontologists in Florida and elsewhere. An age of 7000-8000 BP for the entire Devil's Den assemblage would mean that horses (Equus), saber-toothed cats (Smilodon), giant ground sloths (Megalonyx), Florida spectacled bears (Tremarctos floridanus), and dire wolves (Canis dirus) were running around in Florida at about 6700-5700 BC. There is no other evidence, at archaeological sites or elsewhere, for those species surviving into the Middle Archaic period in Florida or anywhere else.

The long and short of it is that it appears there's good reason to view the late dates of Devil's Den fossil assemblage with significant skepticism.  If it's good evidence for a late survival of mastodon, it's good evidence for a late survival of an entire "Pleistocene" fauna that has no precedent elsewhere.  A simpler explanation is that the age estimate for the assemblage is not accurate. As Butler suggested in his email to me, this assemblage would seem to be a prime candidate for re-dating using modern AMS methods. I wrote the following in my original post:
"Continuing to uncritically employ a handful of young radiocarbon dates from the early decades of radiocarbon dating as support for the claim of elephants at 2500 BC is intellectually dishonest.  Last time I checked, AMS dates were about $600 each (I also seem to recall that the price has recently dropped).  If Mormons want to continue to use radiocarbon dating to evaluate the historical accuracy of the Book of Ether, I suggest that they have those “late surviving” mastodons re-dated.  If they agree to pay for it, I would be happy to help attempt to locate the remains wherever they are curated and try to secure permission to have samples dated.  It would be a nice way to resolve the ambiguity.  We can publish the results.  If there really were mastodons tromping around in the woodlands of Archaic eastern North America, I would like to know about it and so would a lot of other people.  It's a win-win."
That offer still stands. If you're serious about resolving the issue of late-surviving Proboscideans, let's make it happen and re-date this material using modern methods and standards.

One final note to show you how these things fit together: Dr. John Sorenson, an advocate of late mammoth/mastodon survivals and one of the primary defenders of the historicity of the BOM, is a prominent advocate for pre-Columbian transoceanic contact in the Ancient Artifact Preservation Society, the hyperdiffusionist organization backing the "100 percent confirmed Roman sword from Nova Scotia" that turned out to be a piece of modern brass tourist kitsch.  Maybe we should do a blood residue analysis on the sword and see if it was used to kill mastodons. Finally . . . it all makes sense! 

Martin, R. A., and S. D. Webb. 1974.  Late Pleistocene Mammals from the Devil's Den Fauna, Levy County.  In Webb, S.D. (editor): Pleistocene Mammals of Florida, pp. 114-145.  Gainesville: University Presses of Florida.
6 Comments
Eric
2/6/2016 07:02:15 am

I'm still waiting for them to clone the woolly and reintroduce him to Canada.

Reply
Randal Taylor
2/6/2016 07:37:44 am

Holy lords a smokin, it's all coming to light!

The Romans, having found the meat of the regular elephants in Europe not to their taste (because they ate everything that walked, crawled or slithered..or sat there), they took it upon themselves to come to the Mastodon sanctuary set up by the local Micmacs to hunt their quarry.

A huge battle was fought using pikes for arrows, hence leaving them embedded in a tree, and the Romans won. They loaded the meat upon their vessel which summarily sank just off of Oak Island. They had to load it all up on their other boats, made their way out after leaving some stone etchings of their famous leader Harold, and sailed away.

They had a kegger and a BBQ and dropped some coins outside of Dartmouth, then headed home.

The indigenous people of Nova Scotia carved this legend out in their rocks and only the visionary cacheologist of the interwebs, known as the Jovan, was able to figure it out.

My eyes are open!

Reply
Jonathan Feinstein
2/6/2016 09:49:55 am

Well, before someone brings up the Wrangel Island mammoths and how they survived until about 3600 years ago, I think it is important to point out they were an isolated population and apparently isolated from whatever killed off the other mammoth and mastodons(possibly because they became smaller in size and could survive on less food?). Florida, however, is not isolated from the rest of the continent nor was it 9500 BP.

I suppose if we take the latest date of the range on the chart 8000 BP is only 1.5 millennia later (it sounds like less time that way) and by itself I might say, "well, maybe?" but together with the other dates that are incredibly too young and, as mentioned, have to either be a contextual error or due to contamination. Considering how easy it is for a carbon sample to get contaminated by a later influx of carbon, it is sometimes amazing C14 dating has been so useful.

Reply
Eric Butler
2/6/2016 10:41:59 am

Martin and Webb (the authors of the original paper on Devil's Den) seem to have been convinced that the American megafauna extinction was driven by climate. (I'm a behavioral ecologist primarily, but I believe the current consensus leans towards human involvement.) They thought that Florida might have been late to the climate-change party and that species which had not survived elsewhere were hanging on quite late in Florida for this reason. One reason to re-date this material is because if it is correctly dated that really would seem to suggest a strong role for climate in the megafauna extinction.

The current attitude towards these dates seems to be to ignore them. I found people who cited the Devil's Den remains of various species to establish geographic ranges but then simply ignored the dating of those remains when it came to establishing extinction dates for the species. (For those who want to poke around on their own, all the Devil's Den megafauna remains in the list Andy gives above came from the same strata, and so are probably from the same era. So, for instance, if you find someone referencing Devil's Den remains of saber-toothed cats those remains are from the same strata as the mastodon remains.)

The Wrangel Island mammoths (and other island dwarf proboscideans) make sense under a human-driven extinction because humans often made it out to these islands long after they spread out across the closest continents. In general, island fauna are more vulnerable than continental fauna simply because their populations are never very large. Their survival makes more sense if the extinction event simply passed by their island homes.

One final point: these dates could be really important for those who believe that proboscideans survived late in the Americas (and also the people who claim the same for horses - there's a Facebook group for them). If the America megafauna hung on longer in Florida than elsewhere then we do not have an extinction date for these megafauna, we have extinction dates in specific places. That would make it plausible that the American megafauna held on much longer somewhere else, perhaps even in some area too small to have been sampled yet. It seems that $600 would be cheap to establish the plausibility of such a hypothesis. However, without establishing the credibility of these dates with modern methods we are left with a single more-or-less simultaneous extinction event everywhere and so anomalously late dates are suspect.

Reply
Bob Jase
2/7/2016 06:39:00 am

If I recall correctly, replication of testing to confirm results &/or find faults in the procedures was standard when I was doing lab work. Apparently this is not part of fringe science.

Reply
Thomas Loebel
2/8/2016 05:11:08 pm

If you haven't seen it, take a look at Chris Widga's recent work dating Mammoth and Mastodon extinctions in the Midwest. Good Stuff. https://www.facebook.com/ILGeoSurvey/photos/a.171949486169969.36455.116717815026470/1055752847789624/?type=3&theater

Reply



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